In the summer of 2012, while visiting my brother-in-law in North Chittenden, Vermont, my husband and I attended a town-hall meeting in nearby Rutland led by a U.S. Senator. Almost no one back home in Virginia had heard of Bernie Sanders, but he’d represented Vermont in Congress for 20 years, the last 5 in the Senate. Bumper stickers around the state read, simply, “Bernie.” Yet even there, where he would soon coast to re-election with 71 percent of votes, perhaps no one – including Bernie himself -- may have yet dreamed of his becoming a presidential front-runner.
I was intrigued, and eager to see this popular socialist whom I had first heard of circa 1989. A native Vermonter with whom I worked, then, on a newspaper in Virginia had known Bernie. He recalled how, as Burlington’s mayor through the ‘80s, Bernie had won even local Republicans’ admiration for balancing the city budget.
That day in 2012, near the end of an un-Vermontish heat wave, about 200 people (including a small group demonstrating against a local mountaintop wind turbine) gathered for a picnic on the front lawn of Rutland Unitarian Universalist Church. Bernie arrived with one or two aides who distributed campaign stickers, but the event was a check-in with his constituency, not an election rally. As he mingled with a crowd that obviously knew him well, his coiffure (then as now) appeared somewhere between the shaggy brown, Central Casting radical look of his early photos and the impeccably-combed, thin grey of his official Senate portrait.
Robin (husband) and I shook his hand and he agreed to a picture with me. It was Robin’s first time to use the camera that he had given me the last Christmas. His uncertainty with the viewfinder, and reluctance to delay Bernie, led to a goofy result that I’ve kept as a memento and for ragging on him. It shows me with Bernie . . . except for his head. It does suggest Bernie is taller than he appears on TV, but misses his smile. (Robin has gained camera skills since then.)
The crowd soon filed inside. As Bernie spoke, I wrote down two quotes. There was this, which anyone following the current race has heard: “It’s not Congress that regulates Wall Street; it’s Wall Street that regulates Congress.” And this, less familiar: “I have believed all my life that this small state could lead the nation in a very different direction.”
Small and intimate, Vermont. (Once on a winter visit, when legislators were out for a holiday, a guard at the statehouse in Montpelier had recognized my sister-in-law and let us wander its semi-diminutive, Neo-classical hallways unchecked -- not a likely occurrence in either Washington or Richmond).
I wonder if the pundits hammering Bernie as “not pragmatic” ever listened to him on the job. His brief remarks encompassed much of what he’s saying now – a better safety net, including single-payer healthcare; higher minimum wages, reining in the big banks -- but he devoted more time to taking questions. Vermonters asked about highly specific issues involving social security, veterans’ benefits, schools. He listened attentively to each question, updated the status of each topic and suggested resources. Wonky stuff, and important. He clearly knew his way around.
One question led to a discussion of worker-owned co-operative businesses – a development Bernie has promoted legislatively. (Not your grandfather’s socialism, but a growing, cooperation/competition hybrid. There is a highly successful worker-owned restaurant a mile from our home.)
He invited those who spoke of ordeals such as getting referred back and forth between agencies to confer with him after the meeting. Several did.
If you Google Bernie, you’re likely to find “curmudgeon.” He’s gotten curmudgeonly enough in debates and interviews, but the trait was absent that day in Rutland. He even listened, noncommittally but attentively, to the anti-wind turbine delegation before pointing out that the issue was out of his bailiwick and suggesting relevant contacts.
Now I want to share some worries and hopes:
The “socialist” stigma vs. the enthusiasm gap. Pundit Dana Milbank, who “adores” Bernie but says Democrats would be “insane” to nominate him, thinks no avowed, however democratic, socialist could win. It’s a concern: Americans my age, Bernie’s age and above (a large voting bloc) seem especially vulnerable to Cold War-era, knee-jerk horror of that label. Yet Bernie leads Hillary Clinton in the party’s “enthusiasm gap” – and enthusiasm drives turnout.
Bernie is not yet well-known among African American and Latino voters … unlike either the Clintons, who have courted them for decades, or leading GOP candidates, who have alienated them. He’s a no-nonsense, not an “I feel your pain” kind of guy, but his connection to immigrants and those who are marginalized runs deep. Growing up in Brooklyn among Polish Jewish immigrants (with a father who lost most of his family to the Holocaust), Bernie heard early about the 1932 election of Hitler and its consequences: “What I learned as a little kid is that politics is, in fact, very important.”
The Congress we have would hardly enact his vision. (Single-payer? Elimination of for-profit health insurance? We wish!) Eight years ago we enthusiastically elected another visionary candidate, Barack Obama, but many liberals soon seemed ready to throw him under a bus when they saw he was neither walking on water nor winning over the Congressional Republicans. Yet his accomplishments have been considerable, as Bernie’s would be. Bernie’s challenge is to keep fanning the enthusiasm while letting voters know realistically what can be done, our own responsibility for getting it done, and the need for election reform (on which he offers a strong agenda).
Media coverage does not promote intelligent politics. (Duh!) Bernie (like Obama, at times) appears too impatient with silly questions and gotcha’s to bother with debunking them. He may need to answer, more explicitly than he has, the Clinton charge that he would eliminate the hard-won Affordable Care Act, leaving 12 million once again uninsured in hopes of replacing it with single-payer. He may be grilled as to what “means of production” he might nationalize, as per the dictionary definition of “socialism.” I hope voters learn from Bernie that his “democratic socialism” encompasses bounties they take for granted such as public schools, Medicare, non-toll roads, police protection.
He is starting to be questioned about “faith,” that amorphous commodity which today’s climate encourages hypocritical demagogues to wrap themselves in. I’m old-school in seeing religion as personal, not political, but hear Bernie answering such questions stunningly well, citing the universality of the Golden Rule and testifying, “What my spirituality is about, is that we’re all in this together.”
Whatever happens, we need to support the Democratic nominee. Bernie has vowed “I will not be a spoiler” and help elect a right-wing Republican. Progressives can neither sit this election out nor forget 2000’s Bush v. Gore v. Nader debacle. The stakes are too high.
But however it goes, I am delighted Bernie’s message is resonating.