Outsider in the White House (34 page)

It was not just the economic system that was broken, Sanders argued, it was a political system that was broken—corrupted by the absolute refusal of official Washington, even in a moment of crisis, to challenge economic elites.

“Under this bill, the CEOs and the Wall Street insiders will still, with a little bit of imagination, continue to make out like bandits,” growled Sanders. “This bill does not deal at all with how we got into this crisis in the first place and the need to undo the deregulatory fervor which created trillions of dollars in complicated and unregulated financial instruments such as credit default swaps and hedge funds,” the senator continued. “This bill does not address the issue that has taken us to where we are today, the concept of too big to fail … There is not one word about the issue of too big to fail in this legislation at a time when that problem is in fact becoming even more serious.”

Then he named names.

“This bill does not deal with the absurdity of having the fox guarding the hen house,” said Sanders. “Maybe I'm the only person in America who thinks so, but I have a hard time understanding why we are giving $700 billion to the Secretary of the Treasury, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, who along with other financial institutions, actually got us into this problem. Now, maybe I'm the only person in America who thinks that's a little bit weird, but that is what I think.”

Sanders was not the only person in America who had a hard time understanding the bailout as anything more than an insider deal to protect the privileged at the expense of everyone else. When the crisis developed, Sanders wrote a letter to Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson making an argument that “it should be those people best able to pay for this bailout, those people who have made out like bandits in recent years, they should be asked to pay for this bailout. It should not be the middle class.” To Sanders' amazement, almost 50,000 added their names to his on the letter.

If Sanders was frustrated with the compromised and compromising politics of the Senate, he was as excited as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur about the disruptive potential of the Internet. With a young staff that was quick to adopt social media tools that other senators resisted, Sanders began to use his Senate website, Facebook, Twitter, and email to invite Americans into debates about their economic future. By 2015, his Senate Facebook page had 1.6 million followers, far outpacing other senators, most presidential candidates, and more than a few rock stars. Coupled with media appearances and a speaking schedule that took him not only to Vermont but to progressive gatherings across the country, Sanders built a constituency for the arguments he made as a lonely opponent of the bailout.

Sanders was not always in opposition. He backed Barack Obama for president in 2008, and he generally supported the key initiatives of Obama's first years in office. Yet he was rarely an uncritical supporter. The senator from Vermont joined senators Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, and Tom Harkin of Iowa in breaking with the rest of the Democratic caucus to oppose Obama's nomination of Tim Geithner to serve as Secretary of the Treasury, arguing, “Mr. Geithner was at the Fed and the Treasury Department when the deregulatory fervor that got us into this mess ran rampant. He was part of the problem.”

As a senator in a chamber that might decide whether a major initiative would advance or collapse, Sanders used his position to press the administration to improve measures he thought were too weak. One case in point was the Affordable Care Act. Sanders has been a longtime supporter of a universal single-payer “Medicare for All” system, along the lines of the public health systems that deliver care in Canada and most European countries. He was quick to point out gaps and flaws in the ACA. But he kept talking to the administration and Senate backers of the proposal and succeeded in securing $12.5 billion in ACA funding to expand community health centers and to recruit more doctors, dentists, nurses, and other primary health providers. He also fought to expand the National Health Service Corps in order to address the shortage of health providers in underserved regions of the country. And he fought to preserve prospects for states such as Vermont to experiment with single-payer initiatives. Enough of what Sanders proposed was incorporated into the ACA to get his vote in 2010, even as the senator continued his advocacy for a more robust national health-care program. Similarly, Sanders backed the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, even as he acknowledged that the measure “did not end much of the casino-style gambling” on Wall Street. That vote put the senator from Vermont in the company of Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard Law School professor who led the fight for the creation of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was established with the enactment of Dodd-Frank, and who in 2012 would be elected to the Senate from Massachusetts. But the vote put Sanders at odds with a frequent ally in financial reform fights, Wisconsin's Russ Feingold, who opposed Dodd-Frank with an argument that: “My test for the financial regulatory reform bill is whether it will prevent another crisis. [This bill] fails that test.” The decision to vote for Dodd-Frank illustrated a characteristic of Sanders that is often missed by casual observers of Congress; the senator is passionate, and he is not afraid to go it alone, but nor is he a purist who enjoys being right when everyone else is wrong. If he can get an amendment he thinks is important, or at least useful, attached to a piece of legislation (as he did with a Dodd-Frank amendment that directed the Government Accountability Office to conduct the first top-to-bottom audit of the secretive Federal Reserve), Sanders may vote for a measure that he finds insufficient. In this sense he is less of a lone wolf than some imagine.

When Sanders does break with the pack, however, he breaks big.

After the “Republican wave” election of 2010 gave the GOP control of the U.S. House, a stronger position in the Senate, and dominance of statehouses across the country, Sanders argued that the Obama administration and congressional Democrats needed to draw dramatically clearer lines in the sand on economic issues. Instead, President Obama cut a deal with congressional Republicans to extend Bush-era tax breaks for billionaires and create a sweeping estate-tax exemption for millionaires. It was not just bad politics, Sanders said, it was bad economics.

The Vermonter's certainty, on both points, fueled a speech that would redefine him in the eyes of millions of Americans, identifying him not merely as a senator but as a spokesman for a point of view that was profoundly at odds with the cozy consensus in Washington and with the austerity agenda of billionaire-funded “think tanks” and politicians who continued to promote tax breaks for the rich and program cuts for everyone else. That agenda had failed, Sanders said, arguing that it was time for a new agenda of taxing the rich and investing in infrastructure and job creation for the great mass of Americans who never got a bailout.

