Posted on 07/13/2018 7:02:09 AM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
Will he ever stop running?
Bernie Sanders is supposed to be introducing his campaign manager and most loyal staffer, Jeff Weaver. The Vermonter and unwavering Bernie shadow for 32 years has just published a book called How Bernie Won, a rehash of the 2016 Democratic primary with the socialist senator as revolutionary victor in the Democratic party’s war of ideas. Its titular thesis was seemingly vindicated the night before: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ben Jealous, both Berniecrats, won upset victories in their primary races.
When Sanders arrives, the party erupts into cheers. “I’ve known this young man a long time,” he says, grumbling his gratitude for Weaver as he reminisces about their first doomed campaign together. Before long, however, he slides into a version of his old stump speech—now with more than a little gloating thrown in.
“We won that one, too,” he says of the 1986 campaign that Weaver joined. In fact, they won a meager 14 percent of the vote, but Sanders means “winning” in the philosophical, post-2016 sense of the word. “Three years ago, talking about Medicare for all was a crazy idea. Now I don’t know what percentage of Democrats are running on the idea of Medicare for all,” he says. About 60 percent of the Democratic primary candidates who’ve won so far this year support some version of Sanders’s Medicare For All proposal, according to the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.
“Free college!”—another new standard for 2018’s hopeful blue wave surfers—“All the ideas we talked about that were so radical and extreme are now mainstream!” Sanders says. Rejecting corporate donors and taking only small donations—that has long been part of Sanders’s platform too: “We try to make the campaign by the people and for the people. What do you see today?” A field crowded with copycats, that’s what.
“What’s not important is who wins governor of Virginia, or whatever,” Sanders says. (He might have meant Maryland, where Jealous won his gubernatorial primary the night before with help from Our Revolution, a fundraising group that grew out of Sanders’s campaign). What matters is Bernie’s way of winning: “It’s under the radar, grassroots,” he reminds the audience. “We are in the business of transforming this country.”
And Bernie Sanders’s business model—the one that’s made him the beloved socialist grandpa of the populist new left, and the bête noire of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee—may now be the Democratic party’s best bet.
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Sanders’s everyman-socialist story, however tightly woven, has suffered snags. Two Sanders scions have recently risen to prominence in New England progressive politics: Sanders’s stepdaughter, Carina Driscoll (whose mother, Jane, met Sanders just before he won the Burlington mayor’s race and married him eight years later), lost her own bid for city hall this year. But Driscoll did win an endorsement from Our Revolution. Sanders’s son Levi, a candidate for Congress in New Hampshire, did not get Our Revolution’s backing, nor his father’s. The decision, family friend Sandy Baird says, “Seems odd to me. I know why they backed Carina—she was the most progressive candidate in a three-way race. I don’t know why they didn’t take a position in favor of Levi.”
A paternal endorsement would compromise Bernie’s longstanding disdain for “dynasty politics.” But it is Levi who was weaned on his father’s stubborn principles. Father and son barely scraped by while Sanders ran for Senate and governor under the Liberty Union mantle in the lean 1970s. They eked out a life together in bohemian squalor, dependent on the kindness of neighbors in Burlington. (Levi’s mother, Susan Campbell Mott, shared custody but wasn’t a constant presence in the boy’s life, according to friends who knew Bernie then.) Sanders “didn’t have a job job,” says then-neighbor and political ally Darcy Troville. Troville worked at IBM and attended the University of Vermont while his friend Bernie made a quasi-vocation out of running for office.
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Poverty informed the platform that eventually put him in power. “Taking from the one side of Burlington to give to the other, which was where we were,” as Troville describes the ethos of the day, one that, for Bernie Sanders at least, never died. “Most people outgrow it. I don’t think he has. You could turn the clock back—he was saying the same things.” He was living them as well: Before his political career, Sanders never directly participated in the capitalist system his constituents and supporters primarily serve. And yet, “Now he’s a millionaire,” Troville marvels. “That’s gotta change you, but he hasn’t changed his message.”
Sanders the unlikely socialist millionaire hasn’t accrued his fortune without controversy, and his wealth may undermine his message were he to mount another presidential campaign. An FBI investigation of Jane Sanders’s problematic money management as president of Burlington College—which closed in 2014 after her ambitious plan to transform the school from an affordable, local college into a destination for wealthy children of the suburbs failed utterly—hasn’t damaged the family’s fortunes. Sanders bought a third home in 2016, and he raked in more than $1 million two years in a row from sales of Our Revolution and its Grammy-nominated audiobook. The young adult version, Bernie Sanders’ Guide to Political Revolution, was also a bestseller.
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#oldwhiteguysmatter
lol!
FU Bolshevik Bernie. Send some food to your starving people in Venezuela, you rich hypocrite.
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