Anyone who thinks Bernie Sanders is only an absentminded professor type, merely sincerely and cogently bumbling away in what he fervently believes, is plain wrong. Sanders is, in addition, a brilliant politician. He has done the unimaginable - a self professed Socialist who has been successfully elected to national office, off and on, for nearly two decades, a Mayor for nearly ten years and now a serious contender for the Presidency of the United States. In the process of running for POTUS he is regularly drawing ecstatic crowds of tens of thousands. This is not the lot of a hapless well meaning academic muttering to a few long haired fellow travelers. This is the ultimate triumph of a carefully thought out principled career in politics.
His timing for joining the Democratic Party in 2015 and then making a run for President was impeccable. He is able to project the image of being an outsider in a climate that was almost totally rejecting of the “politics as usual” atmosphere that has characterized Washington. He is a hundred percent on message which he has delivered with charismatic and messianic fervor. His is the central message of the day in the field of economics. The fact that the economy is dominated by the one percenters and the political system is rigged in their favor has resonated particularly among millennials who flocked to him in droves and mobbed him like a rock star. He unashamedly trumpets a socialist agenda and makes Hillary’s measured proposals look anemic by comparison. There is no beating around the bush. There will be free tuition at colleges for all, a new healthcare system, and student loans will be scaled back. There will be job creation with infrastructure programs and Wall Street would pay most and taxing the one percenters would pay for the rest.
COMETH THE HOUR
So cometh the hour cometh the man and truth be told Bernie is the real deal. He has not only talked the talk he has walked the walk. MotherJones outlined his earlier political life and from the sixties he has been in opposition politics. His line has not changed from his first losing elections but his political skills have. He from the word go he was into the “corrupt establishment”. He warned President Ford about having Rockefeller as Vice President - the then billionaire class. So it has been the same schtick. His gun compromise is well known but as Mayor of Burlington, Vermont he also allowed Lockheed in, (a.k.a. a big corporation). This was very non pc in his circles because this was post Vietnam. But the airplane company provided jobs and even Bernie has to do what he has to do. He continued to hone his skills for the next two decades in Congress.
The 2016 Presidential election was very much the moment for his big move. There had been a vigorous movement a few years earlier entitled “Occupy Wall Street” which was a ground swell support of his economic message. They too were against the fat cats who had it both ways. They argued that Wall Street took economic risks and made vast sums of money and when it all collapsed the small man lost his house and they were bailed out. So there was a dormant group out there that needed leadership and he was about to provide it.
WHY AND WHAT DID HE MISREAD
Now Bernie’s background was in socialism and of course he read Marx. He wasn’t a Marxist but nevertheless he sees societal conflicts in economic class struggle terms. When he came to Vermont in the sixties he came as part of a mass immigration of hippies to the State. All his influences and fellow travelers were of the same ideology. He successfully functioned in the rarefied atmosphere of rural Vermont where his constituents were white.
The Berne lived for the day when his message would truly resonate. So he picked up on the current climate of anger - even Obama’s electorate were disillusioned. Bernie had even tried to get a Primary candidate against him in 2012. Obama’s youth following was to become Sander’s constituency and he believed if he mobilized the discontent and anger he could increase the frustrated body politic giving him an overwhelming mandate thereby allowing him to achieve what Obama couldn’t.
But his message didn’t take into account all demographics and that all the issues were not purely economic. His inner circle was white and he had not computed the demographics and the complexities that made up the Democratic party that he had just become a member of. In truth Bernie did not for one moment believe that the color of your skin or your gender, for example, made any difference. If pressed earlier on he might have argued, for example, who more than the African Americans had been economically hit by the greed of Wall Street?
BLACK LIVES MATTER
His perceptual gap really hit home in liberal Seattle in August 2015 at a very big rally to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of social security. His microphone was grabbed away from him by Black Lives Matter activists and he was not allowed to speak. They identified him with white supremacist liberalism. He had not as yet presented a platform to meet their needs in spite of their confronting him in Phoenix. When asked to comment by NBC he responded with his mantra, “…the issues we’re talking about are issues that are resonating with the state of Washington and all over the country. That is there’s something wrong when the middle class continues to disappear and almost all new income and wealth are going to top 1%”. He just didn’t get it.
After winning in predominantly white New Hampshire and running a close second in white Iowa he went on a much publicized visit to Reverend Sharpton in Harlem in New York. It all looked bit contrived and he looked uncomfortable. He was now talking about marching in the Civil Rights Movement and being arrested in the sixties in a protest about housing. But he was being reminded again and again that he tried to put a candidate against Obama in the 2012 Democratic Primary. His answer to the criticisms was that everyone who criticized him in his new Democratic Party was the establishment especially Hillary. The message of Seattle had not been not learned.
