Outsider in the White House (32 page)

Universal medical care would improve the quality of life for tens of millions of Americans. It would also be a major step toward reaffirming that through the development of a rational, nonprofit, cost-effective health care system, government in a democratic society can meet the basic needs of its people.

The Coming Crisis in Education

Conservatives are smart. They know that all across America there is discontent with our educational system. Rather than improve our schools and expand educational opportunities, however, they plan to exploit that discontent to dismantle democracy still further. The vehicle for this dismantling is known as “the voucher system.”

The right wants to provide every parent with a voucher—a sort of publicly funded check, allowing them to purchase the education of their choice. Wealthy parents can use the money to reduce their tuition costs at prep schools. Religious parents can send their children to parochial schools—under this scheme, the separation of church and state will be abandoned. Meanwhile, the public schools will get correspondingly less funding. And the public schools, of course, will be where poor and working-class children will be educated. Their educational horizons will contract and their alienation from the American mainstream will widen.

No longer will society have a stake in seeing that every young person learns about American history, about our traditions of dissent and tolerance. Our most democratic institution—the one place in the nation where rich and poor, white and black, native-born and immigrant came together in a mutual enterprise—will cease to exist.

More ominous yet, once the direct link between government and public education is eliminated, it will be very easy to cut back significantly on support for education. Certainly, if the right wing can push cutbacks in welfare that will add another million children to the poverty rolls and cutbacks in Medicaid that will deny health insurance to millions of low-income kids, there is no reason to believe that major cuts in government support for public education will be far behind.

These are real dangers. But once again, there are things we can do to stop them coming to pass. We need to reaffirm our support for quality public education and the right of all children to get the best education possible. We can increase federal funding to improve the quality of our public schools. At the same time, we would be relieving some of the burden of the regressive property tax from the shoulders of the nation's working people and the middle class. Much of the anger at public education today stems from the fact that it is largely funded through very regressive taxes.

We can insist that it is the right of every young person—and every adult—to pursue an advanced education by ensuring that adequate funding is available for scholarships, college loans, and work study. We can provide new funds to expand Head Start programs. If we provide funding for day care centers, we can guarantee a solid base of early education to every child while at the same time really supporting the hard-pressed American family. We can transform President Clinton's embattled and experimental Teach for America program into a massive domestic Peace Corps that would transform every classroom in the nation.

Toward a Progressive and Democratic Future

What I have outlined here is a basic program for rebuilding American society. But there is much more to be done.

First, we have to rid the country of any vestige of racism, sexism, and homophobia. I am convinced that providing decent jobs for all and a better education for the young will be the linchpins of that effort. Too often liberals believe that being “against” prejudice is all that is required to bring about a more just and equitable society. Not true. Only when every man and woman has a
place
in American society—and this means, I believe, a decent-paying job—will we begin to eradicate the hatreds that are based on jealousy and insecurity. And only when every American is economically secure enough to stand up to insults of any sort will all Americans be free of the power of prejudice to define them.

We must be vigilant about protecting our environment. Economically, it makes no sense to degrade our soil, air, and water in the interest of quick profits, only to spend billions ten years from now to remedy the mess we've made. The enormous cost of cleaning up existing toxic waste sites reveals that pollution is only cost-deferment.

In health terms, environmental degradation makes us far sicker than we would otherwise be, and reduces the quality of everyday life. Effective health care begins with prevention, and preserving a liveable environment is one of the best medical investments we can make.

It is not as if acting as careful stewards of our environment is inefficient, as corporations so often claim. Safeguarding the environment creates new industries, new jobs, and new opportunities for workers to make a decent living. And it ensures that future generations will not have to bear the cost—in money, in illness—of our folly.

There is much more that this country needs. We should have a foreign policy guided by the principles of freedom and justice. We should maintain a firm commitment to a woman's right to equality in all areas of life. We need to face up to the root causes of crime and drug addiction, and the escalating circulation of guns. We should support the arts, rebuild communities, and honor our veterans. We must give our children hope and our elders the respect they have earned.

I am convinced that if we can muster the courage to work together, we can do what needs to be done. Building a progressive future requires building a progressive movement. And that means that in every community in America citizens must stand up and say, “We believe in economic justice for all. We will no longer accept a situation in which the wealthy and powerful have undue influence. We are going to change this nation, and we are going to start by doing what needs to be done from the grassroots on up.”

