[ed. From June, 2019; and now we know the answer. Thanks, Bernie for staying true to yourself and your ideals.]
Bernie Sanders wants to make a joke. Pretty good joke, he thinks. He is slumped in a window seat in coach on a plane parked at Chicago O’Hare. He has about an hour in transit to get the joke into his next speech. Before deplaning, he pulls his hair forward, but only on the left, the side one may call Bernie, as opposed to the more combed right hemisphere—Senator Sanders. Off the plane. The selfie requests start. O.K., but quickly. O.K., why not, sure. Ooh, was that a Macaroni Grill? Anyone want to go in on a pizza with him? Sausage pizza, O.K. Then selfies with the kitchen staff. Good people. Hardworking people. His people.
His speech for tonight is ready, but Sanders wants to scrap the planned opening for his pretty good joke. Does Terrel—Terrel Champion, his body man, who has mastered the art of knowing when to talk to the Senator and when to leave him be—have the printer? Of course. Last-minute checks about tonight. RSVPs? Good shape—better than early 2015, when barely anyone knew him. A woman at the gate wants a selfie, but Sanders is fixated on the printout of the joke. “Onnnnnnnnne minuuuuuute,” he barks. He loves The People. People can be trickier.
The junior Senator from Vermont flies over the country he aspires to govern, with its crop circles and caterpillar-shaped suburbs and community pools and rail yards full of shipping containers. Soon his silver SUV is rolling through Davenport, Iowa, past a brick building with a sign for German mustard and a soon-to-open hookah bar. The election is a year and a half out, but the crowd at the venue is feverish. Men in boots just off shifts. Young people who may or may not work in the gig economy and listen to the podcast Chapo Trap House. A woman in a purple nurse’s uniform. Beefy guys in trompe l’oeil camo.
He takes the stage and tosses off his blazer. He is taller in real life than on television, though he shrinks by stooping. His cuffs aren’t carefully folded once or twice à la Farm State Casual, but rather jammed up his forearm. “Before I get into my remarks here in Davenport,” he begins, “I did want to make a few comments.” But now, instead of just launching the joke he worked so hard to print out, he first warns them about it. “I wanted to tell you—I’m being funny here, so don’t get excited—that I was a little bit apprehensive about coming back to Iowa.” He reminds them how President Trump had falsely linked wind turbines, which are ubiquitous in Iowa, to cancer. “So I was sitting here wondering,” he says, “if I come to Iowa, am I and my staff going to get cancer?”
Running for President is like doing stand-up. You try bits, see what sticks. The room liked it, so the next morning the joke resurfaces in Muscatine, again with a warning, because Sanders, who can be funny unintentionally, is making an effort at some of the performative aspects of politics he has long sneered at. “I told a funny joke yesterday,” he says to the audience, adding: “I try. I don’t have the world’s greatest sense of humor.” Several hours later, in Fairfield, he tries again. It takes another day for Sanders to offer the joke without advance notice.
On the way out of Oskaloosa, wind turbines appear. A viral video opportunity. The SUV carrying Sanders, the staff van and the luggage-bearing minivan all swerve to the side of US 63. Sanders, with a few aides, prepares to cross the two-lane highway. “Be careful!” he yells. It’s the kind of Old World, survivalist caring Sanders is capable of in public: Don’t die; Have you eaten?; Remember your luggage; Don’t leave your charger.
Now the Senator, 77, stands before the wind farm in his gold-buttoned blazer and slacks, looking like a traveling Rotary Club speaker, facing a cameraman in yellow skinny jeans who looks young enough to be his grandson. He improvises, theatrically throwing his hands over his ears, as if protecting himself from the allegedly carcinogenic turbine sound. “Oooohh, that noise,” he cries. “Can’t think.” He takes his hands down. “Just kidding. No noise.” He moves into a more serious riff. The opener is funny, but his video team finds it gimmicky. So they cut it.