So it was only after the Primaries moved on did Bernie really have to face the black electorate written large as African American commentator Goldie Taylor put it.
BLACK “ESTABLISHMENT” LINES UP FOR HILLARY
So as the race pressed on the support that twenty - five years of Clinton advocacy of African American priorities had generated became evident. (There was of course the odd attack about off message statements and policies made by the Clintons along the way but that did not really interrupt the kumbaya). The Black politicians generally echoed Bill Clinton’s statement that they recognized that progress was hard and slow and that Obama never lost Congress in 2012 and the Senate in 2014 because he wasn’t liberal enough.
The whole black caucus of the US Legislature endorsed Clinton and Congressman John Lewis an icon of the Civil Rights Movement, who stood shoulder to shoulder with Martin Luther King, in answer to Bernie’s civil rights credentials thundered, “I never saw him. I never met him”. The mothers of the slain black children in those controversial police incidents that was the spur for the advocacy enterprise, Black Lives Matter, have been on the campaign trail with her. Her support of Obama after losing in the 2008 Primaries and her service and loyalty to him stood in contrast to Bernie’s nitpicking. Don’t forget Hillary is unashamedly running for the first black President’s third term and until Obama came along Bill was labelled the first black President.
The most recent supporter to join the Hillary team is African American icon and academy award winner Morgan Freeman - known as the “Voice of God”. He now is the velvety gravelly voice over for some of her new advertisements including a powerful one where her service to all the black constituencies and their issues are graphically presented. Don Lemon of CNN when he replayed it marveled at its gravitas and uttered words to the effect as to how can one argue with God.
Bernie was not without his African American backers either including former NAACP leader Benjamin Jealous who maintained that Sanders had manifested a lifelong commitment to racial equality. In addition there was the African American youth some of whom shared their white counterparts distaste of the status quo. Harry Belafonte, Spike Lee and Errol Garner were to follow Jealous but they were overwhelmed by the avalanche of Hillary’s endorsers.
BERNIE SOLDIERS ON
None of this means that Bernie isn’t sincere and hasn’t got a message. He has tapped into anger and gross inequity and brought a demographic back to the hustings that would have just simmered. The Democratic Party is a coalition of many groups. You can’t just hijack women’s support because the fact is Planned Parenthood is going to endorse Hillary after decades of service even if your agenda appears more radical. The Trade Unions are not going to flock to you all of a sudden as who has had their back all these years even if your economic policy is more to their liking. The Hispanics are going to be wary of blanket promises now that they know what they are up against and they are appreciative of how Obama, who Bernie has dissed, has tried. The LBGT organization has also come up trumps for the former Secretary of State as well.
The youth of all demographics one can understand gravitating to Bernie - they live in perpetual idealism and are sick of the compromise and logjam politics inevitably generates. In addition the term socialist doesn’t conjure up the angst that it does to their cold war parents and grandparents. They merely see it in terms of what the government pays for and what it doesn’t.
As Bernie continues he will wrack up a sizable number of delegates allowing him to have a say on the Democratic platform. He will win several small states and caucuses where the population is not diverse but Hillary will chalk up the winning number of delegates mainly in the larger Sates and the South. He is a tough competitor and the fact that he has made such an incredible showing is reflective both of his charisma and the fact that a large section of the Democratic electorate has moved to the left to counterbalance that dark shadow Trump, Cruz and the like have cast over the American continent.
Also the thousand pound gorilla still hangs around the room - how could Bernie get anything done? In contrast Hillary has succesfully worked the selfsame Senate where he has been an ineffective member for far longer. If Obama’s relative impotence irked his supporters Bernie’s would embitter them forever.
MAJOR IRONY - DONALD AND BERNIE SAME LIMITING FACTOR TO VICTORY
Ironically it is mainly whites in the Democratic Party that have connected with the Berne. This as a professing democratic socialist should really make him ponder. He gave up on black South Carolina and went to campaign in the whitest of States for super Tuesday. In a way he has the same ultimate limitation to the Democratic nomination as Trump has to being elected President. America’s demographic is changing fast and Trump offers to make America Great Again which is code for keeping it white. The Democratic Party however has been integrated, for decades, a fact Sanders should have been aware of when he joined last year. Bernie will be as hard put to win the nomination with only white Democrats as Donald will be to win the Presidency with only white Americans because he like King Canute cannot stem the tide of history.
South Carolina and Super Tuesday will show what all this means.
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