It is time, in other words, for you to begin doing in your community what many of us have begun doing in Vermont: take a stand, organize, and use the political process to build democracy all over again.

If Americans—young and old, black and white, male and female, Hispanic and Asian, straight and gay, veteran and pacifist, worker and student and retiree—join together in a progressive politics at the grassroots level, it will surely spread outward and eventually reshape the United States into the greatest society that has ever existed.

As we move toward a progressive and democratic future, I am sustained by the hope that one day, when millions of Americans are actively involved in the political process and are standing up for their rights and those of their children, a majority of the members of Congress will then represent the interests of ordinary people, and not the rich. When that day comes, we will no longer be outsiders in the House.

That House, and this country, will then belong to all of us. And that's the way it should be.

Bernie Sanders finished
Outsider in the House
, the original 1997 edition of this book, with a chapter titled “Where Do We Go From Here?” He was serious about the “we” part, offering up a movement agenda that anticipated the message he would carry into the U.S. Senate and ultimately into presidential politics: “rid the country of any vestige of racism, sexism, and homophobia”; establish a “progressive tax policy” in order to close the “obscene and terrifying” gap between rich and poor; guarantee “health care for all through a single-payer system”; end “race-to-the-bottom” trade policies and assaults on workers; “rebuild America” with massive investments in communities and schools and job creation; begin “addressing forthrightly the problem of corporate control of the media”; and instigate sweeping reforms “to ensure that votes and not money determined which direction our leaders take.” As for himself, however, Sanders simply wrote, “There is much to do, and for an Independent there is no established trail to follow.”

Sanders understood he was well positioned to remain in the U.S. House of Representatives. After the 1996 election that he and Huck Gutman chronicled in this book, the congressman would win every ensuing statewide race with more than 60 percent of the vote, and he would eventually surpass 70 percent. But in the House he was one of 435 members of a chamber that tends to swallow up even the most outspoken representatives. Democratic socialists had served in the House before—Socialist Party members such as Victor Berger from Milwaukee and Meyer London from the Lower East Side of New York in the 1910s and 1920s, allies of Democratic Socialists of America such as Californian Ron Dellums in the 1970s and 1980s. But none of them made the leap to the United States Senate, let alone to Democratic presidential primaries and caucuses. Sanders was right: there was no historical precedent for an Independent congressman to rely upon, no established trail to follow.

Bernie Sanders had to blaze that trail himself.

In the summer of 2005, the better part of a decade after
Outsider in the House
was published, the trail led the Independent congressman to a spot just beyond the covered bridge in Warren, Vermont.

American flags were hung from the white colonial houses along the main street of the village center. The color guard, the marching units, and the floats that would participate in the community's fifty-seventh annual Fourth of July parade had lined up beside the Mad River, which winds its way through town. At the appointed hour, the local fife and drum corps played “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” an ancient cannon was fired, and the parade stepped off—fire trucks sounding their sirens and children in bib overalls started dancing. In the thick of it, behind the World War II jeep and ahead of the Rotarians, marched the most prominent democratic socialist in America. Dressed in khaki pants and a button-down shirt, Sanders, who was in the midst of his eighth term in Congress, walked the parade route without a cadre of aides handing out literature, without any signs to draw attention toward him, without so much as a campaign pin or a bumper sticker identifying him as a candidate for the state's open Senate seat in 2006. The “minority of one” member of Congress, who sat in the House as neither a Democrat nor a Republican, did not require any introduction anywhere in Vermont. As he marched through Warren, waving his arm and calling out hellos, spontaneous and sustained applause erupted from Vermonters. Everyone was shouting “Senator Sanders!”

The response confirmed what the outsider had suspected when he decided to give up a safe seat in the House to mount what seemed to many outside Vermont to be an unlikely bid for a seat in the U.S. Senate. There were still plenty of Washington insiders who had trouble comprehending the new political calculus of the Green Mountain state. But prolonged exposure to Bernie Sanders—who won just 2.2 percent of the statewide vote as a third-party candidate in a 1972 special election for the Senate seat he would seek in 2006 as an Independent—had turned the outsider into a frontrunner for a place in “the most exclusive club in the world.”