Sanders first ran for office in 1972, campaigning for an open Vermont Senate seat on the Liberty Union Party ticket. He lost, attracting 2% of the vote. One of his opponents was a Democratic state representative named Randolph Major. As Sanders recalls in a memoir, Major invented a “brilliant publicity gimmick”: skiing around the state to meet voters. Sanders later complained, “Here I was, giving long-winded statements to a bored media about the major problems facing humanity, and the TV cameras were literally focused on Randy’s blisters.” Sanders was 31. He was, even as a young man, an old man.
Now, nearly a half-century later, he is an old man who enraptures the young. The Senator who once rejected gimmicks and complained “modern American politics is about image and technique” now scripts jokes and asks after his Twitter likes. He is pretty much the same man he has always been, but he is determined to take advantage of being one of the more improbable top-tier presidential contenders in American history.
When Sanders ran for President in 2016, it was because he felt important ideas were unrepresented. Many of his positions were dismissed as radical, vague, wide-eyed. Yet as the 2020 race gathers intensity, much of the Sanders program has become de rigueur for progressive and centrist Democrats alike: single-payer health care, massively subsidized college education, a $15 minimum wage, a federal jobs program. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey supports some form of Medicare for All. Former Vice President Joe Biden recently embraced a $15 minimum wage. The idea of federally provided jobs, evocative of the New Deal, has gone from being a far-out Sanders talking point to an idea that has more moderate adherents like Senators Kamala Harris of California and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York.
During eight days on the campaign trail with Sanders this spring, I heard one refrain as much as any other: a “funny thing had happened” since 2016, and Sanders’ ideas were no longer “radical.” “Brothers and sisters, we should be enormously proud that we have come a long way in transforming politics in America over the last four years,” he told a crowd one sunny April afternoon in Warren, Mich.
Sanders has changed the debate in great measure because he has never really changed himself. His consistency is the selling point—his mantras against billionaires stealing the American Dream, the system being rigged, working people needing to form a movement to take power back. And yet he is now running against nearly two dozen competitors, many of whom have chipped away at his distinctiveness by emulating his stances, and just being Bernie may not get the job done. (...)
The woke primary is a challenge for Sanders. In part because he is an old-style leftist whose overriding lens is class, not identity. In part because woke culture often craves the kind of gesturemaking to which he’s allergic. And in part because Sanders seems to struggle with the expectation that a 77-year-old white guy needs to learn, evolve and prove that he “gets it,” even if he was at Dr. King’s march.
The 2016 campaign left a residue of doubt about Sanders’ ability to navigate both ends of I-94. Critics complained that his signature campaign advertisement, set to Simon and Garfunkel’s “America,” featured overwhelmingly white faces. His campaign leadership was “too white, too male,” as Sanders himself has put it. There was the time in 2015 when Black Lives Matter activists, unsatisfied with Sanders’ responses to the problem of police violence against African Americans, interrupted a town hall at which Sanders was speaking. “Shall I continue or leave?” Sanders asked. “I’ve spent 50 years of my life fighting for civil rights and for dignity,” Sanders added, turning toward the protesters. “But if you don’t want me to be here, that’s O.K.” (...)
But what makes Sanders an awkward fit with the woke era goes deeper than missteps. He is philosophically committed to a view of the world that can sometimes conflict with the expectations of 2019 identity politics. As a democratic socialist, he sees economic inequality as the paramount issue in American life—and racism and other injustices as derivative of it. When asked, for example, about the 2015 death of Freddie Gray after being taken into custody by Baltimore police officers, Sanders talked about the “short-term” fix of police reform, before suggesting that the “long-term” solution was better employment opportunities to get young African Americans off the streets—which isn’t necessarily a fix given that police have also gunned down unarmed black men in their cars and backyards. (...)
