The trouble with Bernie Sanders

“A movement that wins is a movement that grows.”
— Faiz Shakir, Bernie Sanders campaign manager

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THE COVID-19 pandemic made its brutal trajectory into our world and our lives with monstrous irony and equally monstrous bad timing, injecting itself into the 2020 Democratic nomination.

For the campaign of Vermont's Democratic socialist senator Bernie Sanders, it was the worst that could happen: a deadly viral outlier that short-circuits the retail populism of a candidate desperate to catch up to his opponent; a disease that, among other things, demands that an already cerebral aspirant for the White House must campaign at a serious remove from the crowds that have given his presidential bid oxygen since it started in early 2019.

Sanders and his campaign brain trust recently decamped to Burlington, “Burlington” being the shorthand for the home of Bernie and Jane O’Meara Sanders. I forget the shorthand word they used to explain it — “reassess” or “recalibrate” or some other mechanically therapeutic descriptor — but you know what it means. We all know what it means to a campaign that’s already in trouble.

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With serial primary losses on Super Tuesdays, March 3, 10 and 17, the derailing of the Sanders Inevitability Express accelerated. In breathtakingly swift fashion, his campaign for the Democratic nomination and the presidency has lost the illusion of momentum (maybe the only momentum it really had to begin with) and certainly that of inevitability.

One after another after another, unforced errors have hobbled the Sanders 2020 campaign, mistakes and blindsides you wouldn’t expect of such a well-oiled campaign operation — one that never completely went dark after 2016 — or such a presumably seasoned presidential contender. Let us count the ways:

Example: Despite an historically cool relationship with black voters, and an opportunity to improve that, Sanders, the presumptive leader of a multi-racial political movement, chose this year to forego an appearance at the Edmund Pettis Bridge, a site that spiritually resonates for black Americans, and an obligatory walk for any serious presidential candidate seeking black voter support.

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HE PAID the price for that diss this year. He otherwise paid a price among black voters in the primaries he needed to win.

The New York Times explains: “Instead of spending money on ads and ground operations to compete across the South, Mr. Sanders would all but give up on those states and would focus on winning states where he was more popular, like Colorado and Minnesota, which would at least give him some victories to claim.

“The reason: Mr. Sanders and his advisers and allies knew that black voters would be decisive in those Southern contests, but he had been unable to make significant inroads with them.”

Those two paragraphs weren’t written in 2020. They were written for The Times by Patrick Healy and Yamiche Alcindor in April 2016. It should therefore be alarming AF to Team Sanders how superimposable one election misfire has been over another. Those graphs might as well have been written yesterday, presaging another Sanders surrender of the vote-rich lode of African Americans in the South — the most reliable bedrock of the Democratic electorate.

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Bernie Sanders, the champion of campaign transparency, refused to release the full medical records related to his October 2019 heart attack — a decision that screams for Sanders to justify in comparison to Trump’s refusal to release his tax records, which Sanders called for last year. “I think we have released a detailed medical report, and I’m comfortable on what we have done,” he told CNN in February, not long after it was revealed that Sanders hid the heart attack from the media for days, and waited until the end of 2019 to release testimonials from three doctors attesting to his overall condition.

In April 2019, Sanders, friend of the working class, announced his participation in the moneyed class — the 1 percent of Americans he spent months slagging on the campaign trail. It was there in his tax returns for 2018: Sanders and his wife Jane earned $561,293 in adjusted gross income, largely from money from book sales.

Their income exceeded $1 million in 2016 and 2017, again from book sales. It wouldn’t be so ... unfortunate if Sanders hadn’t spent so much time trashing “billionaires and millionaires” on the stump. It’s just another disconnect, another disjunction of message and messenger. So was his response to a reporter’s observation of his fresh millionaire status — typical Sanders, tone-deaf and headstrong: “I wrote a best-selling book. If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too."

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BUT YOU know what? Something else isn’t right and you can see what it is. It’s in his campaign appearances, in his mien at the debates and TV interviews, in the picture of himself that he shows the world. This is a man whose private aspect is at odds, maybe even at war, with his avowed aspirations.

