Not Ready for Hillary

Though Bernie Sanders wasn’t likely to say anything he hadn’t said before, many times, I had decided to make the two-hour drive up to Burlington to listen to him. The rough two-lane road was mostly empty, and the Adirondacks and Lake Champlain glowed in winter sunset colors off to the west. The big Champlain Valley dairy farms looked as if they had seen better days. Sanders and Vermont’s other senator, Patrick Leahy, make it something like a sacred trust to keep those farms in business. They survive but they do not prosper. Like just about everything else in Vermont, they look like they have seen hard use. Vermont is struggling.

Burlington (pop. 40,000), however, was bustling. My wife and I found a place to eat that could have been picked up and moved to any number of small, prospering American cities. It featured a wide selection of Vermont-made cheeses. While the big dairy operations work hard to get by, the boutique cheesemakers flourish. There were also a number of Vermont-brewed beers on the menu, and my Long Trail IPA was very good.

After dinner, we made our way to the student center. The Sanders event had brought out such a crowd that the room where he spoke was filled to capacity. The overflow was sent to another room, where the audience could watch the senator on a large television screen. This room was also nearly filled. My eyeball estimate put the turnout at 1,000 or so.

Sanders spoke only briefly, and it would be charitable to call it a speech. He made remarks around themes that are a constant in his political life. The fixed stars on his horizon are economic inequality and the essential unfairness of the political system. His Manichean universe consists—and always has—of Wall Street and the millionaires and billionaires in opposition to the middle class, the poor, and what he likes to call “working people.” American life consists of an unequal and ceaseless struggle, which the bad guys are always winning.

“I wish I could tell you my generation left this country in a better place, but it hasn’t,” he says to the students. “And now your job is to start thinking hard about these issues. Embrace democracy in its fullest form and do everything you can to make sure this country fulfills its potential.”

The students listened raptly as a 73-year-old man told them, among other things, that they need to step it up. “Sixty-three percent of the people who are eligible did not vote. Eighty percent of the eligible people in your age group.”

Sanders does not pander and he does not joke. If my generation made a mess of things, he tells his audience, then so far, yours isn’t doing much better.

The students, of course, lap it up.

One reason might be that, unlike the politicians they see on television, Sanders clearly speaks out of conviction. Also, he doesn’t deal in qualifiers or nuance or even complex sentences. He is direct and forceful. In his run for the White House—announced a few weeks after we heard him—he will certainly be underfunded. But, you think, he can save a lot on polling and focus groups and that sort of thing. There is no ambivalence in his DNA.

Sanders, tonight, is saying the same things to these students that he said to some of their parents and grandparents. You don’t go to a Sanders speech expecting to be surprised. His political thinking (the only kind of thinking that he seems to do) has not changed since he first ran for the Senate as a candidate of the Liberty Union party in 1971 and captured 2 percent of the vote. A reporter, now retired, who remembers covering Sanders back then, says today, “Even if you don’t like Bernie—and I don’t—you have to admire him for two things: his consistency and his determination.”

Since the lyrics never change, I pay attention to the music. Sanders comes off as less strident and abrasive in a relatively small room than he does on television. The cameras have a way of turning him into a caricature. On television, his clothes inevitably appear rumpled enough that he might have been wearing them when he boarded a long flight and not yet had time to change. Not rumpled enough, that is, that he might have slept in them, but close. Say, for politeness’s sake, that he napped in them. His clothes tonight are straight-up Eddie Bauer casual—uncreased by design.

Up close, the shock of unruly white hair that always looks, on camera, beyond what could charitably be called “tousled” appears, if not tamed, then housebroken. He could easily be a member of the faculty. A tenured professor, perhaps, in the political science department as opposed to the 19th-century anarchist he looks like on the tube.

And then there is the voice. Bernie Sanders was born and raised in Brooklyn and he still talks like it, which makes for a grating, hacksaw-on-metal quality when it comes at you electronically. In this room, while his voice is certainly not soothing, there is nothing about its quality that would detract from the content of what he is saying.

For the retail aspect of his campaign—the meeting and greeting and working small rooms—Sanders will not need to employ the services of a speech coach or a wardrobe consultant. So there is a little more money saved.

And, finally, there is the physique. On television, he appears slightly stooped and, as a result, comes off as weary and burdened, as if he’s been worn down by the fight. In person, the posture is more an athletic slouch. He stands the way a pitcher on the mound might, while rubbing up a new ball. He was a good athlete in high school, he tells us in his book, Outsider in the House. It is one of the few—the very few—personal items he shares. Reading the book, you would never know that he is a grandfather, and when it comes up in other contexts, he does not dwell on it, unlike his rival for the nomination who is a new grandmother and won’t let anyone forget it.

So the overall physical impression among people he approaches in person or speaks to in small rooms, asking them to vote for him for president of the United States, will not have them thinking, “Are you kidding me?” He looks strong, confident, and utterly comfortable in his own skin. A $3,000 suit and a $400 haircut would, in fact, destroy his credibility and the source of his appeal: He is who he is.