He made his message mainstream enough to win 22 states, pulling Clinton to the left in the process. He helped change the conversation about capitalism and how it relates to that other great national institution, democracy. He inspired many young activists who worked for his campaign in 2016 to run for office—including an organizer who is now Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Yet those years of shouting, feeling unheard, being unheard, left scars. And belated validation can rewrite, or reinforce, habits bred by marginalization: It can inspire magnanimity and outreach—or harden a feeling that you were always right and most others wrong or corrupt. It can foster growth—or justify a refusal to evolve, because what got you where you are is consistency. It can make you feel safe—or justify a siege mentality, because the higher you rise, the harder They are going to work to stop you.
What will it be for Sanders? Can he seize upon the moment he created? Can the warrior for justice learn to be open, adaptive and human in ways that give his message a wider airing? Even in this late season of his life, Sanders has a choice about which version of himself he wants to present to the American voting public, and what he is willing to let himself become.
I keep thinking of a moment in Las Vegas that made me realize we don’t know the answer yet. We had just landed at the airport. We headed for the SUV that would take us to the Paris hotel and casino. But there was a mishap: the local organizers hadn’t known I was joining. When we found the SUV, we realized we were one seat short. Sanders’ aides, in a hurry, looked at me like, “Bye, dude.”
Sanders, who had been preoccupied with luggage, now caught wind of the issue. And I watched it come over him: a transfixing, physical sense of righteousness. It wasn’t about logistics; it was about justice. At that point, he had spoken to me just once in any real way in days of traveling together. He had no interest in me in the normal ways. Oh, you live in Brooklyn? I used to live in Brooklyn. What part? But the prospect of my exclusion bothered him. Even as I said I was fine, he asked if there was any way to squeeze me in. Checked the back row. Maybe I could put a suitcase beside him, between the seats, and sit on top. But something had to be done, because to him it just was not right. And in that moment Sanders became a little clearer to me: He isn’t the person you want sitting beside you on a long boat ride, passing time. He’s the person who will notice when you fall overboard and begin to drown.
by Anand Giridharadas, Time | Read more:
Image: David Brandon Geeting
Bernie Sanders wants to make a joke. Pretty good joke, he thinks. He is slumped in a window seat in coach on a plane parked at Chicago O’Hare. He has about an hour in transit to get the joke into his next speech. Before deplaning, he pulls his hair forward, but only on the left, the side one may call Bernie, as opposed to the more combed right hemisphere—Senator Sanders. Off the plane. The selfie requests start. O.K., but quickly. O.K., why not, sure. Ooh, was that a Macaroni Grill? Anyone want to go in on a pizza with him? Sausage pizza, O.K. Then selfies with the kitchen staff. Good people. Hardworking people. His people.
His speech for tonight is ready, but Sanders wants to scrap the planned opening for his pretty good joke. Does Terrel—Terrel Champion, his body man, who has mastered the art of knowing when to talk to the Senator and when to leave him be—have the printer? Of course. Last-minute checks about tonight. RSVPs? Good shape—better than early 2015, when barely anyone knew him. A woman at the gate wants a selfie, but Sanders is fixated on the printout of the joke. “Onnnnnnnnne minuuuuuute,” he barks. He loves The People. People can be trickier.
The junior Senator from Vermont flies over the country he aspires to govern, with its crop circles and caterpillar-shaped suburbs and community pools and rail yards full of shipping containers. Soon his silver SUV is rolling through Davenport, Iowa, past a brick building with a sign for German mustard and a soon-to-open hookah bar. The election is a year and a half out, but the crowd at the venue is feverish. Men in boots just off shifts. Young people who may or may not work in the gig economy and listen to the podcast Chapo Trap House. A woman in a purple nurse’s uniform. Beefy guys in trompe l’oeil camo.He takes the stage and tosses off his blazer. He is taller in real life than on television, though he shrinks by stooping. His cuffs aren’t carefully folded once or twice à la Farm State Casual, but rather jammed up his forearm. “Before I get into my remarks here in Davenport,” he begins, “I did want to make a few comments.” But now, instead of just launching the joke he worked so hard to print out, he first warns them about it. “I wanted to tell you—I’m being funny here, so don’t get excited—that I was a little bit apprehensive about coming back to Iowa.” He reminds them how President Trump had falsely linked wind turbines, which are ubiquitous in Iowa, to cancer. “So I was sitting here wondering,” he says, “if I come to Iowa, am I and my staff going to get cancer?”
