Bernie Sanders officially ended his improbable campaign to be the Democratic party’s presidential nominee Tuesday. He did so with visible reluctance, which is both understandable and odd. He came close, which makes losing even harder. But he was never much of a Democrat to begin with. He had made a career of insisting that there was no real difference between the Republicans and the Democrats. He defined himself as an independent.
And the political and media establishments considered him a marginal, unimportant figure when they paid him any attention at all.
However, if you lived in Vermont, as I do, it was impossible to ignore him. He has been running for office here since the 1970s. Before he made it to the U.S. Senate, he was in the House of Representatives. Before that, he was mayor of Burlington. He had run, unsuccessfully, for governor. He is a political perpetual motion machine.
But it isn’t just about him. Sanders is an ideologue: a leftist, a socialist. And he has never changed on any of his fundamental convictions, especially on income inequality.
So it wasn’t with the expectation of being surprised that my wife and I drove to Burlington on a very cold night in February to hear him speak to students at the University of Vermont. We knew, more or less, what he would say. We made the trip to get out of the house, for relief from a severe case of cabin fever, and also because there were reports that Sanders was considering a presidential campaign. I thought there might be a story in that—about the preposterous presumption of it, to tell the truth. Sanders, I thought, might never lose an election in Vermont. But he would never win one anywhere else.
So, we made the trip. We got a room at the Hilton, overlooking Lake Champlain, and then went out for a nice dinner—our night in the big city, with entertainment to be supplied by Bernie.
The auditorium where he would be speaking was full when we arrived. This was something of a surprise. The temperature outside was a few degrees below zero, which would have been enough, you’d think, to keep most people indoors.
Sanders spoke and took questions, and there is no need to rehash any of them here. He said the same things he had always said. The same things the rest of the nation would hear him say, over and over, in the coming months. But there was something in the way he said them. There was an ineluctable sense of conviction when he took off on Wall Street and the “millionaires and billionaires,” and the “one percent.” That conviction traveled through the room like electricity. He handled questions effortlessly and looked good doing it. The rumpled, stooped, disheveled figure familiar from television now looked more like a burly former athlete who had never really learned to be comfortable wearing a necktie.
So there was nothing “kookie” in the way he looked. Nothing “crackpot” in what he said. Not, certainly, in the opinion of this audience. You felt, by the end of the evening, that the students in this audience would have followed him anywhere. My wife and I both sensed this. She more than I. He had surprised her, she said. And if he did run, he was going to surprise a lot of people.
Turned out he surprised just about everyone, and you wonder if he surprised himself. He had said that night in Burlington he would not run unless he could see a way to raise enough money to run a credible campaign. He raised that much and more. And it took the form, almost entirely, of small donations. This in a time when big money was said to be taking over and corrupting politics: a charge Sanders, himself, made over and over.
He ran against a candidate who had been virtually anointed as the Democratic party’s nominee and who had access to all that big, corrupt money. But he put Hillary Clinton on the defensive and won in primary after primary without ever altering his message in any significant way.
He came very close, with much of his support coming from the young … like the students in Burlington on that night when my wife and I went to listen to him. They bought into his authenticity and, one supposes, to socialism, which seems self-evidently desirable when you are young and what happened in, say, Great Britain after the Second World War and before Thatcher is either unknown to you or just ancient history.
To the young, the Sanders message sounded new. And the messenger seemed—and is—authentic. That is a nearly unbeatable combination, especially against Hillary Clinton, who had been around approximately forever and was, manifestly, the candidate of Wall Street and the “one percent.” It was almost too easy for Sanders to expose her as “just another politician” to those young voters. He forced her to change her position on one issue after another. She had, for example, endorsed the Trans-Pacific Partnership as the “gold standard” of trade deals when she was secretary of state. As a candidate, under pressure from Sanders, she became an opponent of it.
So he won the battles but lost the war, and in the end, he surrendered almost as reluctantly as General Cornwallis had at Yorktown. Claiming illness, the general remained in his quarters during the surrender ceremonies and when the band played “A World Turned Upside Down.”
The Sanders campaign was not quite so revolutionary as that. But it did turn American politics upside down—for a while, at least, to the astonishment of just about everyone who thought they understood these things.