Years later, as Sanders prepared to launch what was being dismissed as an unlikely bid for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, he warned reporters, “Don't underestimate me.” It was a statement inspired not by bravado but by experience. Two of the breakthrough political races for Sanders were recounted in the original edition of
Outsider in the House
—which told the story of the 1981 campaign that upset Democratic incumbent Gordon Paquette by ten votes in the contest for mayor of Burlington, and of the 1990 campaign that upset Republican congressman Peter Smith. But it was a third race, the 2006 run for the Senate seat vacated by Republican-turned-Independent Jim Jeffords, that secured Sanders a place on the national stage. As a senator, Sanders would grab the spotlight by proposing legislation, engaging in high-profile debates, mounting a headline-grabbing “filibuster” and chairing a key committee on Capitol Hill. He would become a regular on progressive talk-radio shows hosted by Thom Hartman and Ed Schultz, and on MSNBC's cable television; he would be a guest on public television's
Bill Moyers Journal
, and eventually (if infrequently) on programs that rarely hosted progressives, let alone democratic socialists, such as NBC's
Meet the Press
and ABC's
This Week
. The longtime critic of the failures of major media outlets to cover grassroots movements and dissident campaigners understood the dynamics of American politics. He recognized how the microphone gets turned up for senators—and for presidential candidates—and he was not about to turn down the opportunity to amplify the agenda. “There are some great people out there who can say, and are saying, exactly what I'm saying,” explained Sanders. “They're not United States Senators.”

Remaking a Republican State

The New York City–born Sanders has become so closely associated in the minds of Americans with Vermont, and the once rock-ribbed Republican state has been so commonly reimagined as a progressive stronghold, that it is hard to imagine Sanders as anything but the Green Mountain State's junior senator. But the linkage between Sanders and Vermont, like the state's progressive reputation, did not just happen. It developed and solidified over time. In 2005, a Senate run by an Independent and democratic socialist for a Vermont U.S. Senate seat required at least a measure of political rethinking and recalculation.

For the first century after the founding of the Grand Old Party in 1854, Republicans dominated the politics of the state of Vermont like no other. For more than 100 years, Vermont Republicans won every major race for every statewide office. Republican presidential candidates from John Fremont in 1856 to George H.W. Bush in 1988—with the single exception of Barry Goldwater in 1964—won the state's electoral votes. While Democratic Patrick Leahy had won one of Vermont's Senate seats in the Watergate year of 1974 by a margin of less than 1,000 votes over his Republican opponent (and by a considerably wider margin over Liberty Union Party candidate Bernie Sanders), Republicans such as Robert Stafford and Jim Jeffords kept winning right into the twenty-first century.

The unbroken Republican winning streak for the seat Sanders would seek in 2006 had extended from before the Civil War through the 2000 election, which saw Jeffords reelected with 66 percent of the vote. Jeffords quit the Senate Republican Caucus in 2001 and served the remainder of his term as an Independent. That made him a good fit with Vermont in 2005—when the state had a Republican governor, a Republican lieutenant governor, a combative legislature and the calm and cerebral Leahy as its senior senator. From afar, and even to the eye of some Vermonters, this looked like a political landscape that invited the candidacy of a genteel moderate Republican or perhaps a similar moderate Democrat. Bernie Sanders was neither genteel nor moderate. He was politically volatile and proud of it. He never backed away from his identity as a democratic socialist, he ripped the compromises of both major parties, and he proudly served as an Independent. While some members of Congress respond to close races, and the threat of more close races, by tempering their politics, Sanders showed no sign of changing course. As a congressman, he earned top ratings from labor, environmental, and civil-rights groups; played a vital role in forming and building out the Congressional Progressive Caucus; voted against free trade deals and Wall Street “reforms” promoted by Democratic and Republican presidents; joined the lonely circle that opposed the Patriot Act; and was one of the loudest voices of opposition to George W. Bush's use of military force in Iraq. Above all, he railed against the concentrated economic and political power of multinational corporations, media monopolies, and plutocratic billionaires.