Running for President is like doing stand-up. You try bits, see what sticks. The room liked it, so the next morning the joke resurfaces in Muscatine, again with a warning, because Sanders, who can be funny unintentionally, is making an effort at some of the performative aspects of politics he has long sneered at. “I told a funny joke yesterday,” he says to the audience, adding: “I try. I don’t have the world’s greatest sense of humor.” Several hours later, in Fairfield, he tries again. It takes another day for Sanders to offer the joke without advance notice.
On the way out of Oskaloosa, wind turbines appear. A viral video opportunity. The SUV carrying Sanders, the staff van and the luggage-bearing minivan all swerve to the side of US 63. Sanders, with a few aides, prepares to cross the two-lane highway. “Be careful!” he yells. It’s the kind of Old World, survivalist caring Sanders is capable of in public: Don’t die; Have you eaten?; Remember your luggage; Don’t leave your charger.
Now the Senator, 77, stands before the wind farm in his gold-buttoned blazer and slacks, looking like a traveling Rotary Club speaker, facing a cameraman in yellow skinny jeans who looks young enough to be his grandson. He improvises, theatrically throwing his hands over his ears, as if protecting himself from the allegedly carcinogenic turbine sound. “Oooohh, that noise,” he cries. “Can’t think.” He takes his hands down. “Just kidding. No noise.” He moves into a more serious riff. The opener is funny, but his video team finds it gimmicky. So they cut it.
Sanders first ran for office in 1972, campaigning for an open Vermont Senate seat on the Liberty Union Party ticket. He lost, attracting 2% of the vote. One of his opponents was a Democratic state representative named Randolph Major. As Sanders recalls in a memoir, Major invented a “brilliant publicity gimmick”: skiing around the state to meet voters. Sanders later complained, “Here I was, giving long-winded statements to a bored media about the major problems facing humanity, and the TV cameras were literally focused on Randy’s blisters.” Sanders was 31. He was, even as a young man, an old man.
Now, nearly a half-century later, he is an old man who enraptures the young. The Senator who once rejected gimmicks and complained “modern American politics is about image and technique” now scripts jokes and asks after his Twitter likes. He is pretty much the same man he has always been, but he is determined to take advantage of being one of the more improbable top-tier presidential contenders in American history.
When Sanders ran for President in 2016, it was because he felt important ideas were unrepresented. Many of his positions were dismissed as radical, vague, wide-eyed. Yet as the 2020 race gathers intensity, much of the Sanders program has become de rigueur for progressive and centrist Democrats alike: single-payer health care, massively subsidized college education, a $15 minimum wage, a federal jobs program. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey supports some form of Medicare for All. Former Vice President Joe Biden recently embraced a $15 minimum wage. The idea of federally provided jobs, evocative of the New Deal, has gone from being a far-out Sanders talking point to an idea that has more moderate adherents like Senators Kamala Harris of California and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York.
During eight days on the campaign trail with Sanders this spring, I heard one refrain as much as any other: a “funny thing had happened” since 2016, and Sanders’ ideas were no longer “radical.” “Brothers and sisters, we should be enormously proud that we have come a long way in transforming politics in America over the last four years,” he told a crowd one sunny April afternoon in Warren, Mich.
Sanders has changed the debate in great measure because he has never really changed himself. His consistency is the selling point—his mantras against billionaires stealing the American Dream, the system being rigged, working people needing to form a movement to take power back. And yet he is now running against nearly two dozen competitors, many of whom have chipped away at his distinctiveness by emulating his stances, and just being Bernie may not get the job done. (...)
