Outsider in the White House (35 page)

The best members of Congress, of all ideologies and on both sides of the aisle in the House and Senate, respond to crises, challenges, and opportunities outside Washington by launching inquiries, holding hearings and proposing legislation. But Sanders reimagined the role of the legislator, working all the angles on Capitol Hill and then hitting the road to urge citizens at home in Vermont and across the country to pressure Congress to address climate change, to save the Postal Service, to recognize and respond to the damage done by trade policies that led to dislocation and unemployment—especially for African Americans, Latinos, and the young. “To me,” he said, “what politics is about is not just coming up with ideas and a legislative program here in Washington—you need to do those things—but it's about figuring out how you involve people in the political process, how you empower them. It ain't easy, but that is, in fact, what has to be done.”

In response to the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 ruling in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which struck down historic barriers to corporate spending on elections, Sanders proposed a “Saving American Democracy Amendment” to the U.S. Constitution—with the purpose of overturning the Citizens United ruling, restoring a century-old ban on corporate campaign donations to candidates, establishing that corporations are not entitled to the same constitutional rights as people, and making it clear that corporations may be regulated by Congress and state legislatures. But he did not stop there. Sanders launched a petition drive to show support for the amendment, he urged citizens to pass local and state resolutions to demand action, he appeared at rallies across the country to promote the idea, and then he brought activists back to Washington to raise the volume. In a city where the billionaire Koch brothers are increasingly influential—thanks to their massive spending on campaigns and their funding of groups that promote right-wing economic agendas—Sanders did not just call them out. He organized a Capitol Hill screening of a documentary exposing the manipulation of politics by the billionaires,
Citizen Koch
, by Academy Award–nominated filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, at which he declared, “The paramount issue is the movement of this country toward what I call an oligarchic form of society—where you have a small number of people owning and controlling not only our economy, not only our media (the means by which people get their information) but increasingly, and especially as a result of Citizens United, our political process.”

“That's the bad news, and it is very bad news indeed,” said Sanders. “The good news is that all over this country millions and millions of people are understanding, and believe in the bottom of their hearts, that American democracy is not about billionaires being able to spend as much money as they want to elect the people they want. Very few people believe that is what American democracy is about.”

Vermonters liked the activist approach. When Sanders sought reelection in 2012, he broke almost all the rules of the Citizens United era. He ran no attack ads. In fact, he ran no TV commercials. Instead, he poured his campaign's resources into a grassroots strategy that had volunteers knock on 20,000 doors and that organized dozens of town hall meetings across the state. The meetings were not rallies. Sanders spoke in full sentences, not sound bites; he invited voters to ask complicated questions on controversial issues—and he answered with big, bold proposals to address climate change by “transforming our energy system away from polluting fossil fuels, and towards energy efficiency and sustainability,” to really reform health care with a single-payer Medicare-for-all program, to steer money away from the Pentagon and toward domestic jobs initiatives. Rejecting the empty partisanship of both parties, Sanders ripped the austerity agenda of Republican nominees Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, while warning that President Obama and too many Democrats were inclining toward an austerity-lite “grand bargain” that would make debt reduction a greater priority than saving Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. “Why, in God's name, in a tight race, did Barack Obama have a hard time saying six words: ‘I will never cut Social Security'? Why won't these Democrats say: ‘We will never cut Social Security'?” asked Sanders. “If they can't say that, how are they ever going to go after Wall Street?”

When the results began to pour in from across the country on election night, one of the first Senate races to be called was for Bernie Sanders in Vermont. Against an aggressive Republican rival, a businessman and four-term Massachusetts state legislator who made a big deal about the fact that he was running to replace “the only admitted socialist in the U.S. Senate,” the senator took 71 percent of the vote, sweeping every county in the state in the best finish of the sixteen statewide races he had run since 1972. Yet Sanders was frustrated. He did not like that pundits who didn't know Vermont were dismissing his approach—and his electoral success—as a regional deviation that might work in what is often portrayed as a quirky liberal state but that couldn't possibly have relevance for the rest of the country. “It wasn't that long ago that Vermont was one of the most Republican states in the country. Until two years ago, the governor was a Republican; the lieutenant governor
is
a Republican. This is a significantly rural state. This is a state with some very conservative regions,” said Sanders, who argued that he won those conservative regions not by dumbing down or compromising his message but by turning the volume up.

“I go crazy with all these Democrats saying you have to go conservative to win, you have to go cautious to win. These damned consultants come in and say, ‘This is how you have to run,' and it's always the same: raise money, spend it on television, don't say anything that will offend anyone. And the Democrats do it and then they end up in tight races, worried about whether they'll make it,” said Sanders. “For the life of me, I can't figure out why progressives listen to consultants. Building movements, making progress on progressive issues—you have to talk to people, educate people, organize people.”

Sanders was offering a roadmap for Democrats. But, for the most part, Democrats weren't listening to the Independent who caucused with them in the Senate but who was often “off-message.” Wrangling with the White House and Republican neo-conservatives, Sanders was a forceful critic of proposals to send U.S. troops back into the Middle East. At a point in 2013, when Republicans such as Arizona senator John McCain were pushing for intervention in Syria, and when the White House was sending ominous signals about the project, most Democrats in the House and Senate kept quiet. But Sanders kept recalling the rush to war in Iraq and its consequences, while arguing, “To get involved in a bloody and complicated war in Syria makes no sense at all. We would reap consequences we can't imagine.” Explaining that the human cost of war is not just counted on the battlefield but on the home front, the then-chairman of the Veterans Affairs Committee pointed out that the United States was still struggling to care for the veterans of the last wars in which it had engaged. He asked who would pay for another war for another regime change in another country. And he answered, “The top 1 percent? No. Children in Head Start, families on food stamps, seniors on Medicare—that's who will be paying for it … At a time when the middle class is literally disappearing, when 46 million people are living in poverty and real unemployment is close to 14 percent, and a generation of kids are graduating from high school and college and can't find any work, and when we have the most unequal distribution of income since the Great Depression, what do you think is going to happen if we go to war with Syria?” said the senator, who warned that human needs at home would “keep getting pushed aside because of war and war and war and war.”