And you know what he stands for. More important, in the campaign he proposes to wage against Hillary Clinton, so does he.

The speech to the students is short and almost perfunctory. Then he opens the floor to questions. “I hope that maybe we’ll spend one-tenth of the time talking about the important issues facing America,” he says, “as we do talking about the Super Bowl.” 

The questions cover the usual territory, and he handles them effortlessly. He proposes a big increase in spending to “rebuild our crumbling infrastructure.” He wants to get money out of politics, especially that $900 million that the Koch brothers have pledged to spend in the coming presidential campaign. He wants to rein in Wall Street and put an end to “casino capitalism.” He considers it an “outrage” (perhaps the most-used word in his entire political vocabulary) that the median middle-class income is $5,000 lower now than it was before the Great Recession. It is equally an outrage that 45 million Americans live in poverty. The outrages and the data flow effortlessly. This is what he does.

In this room there is a lot of interest, understandably, in his enthusiasm for President Obama’s recent proposal to make the first two years of college free. Indeed, he would raise the president two years.

“It is absurd that a large number of low-income citizens cannot go to college simply because they cannot afford it,” he says. “America should want all of its citizens to be educated because it is good for the country.”

Three months later, Sanders put his plan for making college “free” into legislative form. His plan, he announced, would cost “$750 billion over the next ten years.” Anticipating the question of “How do we afford it?” he answers, predictably, “At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, at a time when trillions of dollars in wealth have left the pockets of the middle class and have gone to the top one-tenth of 1 percent, at a time when the wealthiest people in this country have made huge amounts of money from risky derivative transactions and the soaring value of the stock market, this legislation would impose a Wall Street speculation fee on Wall Street investment houses and hedge funds.”

As he spins out his vision of a free college education for all, one begins to understand the point of this evening. Bernie Sanders does not need to campaign on a college campus in his hometown on a brutally cold night in February. While he received only 1 percent of the votes in that first Senate race, he was elected to the Senate by a 33-point margin in 2006 and reelected in 2012 with 71 percent of the vote. He could be senator for life in Vermont. The state’s three electoral votes will be his in 2016 if he is the Democratic candidate. They might even be his if he chooses to run as an independent, which is what he has called himself since 1976, when he left the Liberty Union party after a run for governor that got him 6 percent of the vote.

This event at the University of Vermont and the appearances at other Vermont campuses in the last few days are, then, a form of road testing, designed to see if what worked once will, with some fine tuning, work again. Sanders is returning to his roots. That first time out, he ran, and won, as an insurgent and hopeless underdog against a political machine that was slightly corrupt and vastly overconfident and never saw what hit it.

It began—and begins—with consciousness raising. He must build a movement that is fueled by a feeling of “us against them.” This movement will be made of people who are willing to do the tedious work of knocking on doors and spreading the word—foot soldiers in the great campaign, volunteers and almost inevitably the young.

They will be a crucial part of the coalition of “us” that he needs to build on his way to the nomination of the Democratic party. He has “us” in his pocket on the social issues, having long been out front on those. Now he will work the bread and butter stuff. This generation, after all, is graduating deeply in debt and looking for employment that often turns out not to be worth that expensive university degree. “Your standard of living,” he tells them, “will be lower than that of the generation that came before you.”

What might be a problem for some primary voters will not concern people like the ones in this room. The young do not care that while he is running for the Democratic party nomination, he has always insisted that he is not a member of any party. That he is proud to run and serve as an “independent.”

In his book, he writes,

The entire infrastructure of a modern campaign, in other words. For which, according to news reports, Hillary Clinton will be raising and spending some $2.5 billion.

Sanders is probably the least wealthy member of the Senate and almost certainly the one who cares least about money. His own money, that is. When it comes to money in politics, his resentment (call it “outrage”) comes off him like heat off an oven. And it seems impossible that his fierce consistency will allow him to give Hillary Clinton a pass on this one.

He was never, for that matter, a fan of Bill Clinton and is not shy about saying so. In his book, he writes,

Still, he supported Clinton in a vague way, endorsing him as the lesser evil, because there was no acceptable alternative. Which will not be the case in this campaign when the alternative to another Clinton will be .  .  . Bernie Sanders.

He has been right, by the standards of the left, about many things. While Hillary Clinton is obliged to publicly regret her vote in favor of the invasion of Iraq, Sanders can point to his opposition to the first Gulf war. There is almost no big issue on which he has deviated from leftist orthodoxy. If he is not 99.4 percent pure in anything, it is the issue of guns.

But then, he represents the people of Vermont, where a proposal to change the regulations regarding deer hunting will turn out larger crowds at public hearings than the ordinary, annual town meetings of which the state is so justly proud. It is generally acknowledged that gun ownership in Vermont is robust and that gun violence is very rare. A Vermont politician running on a gun control platform would be committing political suicide. Sanders, for all his consistency in the leftist faith, is also an able politician. So he has an uneven record on guns.