The woke primary is a challenge for Sanders. In part because he is an old-style leftist whose overriding lens is class, not identity. In part because woke culture often craves the kind of gesturemaking to which he’s allergic. And in part because Sanders seems to struggle with the expectation that a 77-year-old white guy needs to learn, evolve and prove that he “gets it,” even if he was at Dr. King’s march.
The 2016 campaign left a residue of doubt about Sanders’ ability to navigate both ends of I-94. Critics complained that his signature campaign advertisement, set to Simon and Garfunkel’s “America,” featured overwhelmingly white faces. His campaign leadership was “too white, too male,” as Sanders himself has put it. There was the time in 2015 when Black Lives Matter activists, unsatisfied with Sanders’ responses to the problem of police violence against African Americans, interrupted a town hall at which Sanders was speaking. “Shall I continue or leave?” Sanders asked. “I’ve spent 50 years of my life fighting for civil rights and for dignity,” Sanders added, turning toward the protesters. “But if you don’t want me to be here, that’s O.K.” (...)
But what makes Sanders an awkward fit with the woke era goes deeper than missteps. He is philosophically committed to a view of the world that can sometimes conflict with the expectations of 2019 identity politics. As a democratic socialist, he sees economic inequality as the paramount issue in American life—and racism and other injustices as derivative of it. When asked, for example, about the 2015 death of Freddie Gray after being taken into custody by Baltimore police officers, Sanders talked about the “short-term” fix of police reform, before suggesting that the “long-term” solution was better employment opportunities to get young African Americans off the streets—which isn’t necessarily a fix given that police have also gunned down unarmed black men in their cars and backyards. (...)
He made his message mainstream enough to win 22 states, pulling Clinton to the left in the process. He helped change the conversation about capitalism and how it relates to that other great national institution, democracy. He inspired many young activists who worked for his campaign in 2016 to run for office—including an organizer who is now Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Yet those years of shouting, feeling unheard, being unheard, left scars. And belated validation can rewrite, or reinforce, habits bred by marginalization: It can inspire magnanimity and outreach—or harden a feeling that you were always right and most others wrong or corrupt. It can foster growth—or justify a refusal to evolve, because what got you where you are is consistency. It can make you feel safe—or justify a siege mentality, because the higher you rise, the harder They are going to work to stop you.
What will it be for Sanders? Can he seize upon the moment he created? Can the warrior for justice learn to be open, adaptive and human in ways that give his message a wider airing? Even in this late season of his life, Sanders has a choice about which version of himself he wants to present to the American voting public, and what he is willing to let himself become.
I keep thinking of a moment in Las Vegas that made me realize we don’t know the answer yet. We had just landed at the airport. We headed for the SUV that would take us to the Paris hotel and casino. But there was a mishap: the local organizers hadn’t known I was joining. When we found the SUV, we realized we were one seat short. Sanders’ aides, in a hurry, looked at me like, “Bye, dude.”
Sanders, who had been preoccupied with luggage, now caught wind of the issue. And I watched it come over him: a transfixing, physical sense of righteousness. It wasn’t about logistics; it was about justice. At that point, he had spoken to me just once in any real way in days of traveling together. He had no interest in me in the normal ways. Oh, you live in Brooklyn? I used to live in Brooklyn. What part? But the prospect of my exclusion bothered him. Even as I said I was fine, he asked if there was any way to squeeze me in. Checked the back row. Maybe I could put a suitcase beside him, between the seats, and sit on top. But something had to be done, because to him it just was not right. And in that moment Sanders became a little clearer to me: He isn’t the person you want sitting beside you on a long boat ride, passing time. He’s the person who will notice when you fall overboard and begin to drown.
by Anand Giridharadas, Time | Read more:
Image: David Brandon Geeting