He’s not incapable of showing upscale emotion. Anand Giridharadas of Time magazine reported: “Along our 6,000-mile journey, when Sanders came upon a voter in an airport or on a sidewalk and the situation demanded a smile, he gave the smile my 4-year-old gives when he knows that greeting our dinner guests nicely is the price of staying up.”

For much of the time he’s visible, though, the senator from Vermont doesn’t look like he’s having an especially good time running for president. He often presents to the American people the countenance of a curmudgeon. He looks unhappy, not just situationally unhappy, but foundationally sour and cross, the neighbor always telling people to get off his lawn, even when they’re walking on the sidewalk across the street.

Look at his face as he moves around in public; observe the tension there, his generally unsmiling demeanor, the tightness in his jaw muscles. More recently, coincident with his rise to frontrunner status, he smiles in some smartly-produced campaign ads. But over the long arc of the campaign, Bernie looks like he swallowed some bad beef at the holiday table and he’s doing all he can to not embarrass his guests by bringing it back up. He looks like he’s holding something in. It looks as if he’s holding something back.

He looks like he’s trying not to explode. He looks like he’s hiding something.

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MAYBE. The heart-attack secrecy was bad enough. And don't forget February, when Sanders revealed that he was told — weeks to months earlier — that Russia was working to support his campaign for the nomination, this as one component of the Russians’ wider attempts to interfere in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Why'd Sanders keep that a secret for so long?

There’s another basic kind of withholding going on. In his Time profile of Sanders, Giridharadas writes of a candidate willing to deflect attention, “a candidate who is himself so emotionally inaccessible, reluctant to share more than the barest glimpses of his own history and inner life. “Not me. Us.” is his 2020 campaign slogan, and he means it.”

And that’s a problem. As egalitarian as that three-word creed seeks to be, it lets Sanders skip out on the personal revelations that have a way of endearing a candidate to an electorate. Coming clean about who and what you are, not as a politician but as a human being with a family and a history, is one of the most nakedly honest decisions you can make in presidential politics.

Some, like Barack Obama, make that leap in stunning fashion, as anyone who’s read Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance already knows. Sanders, though, has worked hard to play down that very back story that could wed him to more than his Bernie Bro legions. It’s a kind of, uh, social distancing he can ill afford if his campaign plans to soldier on.

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The campaign’s been plagued with other missteps, the latest and most likely terminal of these on March 18. CNN reporter Manu Raju had the audacity to ask Sanders about his likelihood of dropping out of the race for the White House, given the back-to-back-to-back cratering of the campaign's delegate hopes. Sanders, no doubt expecting the question (or tired of answering it before), didn’t hold back.

“I’m dealing with a fucking global crisis,” Sanders said. “You know, we’re dealing with … Well right now, right now I’m trying to do my best to make sure that we don’t have an economic meltdown and that people don’t die. Is that enough for you to keep me busy for today?”

Statements like that don’t leave a lot to the imagination. You don’t have to be the most avid student of political science to make sense of a campaign in the midst of imminent collapse. Sanders is clearly navigating his own political meltdown; his frustration with Raju was just a distillation of what’s been brewing, what’s been coming, for weeks.

Because break down what Sanders said in that blast of rage. I’m dealing with a fucking global crisis. I’m trying to do my best to make sure that we don’t have an economic meltdown. This is Bernie Sanders as the center of his own universe, the source of gravity, in full messianic mode. This is Bernie as a legend in his own mind. Which is consistent with what detractors have been saying about him since 2016.

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IN THOSE comments, and others, Sanders exhibits nothing so much as a sense of entitlement, imparts the idea that he’s all but owed the nomination because he’s been after it the longest, he has the best ground game, the most passionate supporters, the most thoroughly articulated rationale for governing, the most money to keep going ... it’s a numbers-centered, metrics-based argument for his being granted the nomination by some kind of acclimation by exhaustion. A lot of the numbers that matter do line up for Sanders. Except those that are the pertinent currency right now. States. Primary victories. Voters. Delegates.

Ironically, the trouble with Bernie is he’s offering the American electorate too much of what it’s had since 2016. President* Trump has brandished that same sense of entitlement, that same my-way-or-the-highway approach to leadership that Sanders has shown, intentionally or not, since his campaign began. Like Trump, Sanders refuses to grow his church too, going out of his way to pick fights and cultivate enemies, and confuse mainstream America what it is (besides universal health care) he could possibly stand for.

