GELFAND’S WORLD-Bernie. When a first name is all that's required for masses of people to recognize you, you've come a long way. Right now, Bernie Sanders is one of those first-namers, along with Hillary and The Donald. Besides those three, it's hard to find another in either party. Anybody remember what Sen. Cruz's first name is? How about the former mayor of Baltimore?
What is truly surprising about the Bernie movement is its explosive development. When a new candidate draws crowds of greater than 20,000 less than 5 months after announcing his run, you have to think that something's happening.
What's it all mean? I suspect that at the campaign level, it signifies that Hillary is in a little bit of trouble. Not all that much as yet, but some. And there is one more side to the explanation that may signify a political swerve.
I think that on a deeper level, it signifies that liberalism is no longer a negative term. This is true for a substantial group of people who may call themselves progressives or moderate liberals, but are at least as numerous as the right wing conservative movement. You can tell because Sanders pushes unreservedly liberal positions without apology, and 20,000 people cheer him on, city after city. In short, people are willing to speak out about liberalism and shout their support when a candidate espouses particularly liberal positions.
It's a switch. People have been circumspect about liberalism since Ronald Reagan turned the word into a pejorative. Maybe the pendulum is swinging back.
But why Bernie Sanders at this point? Hillary is, after all, fairly liberal herself.
I suspect that it is as simple as this: Bernie is recognized as the real thing. He has been liberal in his views for as long as he has been in public life. He has been outspoken on the dangers of wealth concentration, and publicly takes credit for participating in the creation of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.
What that means to his frustrated public is that Bernie Sanders can be counted on to avoid compromising away his principles in the unlikely event that he is elected president.
Kevin Drum, a serious thinker, is not impressed by the Bernie upsurge. He points out that we always have the "anybody but" movement whenever there is a strong frontrunner in a contested election. In Bernie, we are seeing the expression of the "anybody but Hillary" position. Drum points out that these movements don't usually prevail. You might paraphrase Drum's remarks as the idea that these movements are utterly predictable, and that they have a short shelf life.
I wonder.
For sure, there is a certain amount of Hillary fatigue out there, but it's not just boredom. I find it remarkable how many liberals simply don't trust Clinton. In the most obvious way, she is not the real thing in the way that Sanders is the real thing. She has been politicking and compromising her whole career.
Worse yet, at a level that may be unfair but goes deep, people recognize that she traded away her chance to make a public repudiation of Bill's philandering. A lot of people believe that she did so in order to maintain her own power and influence. Her failure to act seemed kind of inhuman at the time. I don't think that people get past the level of distrust that this kind of inaction provokes.
Bill was out hiking the Appalachian Trail, as the old joke goes, and Hillary simply distanced herself from the problem. Voters now infer that the expression you see on her face does not necessarily represent what she is feeling. It's a short step to thinking of her as two-faced. It may be unfair to blame the victim in this way, but it's definitely a factor.
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But the Bernie phenomenon goes way beyond simple Hillary fatigue. The traditional "anybody but Hillary" movement would be looking around among a collection of lesser known mediocrities for one person who could be groomed to take over the lead. The Bernie phenomenon is very different, as he is anything but a mediocrity. He has come from seemingly nowhere, but not as an anti-Hillary candidate.
For all his traditional negatives (more on that below), Bernie Sanders is developing the kind of grass roots enthusiasm that other candidates secretly yearn for and almost never get. There was something of the Bernie enthusiasm when Obama ran for his first term, but I don't recall Obama filling a place like the Sports Arena this early in the going.
For insight into how Bernie filled the Sports Arena, there is an article in Politico that explains. The explanation is that the Sanders campaign simply puts the word out to its self-expressed followers, and they do the rest. Each time this happens, the campaign enlists more followers, and the next cycle begins.
The other political force that I suspect is in play is the continuing fatigue over economic uncertainty. We've had growth under Obama in spite of the way the Bush crew broke the economy, but it has been mild growth at best. Working class voters recognize that they are falling behind, even as the term billionaire becomes more and more prevalent. Those who read the news even a little are deluged with stories about the biggest banks and the biggest CEO bonuses. The voters recognize that the Republican Party as it currently exists is unabashedly in favor of the system being continued.
The Bernie Sanders political platform--I think that if you look at Sanders' website, you will find a collection of positions that are traditionally liberal, and well within the confines of traditional Democratic Party thought. He wants to control the financial institutions, but Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, made a name for himself as a trust buster. The times are different. The feeling isn't.
Bernie wants to see a country in which health care is universal. So do I, as do millions of others. I seem to recall that this idea goes back to the days of the Truman presidency.
Bernie wants to extend the ability to go to college to the middle class and the poor. Curious, but California had just such a system until Gov. Ronald Reagan started demanding that the universities charge tuition. Prior to that, you could go to UCLA for $60 a semester. Bernie, Hillary, and the president are pretty much on the same page on this one.
In other words, Bernie Sanders represents political views that have been around for quite a while. His opponents will eventually try to tar him as a radical socialist. How he reacts when that flurry commences may decide how he fares in the later running.
Political pundits use words like honeymoon to describe the experience Bernie Sanders is enjoying at the moment. Honeymoon's don't last, because there is always something about the candidate that you don't learn at first. Now that Sanders is the phenom, we can expect the second phase, in which everything Bernie did in his youth will be brought back and paraded before our weary eyes.
Here's one example of a Bernie story that was run by the liberal magazine Mother Jones. Sanders wrote about speaking honestly to teenagers about sex, and seems to have taken a fling at writing about fluoridation of water supplies. As soon as the right wing begins to take note of Sanders' rise, they will open up on him with guns blazing. His membership in a socialist club in college will play hour after hour on talk radio and on Fox television for the rest of the campaign.
The fact that Sanders, like everyone else, has baggage is one reason that the "anyone but" campaigns tend to have short lives. Perhaps Bernie will get past it, enduring the hazing the same way Obama and George W. Bush both survived stories of their youthful indulgences in drugs and alcohol.
There's one more observation that is a bit subtle, but worth bringing up. I'm going to provide you links to the web page of Martin O'Malley and then to the web page of Bernie Sanders. By the way, O'Malley is that former mayor of Baltimore I mentioned above. O'Malley's web page is an example of how not to do a political campaign.
(You can skip the next paragraph if you like, because it explains how boring the O'Malley approach is.)
O'Malley's web page is fashionably red, white and blue, rather similar to Sanders' actually. But that's as far as the similarity goes. When you look at the O'Malley website, you get "Rebuild the American Dream." Then you get "Read my 15 goals to rebuild the American Dream." It's dull, put together in the laundry list style of political platform building. O'Malley has more ideas, mostly good, but I think you get the idea that this reads more like a corporate strategic plan than an appeal to average voters.
Now take a look at Bernie's page and see the difference. It's the same red, white, and blue, but the attitude is different. In brief, Sanders has attitude. He uses the word revolution, as in "Ready to start a political revolution?" Instead of the laundry list, Sanders invites people to "attend events, share with friends, and volunteer for Bernie." These are the proposals of a candidate who knows that he already has a following. All he has to do is mobilize them. Bernie is in a different planetary system.
There is one other thing that these Sanders crowds show. Hillary is now less able to run on the basis of inevitability.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 13 Issue 68
Pub: Aug 21, 2015