For those who did not know Sanders and did not know Vermont in 2005, the notion that a radical Independent was going to take the most permanently Republican Senate seat in the country shortly after the reelection of George W. Bush to a second term and the seating of Republican majorities in the U.S. House and Senate was hard to fathom. But Margrete Strand Rangnes, a veteran environmental activist who for many years served as director for the Sierra Club's Labor and Trade Program, who helped form the BlueGreen Alliance partnership of environmental and labor organizations, and who now serves as the executive vice president of Public Citizen, was pretty sure Sanders could do it. She had unique experience with regard to Vermont politics. As a young activist, she had helped run the 2000 campaign of the last Democrat who had tried to unseat Jeffords. On paper, that Democrat, Vermont auditor Ed Flanagan, looked like a strong challenger. A former Carter administration aide who had already won two statewide races, Flanagan had gained national attention as a trailblazing, openly gay elected official and was known in Vermont as a progressive watchdog who had used his position to battle for patient rights and better child-care protections. Yet he got nowhere against Jeffords, winning just 25 percent of the vote. On the same day, Sanders was reelected with 69 percent of the vote. That was when Strand Rangnes came to understand something about Sanders and his approach to politics that most national pundits are still struggling to get. “It's mind-boggling how popular Bernie is,” she explained as Sanders was preparing to make the Senate race in 2006. “And it's not just progressives. People who tell you they have no interest in politics, who tell you they don't trust any politicians, are the ones who love Bernie the most.”

Sanders was not born with the ability to leap the boundaries of partisanship and ideology, and also of frustration and disenchantment; he is not a natural politician. But he is persistent, and by the time he got to Warren on July 4, 2005, he was seen as the front runner to win one of the few U.S. Senate seats where no incumbent would be running in 2006. Sanders knew he would still face a multimillion-dollar GOP attack campaign, but top Republicans were backing away from the race. Democrats were getting in line behind his candidacy—sometimes grudgingly, sometimes not—and polls showed him running 2-to-1 ahead of likely foes.

So the folks shouting “Senator Sanders” along the parade route were not crazy.

And neither was Sanders.

That did not make what was happening in Vermont any less remarkable, however, nor any less significant.

Even if he were not a socialist, and even if he were not an Independent who eschewed most of the trappings of contemporary partisan politics—including those of a Democratic Party he then saw (and still generally sees) as dramatically too centrist, too cautious, and too unfocused to counter the corporate power that dominates our politics—the enthusiasm Sanders inspired in that 2006 campaign in Vermont would have been striking.

That Sanders attracted the support he did with what pundits portrayed as career-crushing liabilities in American politics delighted activists who—since the death of U.S. senator Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) in 2002—had been casting about for a senator who could preach the progressive-populist gospel. And the interest in Sanders went further than that. At a point when the question of the moment was drawn from the title of Thomas Frank's groundbreaking book on political disconnection (
What's the Matter with Kansas?
), savvy Democrats wanted to know how Sanders was winning tough races by drawing the enthusiastic support of precisely the sort of rural and working-class voters who most Democrats had a hard time exciting.

Unfortunately for the politicos and pundits, Sanders was not peddling an easy fix. What he had to teach was not a new scheme for organizing a campaign or raising money. There was no Bernie Sanders gimmick. Rather, Sanders provided confirmation of a fundamental reality that too many progressive pols, and almost all Democratic leaders, had forgotten: an ideologically muscular message delivered in a manner that crosses lines of class, race, region, and partisanship has always been—and will always be—politically potent. “Bernie earned people's trust over a long period of time by taking strong stands and sticking to them,” Peter Freyne, the longtime columnist for Burlington's weekly newspaper
Seven Days
, explained as the Senate race got started in 2005. “There's a connection between what the politician says and what the politician does. And it's always there. The consistency of where he's coming from and who he's looking out for has been there since I started covering him in 1981.”

What Sanders had done was stay on message, from election to election, from decade to decade. Yes, the Vermonter opposed George W. Bush's war in Iraq; yes, he decried Bush's Patriot Act; yes, he supported LGBT rights and women's rights and civil rights. But what animated his campaigning in Vermont was honest fury at the neglect of the poor, frustration with the abandonment of the middle class by corporate CEOs and politicians, and an absolute—if lonely—faith that government really could do a lot of things, like guarantee health care for all, that the private sector could not. There was nothing smooth or prepackaged or focus-group tested about the way Sanders communicated. After decades of close to constant campaigning, first as the gadfly candidate of the Liberty Union Party for senator and governor in the 1970s, then as the radical mayor of “The People's Republic of Burlington” in the 1980s, then as a failed candidate first for governor and then for Congress later in the 1980s, and, from 1990 on, as the only Independent in modern history to repeatedly win a U.S. House seat, Sanders forged relationships with generations of Vermont voters. Many of them echoed the sentiments of Warren attorney Mark Grosby, who said, “I used to be a diehard Republican. Now, I'm a diehard for Bernie.”