Sanders’ earnestness can’t be contested; for years he’s been laser-focused on transforming health care and attaining the American presidency, and he’s been generally unwavering in his message and his methods. That single-mindedness is a trait Americans generally admire, and reward. But Sanders faces a singular challenge, one he has no answer for.  While much of his defining message is something Americans can buy into, his role as the messenger is at odds with the direction of the country, and the proven inclination of the voters still reckoning with the revolution we got in 2017, when Trump assumed the White House, waging war on competence and civility every day since.

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Sanders’ signature issue resonates with the public, but as an adjunct to what already exists — the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare — rather than its outright replacement. Sanders wants, of course, to make universal health care the law of the land. Achieving that has been his prime directive, both for the 2016 campaign and for this one. Public opinion be damned.

That could be problematic for the candidate: A Kaiser Family Foundation poll from Feb. 21 found that “more Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents would prefer voting for a candidate who wants to build on the ACA in order to expand coverage and reduce costs rather than replace the ACA with a national Medicare-for-all plan ...

“And while partisans are divided on a Medicare-for-all national health plan, there is robust support among Democrats, and even support among four in ten Republicans, for a government-run health plan” — aka the public option.

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THE RISE of former Obama vice president Joe Biden in the polls and (where it counts) in the delegate count hasn’t been a matter of exotic political levitation; there’s no Svengali behind Biden’s building momentum. Big Biden wins on serial Super Tuesdays this month were a matter of voters seeking and validating the familiar, something both grounded and grounding, at a time of relentless, unprecedented upheaval.

“Especially now with the coronavirus, with everybody terrified that President Trump is lying every minute of the day and they just need some normalcy and safety in their life, Biden is that loyal, comfortable politician,” Nebraska Democratic Party Chair Jane Kleeb, to The Hill.

What voters seem to be saying: “You say you want a revolution, Bernie? That’s curious. You don’t even pay proper homage to the revolutionaries who preceded you, at risk of their lives. Oh, except for your propers paid to Fidel Castro, which'll make you a big hit in south Florida. You want Medicare for All, which sounds great, but we shouldn’t have to get rid of Obamacare to do that. You say you want a revolution? Go head. That’s not where it’s at for us right now. No more frickin’ revolt, thanks. We’re full up here. Have been for three years.”

WITH A THIRD OF the country effectively locked down, the campaign of 2020 is suddenly a low-attention-span event, under accidental quarantine from greater public scrutiny. That shift in the political television landscape — one that’s probably a fact for the foreseeable future — changes the dynamic of the race, and underscores the increasing gravitational pull of the Biden campaign.

Politics goes on, of course, but it's still there, bubbling under the surface like never before. More than a dozen states have pushed back their primaries to allow for COVID-19-related uncertainty. At least three of those have opted for voting completely by mail. The postponement of several big primaries does put a damper on the combustible, man-the-ramparts urgency of Sanders’ stump-speech message. But at the end of the day, that's not his big challenge. He can’t get past a fact that hobbles his campaign’s future as surely as it’s hampered his campaign’s past:

For the millions of Americans who’ve already rejected him as the Democratic nominee — and maybe for the millions still to vote in the remaining primaries — the most revolutionary idea in the 2020 campaign is restoring the American democratic experiment to something closer to its original intent.

For those voters, the biggest revolution they can imagine is America running the way it should, on behalf of all its citizens, according to the Constitution that now and forever defines this nation to the world — more or less the way it was running before Jan. 20, 2017. For them, that’s revolution enough. And Bernie Sanders’ revolution couldn’t improve on that.

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Image credits: Sanders top: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters. Logo: From the Sanders campaign web site.  N.Y. Times nameplate: © 2020 The New York Times Company. Sanders #2: via The Hill. Super Tuesday state-by-state tally: Politico. Sanders angry: via The Palmer Report. Sanders voting results chart: Daily Kos. KFF logo: Kaiser Family Foundation. Biden: Reuters/MSNBC/NBC News.