After promising to do “whatever it takes” to block the deal, Sanders appeared on the Senate floor at 10:24 a.m. on Friday, December 10, 2010. He adjusted the microphone and began speaking about what was wrong with the tax deal, about what was wrong with how Washington did business, about what was wrong with national priorities, about what was wrong with the economy. “You can call what I am doing today whatever you want, you [can] call it a filibuster, you can call it a very long speech …” read a message on the senator's Twitter feed. Very long. Sanders remained at the podium for 8 hours, 35 minutes, and 14 seconds.

The senator's bold gesture grabbed the attention of the nation, as Senate video servers were overwhelmed when tens of thousands of people tried to watch the speech online. MSNBC's Rachel Maddow called the speech “a superhuman display of endurance and strength of conviction against the tax deal.” But the White House was not impressed. On NBC's
Nightly News
, political director Chuck Todd reported, “For most of the day today, the tax debate had been dominated by Vermont's Independent, self-described socialist senator who has been speaking on the floor of the United States Senate by himself continuously since about 10:30 this morning. Well, about 4 o'clock clearly the White House had had enough so instead of briefing reporters about President Obama's private meeting with President Clinton, President Obama decided to trot out President Clinton himself to brief reporters.”

CNN's John King explained that “the calculation, both risky and simple, [was] I'll see your Bernie Sanders and raise you a Bill Clinton.”

But the story was not Clinton. It was Sanders. Sanders finished speaking not with a
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
–style collapse from exhaustion but with an energetic call to action. “If the American people stand up and say, ‘We can do better than this, that we don't need to drive up the national debt by giving tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires,' [if] the American people are prepared to stand—and we're prepared to follow them—I think we can defeat this proposal,” he thundered. “I think we can come up with a better proposal which better reflects the needs of the middle class and working families of our country and, to me, most importantly, the children of our country. And with that, Madam President, I would yield the floor.”

National Public Radio announced, “The whole world was watching Bernie Sanders today.” The
Washington Post
's Chris Cillizza declared, “Sanders' stand symbolized the anger and resentment liberals felt about the deal and turned the Vermont senator into a progressive hero.” Politico agreed, explaining, “The left's been looking for a new hero. Tonight they latched onto one: Sen. Bernie Sanders. The Vermont Independent took progressive fury over President Obama's tax-cut deal with Republicans to the floor of the Senate Friday, bringing the chamber to a standstill for eight hours with a filibuster-style speech that set the liberal Twitterverse ablaze.”

Inside/Outside Strategies

In the new and more conservative Congress, Sanders would continue to focus on Senate duties—as the chairman of Veterans' Affairs Committee from 2013 to 2015, for instance, he often worked closely with Arizona senator John McCain, the former prisoner of war and 2008 Republican presidential nominee. With McCain, Sanders co-wrote the sweeping Veterans' Access to Care through Choice, Accountability, and Transparency Act of 2014 in response to reports of scandalous neglect by the Veterans Health Administration. Increasingly, however, Sanders devoted his energies to developing inside-outside strategies that brought public pressure to bear on a Congress that after 2010 was gridlocked both by partisan division and by the influence of big-money campaign contributions and corporate lobbying.

To a greater extent than any senator since Wellstone, Sanders used his position to highlight struggles far from Washington, and in so doing to argue for federal interventions in response to popular uprisings. When newly elected Republican governors attacked labor rights immediately after taking office in 2011, Sanders leapt into the fray, declaring his solidarity with union members who were protesting in Madison, Wisconsin, and Columbus, Ohio, and other state capitals. “This is part of the concerted attack on the middle class and working families of this country by the very wealthiest people in America,” Sanders said of the effort by Republican governors such as Wisconsin's Scott Walker and Ohio's John Kasich to eliminate collective bargaining rights for public employee unions. “These guys want to return us to the 1920s when working people had virtually no rights to organize or to earn a decent living … Wages are going down in this country for everybody. When you destroy unions there will be no standard at all, nobody left to negotiate decent jobs for the middle class.” When the Occupy Wall Street movement began in New York City's Zuccotti Park and quickly went national, Sanders embraced the language and the spirit of the protests. “We have the crooks on Wall Street, and I use that word advisedly—don't misquote me, the word is ‘crooks'— whose greed, whose recklessness, whose illegal behavior caused this terrible recession with so much suffering. We believe in this country; we love this country; and we will be damned if we're going to see a handful of robber barons control the future of this country,” declared the senator, who added, “I applaud those protesters who are out there, who are focusing attention on Wall Street, but what we've got to do is put meat on that bone,” he said. “We've got to make demands on Wall Street [and] break those institutions up.” When Cook County commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, who had spent decades working to forge coalitions of working-class Latinos, African Americans, and white ethnics, in the tradition of former Chicago mayor Harold Washington, challenged centrist Democratic mayor Rahm Emanuel and that city's political establishment, Sanders campaigned for him—as a former mayor and as a senator who announced that he needed allies in the nation's city halls to battle the top-to-bottom influence of corporations and the billionaire Koch brothers.

When eighteen-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, Sanders declared that “the shooting of an unarmed person is unacceptable,” endorsed calls for a federal investigation and defended the rights of protesters in Ferguson and across the country. “Police must be seen as part of a community and not an occupying force,” said the senator, who argued in the immediate aftermath of the shooting of the young African-American man that: “All of us have a responsibility to make sure that what happened in Ferguson never happens again.” To that end, Sanders and Congressman John Conyers, Jr. proposed legislation that would provide $5.5 billion in immediate funding to states and communities to address the crisis of African-American youth unemployment, arguing that “instead of putting military style equipment into police departments in those areas, we [should] start investing in jobs for the young people there who desperately need them.”