He might never have achieved national office if a Republican opponent had not endorsed a gun control bill. Chris Graff, who was AP bureau chief and the go-to source on Vermont politics during those times, told an interviewer, “There was absolutely no doubt in that ’90 vote,” when Sanders won his seat in Congress for the first time, “that the NRA got him elected, and he owed them.” Once he had been elected, Sanders voted against the Brady bill.

But if this is a chink, it is hard to think of it as a serious one and possible, even, to see it working to his advantage in a campaign against Hillary Clinton. One can imagine an out-of-work coal miner or some other struggling voter weighing a wealthy member in good standing of the political class who has endorsed the most recent free trade treaty (though she now has “concerns”) and is pure on gun control against the righteous fury of a man who is down the line in his support for the old left/labor causes and also okay with him keeping his deer rifle and the 1911 Colt that stays next to the bed.

Gun control will probably not be much of an issue in the Iowa caucuses or the New Hampshire primary, and if it even comes up, Sanders will explain himself in something that resembles the answer he gave, in his Playboy interview, to the question: Vermont has quite a few gun owners. How do you position yourself on the debates regarding gun ownership and restrictions?

Sanders answered, “Vermont does have many gun owners who enjoy hunting, target shooting and other gun-related activities. But most people in Vermont understand that as a nation we must do everything we can to end the horror of mass killings we have seen in Newtown, Connecticut; Aurora, Colorado; Blacksburg, Virginia; Tucson, Arizona and other American communities. Clearly, there is no single or simple solution to this crisis. While the legislation [to expand background checks] recently brought forth in the Senate would by no means have solved all our gun-violence problems, it would have been a step forward, and that’s why I voted for that legislation.”

That will be good enough for most of the people he is trying to reach.

The month of February, when Sanders spoke to the students in Burlington, was part of a quarter during which the economy grew by a meager .2 percent. And that anemic number might, as more data come in, fall into negative territory. One quarter of negative GDP growth gets you halfway to a recession, something the voters Sanders is going after feel firsthand and are likely to regard as more important than any gun control legislation. 

Sanders could get all the fresh material he needs simply by reading the Wall Street Journal. According to one headline, “The U.S. Economy Just Had Its Worst Month Since the Recession.” Another reads: “Top CEOs Make 373 Times the Average U.S. Worker.” In the body of that story, one learns that “overall CEO compensation rose nearly 16% last year. The average worker’s wages rose just 2.4%.”

Sanders has a word for that sort of thing.

The night ends with the senator walking out of the room, without entourage, carrying his own briefcase, stuffed with papers. He is smiling and surrounded by adoring students. It is late. Past bedtime for most 73-year-olds, but he looks as if he could go another couple of hours, hanging around the student union and talking about the things that really fire his jets: Eugene Debs, the minimum wage .  .  . 

I leave the event thinking, first, that when Sanders does announce, it will be treated in the media as an amusing sideshow. There will be lots of stories about how Sanders calls himself (can you believe it?) a “socialist.” His looks and his voice will be fair game (“disheveled and awkward political outcast,” will be the New York Times’s way of thumbnailing him). And the mismatch will be (fairly, perhaps) painted as something on the order of David vs. Goliath .  .  . before the rock went whistling through the air and laid the giant down.

All true, but .  .  . Nobody expected Sanders to win when he ran for mayor of Burlington in 1981. And that may not be the example that resonates most with him and some of his long-term followers. He is a child of the ’60s, and he was, as he writes, “active in radical politics at the University of Chicago, where I was involved in the civil rights and peace movements.”

The war was the great galvanizing force for the young in the political revolt of the sixties. Their opposition to it was based on both idealism and self-interest. There was, after all, a draft. (Which Sanders evidently avoided because he was married. He later divorced and remarried while he was mayor of Burlington. He and his new wife honeymooned in the Soviet Union. Really.)

The opposition to Vietnam was widespread, but there was no political figure willing to grasp it until Eugene McCarthy announced, in November 1967, that he would be challenging President Lyndon Johnson for the nomination of the Democratic party. This was dismissed by the wise people as a joke and a bad one. Johnson was a colossus, the second coming of FDR, and McCarthy was a dilettante who actually liked to write poetry.

But the “kids” signed on. They famously went “clean for Gene,” with the boys shaving their beards and cutting their long hair and the girls putting on dresses, before they went around New Hampshire over the next few months, knocking on doors and earnestly making their case.

In March 1968, their man took 42 percent of the votes in the New Hampshire primary. He didn’t win, but he didn’t have to. The vote exposed the rot. Johnson was humbled and ruined. He withdrew his name from consideration for his party’s nomination.

For the students who turned out to hear Bernie Sanders in February 2015, that would be ancient history.

For Sanders?

Well, that might be just yesterday. Those days no doubt resonate still. And the possibility that history might, in some sense, repeat itself must thrill him to his bones.

This is his moment. The one for which he has lived his whole life.

Always underestimated. And never giving up.