Bernie Can Beat Trump-- Or The Establishment Can Shove Another Status Quo Candidate Into The Nomination And Guarantee Trump A Second Term

Last night at this time, we took a quick look at the incipient 2020 Bernie presidential campaign. Let's do it again tonight. This time it's based on the extensive interviews in New York Magazine that Gabe Debenedetti did with Bernie last month and that are in the new issue of the magazine. Progressive activists are starting to pack their snow shoes and heaviest winter wear for trips to Vermont this week. Bernie's wife, Jane, has been busy organizing a conclave for the Sanders Institute that starts Thursday in Burlington. And Bernie will be there. His book, Where We Go From Here, comes out tomorrow. Early this month Donna Brazile's book, Hacks, strongly implied that top level Clinton campaign staffers-- not just Wasserman Schultz, but campaign manager Robbie Mook as well as Amy Dacey and Marc Elias too-- conspired to prevent Bernie from getting the nomination and giving it to the catastrophic Clinton, in effect, giving the U.S. Trump. The corrupt, self-serving party establishment refused to pay attention to what the American people wanted in 2016. Will they listen this time?

Debenedetti wrote that Bernie still thinks he should be president. "He doesn’t say this out loud, exactly. 'I’m not one of those sons of multimillionaires whose parents told them they were going to become president of the United States,' he says. 'I don’t wake up in the morning with any burning desire that I have to be president.' Still, he’s pretty certain he’s already the country’s second-most-important politician, and the logic for running in 2020 is obvious to him: His ideas are the best for the country, a majority of Americans will agree once they’re exposed to them, no other national politician has proved to be as uncompromised or effective a messenger of his platform as he is, and no one else seems better positioned to actually win. 'If there’s somebody else who appears who can, for whatever reason, do a better job than me, I’ll work my ass off to elect him or her,' he says. But 'if it turns out that I am the best candidate to beat Donald Trump, then I will probably run.' He’s been mulling the question all year as he bounds across the country... He is now the dean of the American left-- the incumbent leader, as it were, of the most energized segment of the national electorate-- and everyone is watching to see how he spends the substantial political capital he has, over a four-decade career, recently accumulated."

One week before Trump’s inauguration, Sanders was steaming. He’d returned to Washington to fight, but he found his colleagues unable to internalize what went wrong. When 13 Senate Democrats nixed a measure to decrease drug prices through Canadian imports, he vented to USA Today that they didn’t have “the guts” to do the right thing, promising they’d hear from him. Behind the closed doors of the Democratic caucus, the backlash from his colleagues was swift. Four of the senators who’d crossed Sanders were centrists up for reelection in states Trump had just won. They already faced pressure from their right; none could afford for Sanders to train his large and energized audience against them. For the first time, he scared them-- and this was new to him, too. The prospect of exerting this kind of power opened up new possibilities of influence but also potential pitfalls. Sanders backed down and retreated to his third-floor Senate office to iron out with advisers what, exactly, his new role should look like.

His first step was agreeing to be more of a team player in the Senate, which meant building relationships with powerful party members. He had already accepted Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s invitation to join the Senate leadership team. He also hired Ari Rabin-Havt, a former senior aide to Reid, and they quickly found an opportunity to persuade his colleagues to hear him out: working to protect Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act. Sanders had never made any secret of his dissatisfaction with the law or his preference for a single-payer health-care system. But he saw health care as the defining fight of Trump’s term and pitched Schumer on helping organize rallies that winter. He spent much of the first half of 2017 traveling to states represented by key Republican senators to rile up voters around saving the ACA.