“I don't want our country to become the Sparta of the twenty-first century,” Sanders declared. The White House did not like that sort of talk, but polls showed that the American people were exceptionally ill at ease with the prospect of perpetual war. For his part, Sanders was more convinced than ever of what he described as an increasingly profound “disconnect” between the great mass of citizens and the political and media elites of Washington. Anticipating a disastrous 2014 election cycle for Democrats—in which they lost control of the Senate, made no progress in the House and suffered setbacks in statehouses across the country—Sanders appeared the weekend before the voting on public television's
Moyers and Company
.

A Political Revolution

Sanders talked about how “big money [can] put an unbelievable amount of TV and radio ads out there to deflect attention from the real issues facing the American people.” The notion of deflecting attention caught the ear of Bill Moyers, who has been on both sides of the politics and media equation—as a White House press secretary in the administration of Lyndon Johnson, as a newspaper publisher and as a highly regarded broadcast journalist.

“Well, that's interesting,” said Moyers. “Because, you know, I've seen you quite recently on television. It's always the same questions and always the same five headlines. What's the story that the corporate press is not letting you tell?”

“Oh, my God. You see, this is the issue,” responded Sanders. “I mean, I've been on a million of these shows. They say, ‘Here's the story of the day. What do you think about the Secret Service? What do you think about this? What do you think about Ebola?' All of those issues are important. But the issues that impact ordinary people—they're asking why, despite all of the productivity, people are working longer hours for lower wages. Have we had that discussion, Bill? Have you ever heard anybody talking about it?”

The nation's longest-serving Independent member of Congress was just getting started.

“And this issue of income and wealth inequality, wow: one percent owning 37 percent of the wealth in America. Bottom 60 percent owning 1.7 percent. One family, the Walton family of Walmart, owning more wealth than the bottom 40 percent,” he said. “Do you think we should be talking about that issue? You can't get the discussion going on TV.”

Then came the vital exchange.

“Why?” asked Moyers.

“Because it's not in the interest of the corporations who own the networks to actually be educating the American people so that we're debating the real issues. It's much better to deflect attention away from those issues and get into the story of the day,” explained Sanders. Moyers pressed Sanders with regard to solutions to what he referred to as “this fundamental question facing Bernie Sanders: how do you get your message directly to those who need it most?” Implicit in the question was an acknowledgment that, for all his efforts inside the Capitol and across the country, and for all of his electoral success in Vermont, Sanders had not exactly thwarted the forces of plutocracy. Most of the goals he outlined in the last chapter of
Outsider in the House
remained unrealized, and some of them seemed further from realization than they did in 1997.

“I wish I had the magic answer,” replied Sanders. “You're asking exactly the right question … The idea that you have these working-class people who are voting for candidates who refuse to raise the minimum wage, who refuse to provide healthcare for their kids, who want to send their jobs to China, who want to give tax breaks to corporations, it blows my mind. And that is the issue that we have to figure out.”

What Sanders was also figuring out in the fall of 2014 was whether a campaign for the presidency might be a part of the answer to Moyers' “How do you get your message directly to those who need it most?” question. The previous March, in an extended interview with the
Nation
, Sanders had explained, “I don't wake up every morning, as some people here in Washington do, and say, ‘You know, I really have to be president of the United States. I was born to be president of the United States.' What I do wake up every morning feeling is that this country faces more serious problems than at any time since the Great Depression, and there is a horrendous lack of serious political discourse or ideas out there that can address these crises, and that somebody has got to represent the working-class and the middle-class of this country in standing up to the big-money interests who have so much power over the economic and political life of this country. So I am prepared to run for president of the United States. I don't believe that I am the only person out there who can fight this fight, but I am certainly prepared to look seriously at that race.”

Sanders recognized that it was an audacious proposal, and a complex one. Would the longest-serving Independent in Congress mount an Independent or third-party bid, or would he run as a Democrat? Would an outspoken critic of money in politics be able to raise enough to get past the starting line of a presidential race? Would he be overshadowed by his frequent ally, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, who progressive groups talked of drafting into the race? Could anyone upset the trajectory of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who would always have more name recognition, more money, and more connections? And there was the matter of whether a democratic socialist could get traction in a country where the “S” word was treated as an offensive epithet by most Republicans and scrupulously avoided by most Democrats?

As it happened, the latter question was settled in Sanders' mind. “No, that's not a factor at all,” he said. “In Vermont, people understand exactly what I mean by the word. They don't believe that democratic socialism is akin to North Korea communism. They understand that when I talk about democratic socialism, what I'm saying is that I do not want to see the United States significantly dominated by a handful of billionaire families controlling the economic and political life of the country. That I do believe that in a democratic, civilized society, all people are entitled to health care as a right, all people are entitled to quality education as a right, all people are entitled to decent jobs and a decent income, and that we need a government which represents ordinary Americans and not just the wealthy and the powerful.