By Jim Geraghty
Monday, January 13, 2020
If turnout is comparable to 2016, three weeks from today
about 170,000 people will participate in the Iowa Democratic caucus, and eight
days after that about 250,000 people will vote in the New Hampshire Democratic
primary. That’s about 420,000 people who will essentially decide the legacy of
Bernie Sanders.
Sanders shouldn’t, by rights, even be here. His critics
like to point out that he “didn’t collect his first steady paycheck until he
was an elected official pushing 40 years old.” In his early 20s, he lived in a
“shack-like structure” with a dirt floor and no electricity or running water.
At age 32, he was writing bizarre and lurid rants about sex in an alternative
newspaper that are shocking even by today’s standards.
He became a candidate for office in late 1971 because he
volunteered and no one else did. The far-left Liberty Union party, touting
“nonviolent revolutionary socialism,” needed a candidate for the U.S. Senate,
and Sanders agreed to do it. (Up in Vermont, the party is a venerable, if never
successful, institution.) Sanders’s message in that campaign should sound
eerily familiar: He lamented that “some people in this country have billions of
dollars when other people have nothing.” He received 1 percent of the vote.
For much of his early political career, Sanders no doubt
struck people as a kook. Perhaps no city other than tiny Burlington, Vt., would have given him a chance. In 1980, when
he first ran for mayor of the town, in 1980, he won by ten votes over a wildly
overconfident five-term incumbent who “hardly bothered to campaign.” Sanders
broke almost every traditional rule in politics. He started to go bald early,
what’s left of his hair always seemed disheveled, his suits were always
wrinkled and rarely fit well, and he wore thick glasses, spoke with an even
thicker Brooklyn accent, shouted most of his speeches, and went on at length
about dry topics.
In short, he could have turned out to be another Jesse
Ventura — a wildly unorthodox outsider whom the voters elected on a lark and on
whom they almost immediately soured. Yet Burlington residents seemed to like
the distinction of having the country’s only Socialist mayor, reelecting him
three times. The dirty little secret of Sanders’s time as mayor is that he
earned a lot of good will with basic good-government initiatives: “Insurance
and fuel contracts were opened to competitive bidding for the first time in
years. And the first audit of the city’s $11-million pension fund in 30 years
took place.” Wealthy developers and local Republican businessmen such as Tony
Pomerleau were pleasantly surprised at how Sanders was willing to listen to
their arguments. There were some signs that Sanders’s socialism was more bark
than bite, more radical-chic branding than genuine radicalism. (His fans called
themselves Sandernistas, and during these years, the local shops started
selling t-shirts proclaiming the “People’s Republic of Burlington.”)
But of course, winning over the people of Burlington, Vt.
wouldn’t have led people to predict Sanders’s subsequent rise. By any standard,
he was among the last people you’d expect to end up in Congress, and he almost
didn’t. In 1988, he ran for Vermont’s open U.S. House seat and lost, in what
could have been the end of his political career. But two years later — now
fully recognizable as the rumpled, hunched-over, hectoring leftist motormouth
we all know today — Sanders ran for the House again, in what became a six-way
race. The incumbent, Republican Peter Smith, had changed his mind on the
so-called assault-weapons ban, infuriating gun owners and their political
leaders. This led to an endorsement of the then-independent Sanders by . . . NRA
executive vice president Wayne LaPierre. (“The gun vote brought us down,”
Smith’s campaign manager later lamented.) Thus, with the help of the nation’s
most powerful gun-rights group, Sanders was first elected to Congress. He’s
been there ever since.
Democrats who aren’t fans of Sanders point out that over
his 30 years in Washington, only 1.8 percent of the legislation he’s introduced
has passed. Many House Democrats have never particularly warmed to the man who
for so long rejected the label of their party and kept offering wildly
unrealistic proposals that were politically toxic in their districts. His
stances — voting against the Persian Gulf War, opposing NAFTA — were rarely
popular even among Democrats. He frequently clashed with Bill Clinton, offering
carefully measured praise for H. Ross Perot’s independent bid for president in
1992, noting, “I have strong, strong differences with Clinton,” and later
denouncing the welfare-reform bill that was one of Clinton’s signature
legislative accomplishments.
Sanders’s relationship with the next Democratic president
wasn’t that much warmer. During the 2016 campaign, Obama described Sanders’s
bid in terms that sounded dismissive to some ears:
I think Hillary came in with the
both privilege — and burden — of being perceived as the front-runner. . . .
You’re always looking at the bright, shiny object that people haven’t seen
before — that’s a disadvantage to her. Bernie is somebody who — although I
don’t know as well because he wasn’t, obviously, in my administration — has the
virtue of saying exactly what he believes, and [with] great authenticity, great
passion, and is fearless. His attitude is, “I got nothing to lose.”
In 2018, Sanders declared, “the business model, if you
like, of the Democratic party for the last 15 years or so has been a failure,”
a remark that many in Obama’s circle interpreted as a disrespectful criticism.
“Back when Sanders seemed like more of a threat than he does now, Obama said
privately that if Bernie were running away with the nomination, Obama would
speak up to stop him,” Ryan Lizza reported in November.
All of which is to point out just what an extraordinarily
unlikely figure Sanders was to become a major presidential candidate in 2016.
Vermont offered no key strategic positioning in a presidential election, as the
second-least-populous state in the union. Hillary Clinton had been the heir
apparent to President Obama since the day she conceded to him in the 2008
Democratic presidential primary. The incumbent president, popular with the
Democratic grassroots, appeared to prefer Clinton. By assuming control of the
Democratic National Committee’s debts, the Clinton campaign had effectively
coopted the DNC into its service. Yet somehow, Sanders came close to beating
her — and along the way he inspired a fanatical loyalty that has helped him
defy the conventional wisdom to remain a strong contender for the 2020
nomination.
At the beginning of this cycle, even some Sanders fans
wondered if a man in his late 70s could run for president and successfully
serve — and that was before October, when he suffered a heart attack and
doctors inserted two stents in a blocked artery. When the news broke, David
Axelrod articulated the uncomfortable truth: “While we all wish Senator Sanders
well, this has to be a big flashing light for him. And given his age, it may be
for some voters, as well.” Yet Sanders is in better shape in the polls now than
he was before the heart attack.
It’s easy to see why Sanders supporters believe their man
is a candidate of destiny: He’s accumulated one improbable victory after
another in a charmed 40-year political career. As recently as this point four
years ago, no one in their right mind would have bet on Sanders to be here now,
ranking among the front-runners for the party’s nomination. He’s been an
oddball and a longshot every step of the way, and he’s won every step of the
way. Now he finds himself a few more steps away from becoming the 46th
president of the United States. Why couldn’t he win?
Of course, the glass-half-empty view is that Sanders is
where he is today because of improbable luck and the bad judgment of others. In
this telling, his career would have proceeded quite differently if the
incumbent mayor of Burlington had put serious effort into winning reelection,
or LaPierre had chosen to not endorse him, or Hillary Clinton had recognized
her weaknesses among some Democrats earlier in the 2016 primary. Any one of his
opponents over the years could have discovered his writings about rape
fantasies in that alternative newspaper and wrecked his support among women.
That heart attack could have killed him. His happy accidents were still
accidents.
By the end of spring, we will know whether Bernie Sanders
is indeed the candidate of destiny his supporters believe him to be or just an
aging oddball who happened to be in the right place in the right time over and
over again until his decades-long hot streak ran cold. If nothing else, we’re
in for an interesting few months.
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