...It’s this audience, and the pressure it can exert, that Sanders often credits with pulling his party toward him on specific issues. “Not only Hillary Clinton, not only the Establishment media, not only every op-ed writer in America-- they said, ‘Bernie Sanders is crazy, these ideas are extreme, they’re fringe, nobody believes in it, this is not what America is supposed to be about,’ ” he tells me, pounding his index finger on the table as he talks about the presidential-announcement speech he gave in May 2015. Now, “virtually every one of the issues that I talked about”-- he lists basically his full campaign platform-- “today are mainstream, and today are supported by, in many cases, a vast majority of the American people.” He advocated curtailing the influence of superdelegates in the party’s presidential-nominating process, a change that was codified in August. And he succeeded in bending the national conversation around health care not just away from repealing Obamacare but in the direction of Medicare for All. After the first serious Republican attempt to repeal the ACA was defeated in July 2017, he started wooing colleagues to his own measure, which for years had been widely regarded within the party as unrealistically ambitious, not to mention a rebuke of Obama. He also played his outside game: One video of a Canadian doctor explaining her country’s health-care system earned more than 30 million views on Sanders’s Facebook page. When Sanders introduced his measure in the Senate that September, 16 Democrats co-sponsored it, including Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren.

None of which is to say that Sanders, still an Independent, and the Democratic Establishment have altered their opinions of each other much. His advisers believe the party still doesn’t appreciate how respectfully he treated Clinton-- he never brought up her emails!-- or how useful he was in energizing young voters after the primaries. Clinton loyalists find this analysis laughable to the point of offensiveness. In Washington, there’s still no shortage of Sanders critics within the party, people who see him as a cranky narcissist with a victim complex, or an old, out-of-touch white man with few legislative accomplishments, or someone deluded into thinking his success has to do with anything other than being the alternative to Clinton. Even some activists sympathetic to Sanders see him exercising his political muscle on the health-care and tax debates and wish he’d play a bigger role in the party’s thorniest fights-- over Trump’s Muslim ban or the Dream Act, for example. “He’s never been totally comfortable being full-throated in his opposition to Trump, although he does all of it,” one of his Senate colleagues tells me. “He’s more comfortable making Democrats uncomfortable.” This line of argument drives Sanders crazy.

...Sanders’s advisers admit that his path to the Democratic nomination mirrors Trump’s in 2016. Facing what’s likely to be a historically large field, he’s been told, Sanders could start with his most loyal supporters from last time and go for a tight plurality victory in Iowa’s caucuses, followed by a slightly bigger one in New Hampshire’s primary. From there, advisers hope, his numbers could grow as the field dwindles. “There’s a 25 percent base of the party that isn’t going anywhere, and I think 25 percent, in a ten-person primary, is very formidable,” says a former adviser. But everyone recognizes that the strategy is tough-- “It is the only thing you can tell yourself and draw a plausible route to the nomination,” says David Axelrod, Obama’s political architect-- and everything will depend on who emerges as considerable rivals and how they chip away at his base of support. In January, Sanders’s team reviewed the potential field with him, lingering on the possibility of Warren and Biden entering the race. (An October CNN survey showed Biden 20 points ahead of Sanders across the country, though other polls show a smaller margin.) Sanders made clear that he was also wary of Booker, whom he regards as a potent messenger. In the months since, his aides have kept close tabs on the maneuvers of a wide range of potential candidates, questioning whether Warren intends to run as, in the words of multiple Sanders allies, “Bernie-light” and smiling at the prospect of a matchup against Michael Bloomberg.

Yesterday, Bernie was a guest on Face the Nation and when Margaret Brennan asked him about his call to the House Democrats to launch a kind of new contract with America that includes many of the most popular aspects of what he talks about to audiences around the country, he explained that it's a legislative agenda, not a campaign platform. "This," he said, "is what the American people want. And we should do it. They want to raise the minimum wage to a living wage, which I think is 15 bucks an hour. They want pay equity for women. Poll after poll shows that the American people understand that our current dysfunctional health care system needs fundamental change and that means Medicare for all-- single payer system. The American people understand that in a highly competitive global economy we have got to make public colleges and universities tuition free. We have got to deal with climate change as we just discussed. We have got to deal with a broken criminal justice system with immigration reform. All of these issues are, in fact, what the American people want. And the question is whether Congress has the guts to stand up to the big money interests who want more tax breaks for the rich, who want to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Or we stand up for the shrinking middle class and we demand a government that represents all of us. And legislation which represents the working families of this country."

Isn't that what prospective candidates should be talking about-- not to mention the TV and radio talking heads who drone on about everything except what is actually important to people?