Where We Go From Here Is More Than Just The Title Of Bernie's New Book

Earlier today we looked at the case for a mushy-middle 2020 scenario. The conclusion was inevitable: the Democrats need to avoid that disaster-- basically by ignoring their own craven, visionless and predatory establishment-- and demanding that Bernie be the candidate against Trump. In a preview of Where We Go From Here, Bernie's new book, Edward-Isaac Dovere mentioned that his "decision about running for president again isn’t about trying to bend the race toward his progressive politics-- it’s about whether he can convince himself that he’s the Democratic candidate with the best chance of beating Donald Trump. He thinks the answer might be yes, but he isn’t quite sure." The book comes out on Tuesday and Dovere terms it "a rundown of the ways he’s been able to keep a hold on American politics, from the demands he gave Hillary Clinton at their post-primary meeting to his political and legislative wins since."

He’ll kick off the release with a speech at George Washington University on Tuesday night, and later in the week he’ll convene a summit of allies at his Sanders Institute, back home in Burlington, Vermont.

Meanwhile, Sanders is trying to figure out where he goes from here.

...“He’s uniquely positioned to do better against Trump in the general because he appeals to white working-class and rural voters-- much better than a conventional Democrat does,” said Ben Tulchin, who was Sanders’s 2016 pollster and remains in touch with his team. “He also is very popular and has done well in the Midwest, such as Michigan and Wisconsin, which are critical to winning.”

Most of the potential 2020 Democratic candidates deciding whether to pull the trigger are deep into staff interviews and debates about the timing of exploratory-committee announcements, but Sanders has turned inward. The number of people he’s actually talking to is tiny. The time they’re spending on what they consider the transactional politics of endorsements and influence is close to nonexistent.

“The place where the country is now is so far off, so out of whack, that those kinds of tactical discussions really don’t give an appropriate amount of appreciation of the danger that Trump and his kind of politics represent to American policy,” Weaver said. “If you had a crystal ball and could say, ‘This is the person, and the only person who could beat Trump,’ then you would have the entire party lining up against him. But I don’t think that’s clear yet.”

Sanders knows that a 2020 campaign would be his last shot at running for president—he turned 77 in September. But he also knows that running isn’t the only way he could be a factor. Some around the senator, who was just reelected to a third term, think he could be a presence in the chamber while continuing to be the kind of outside force that helped pressure Amazon to raise wages over the summer.

Sanders’s midterm campaign swing was, on the one hand, a success-- no prospective presidential candidate drew crowds as big as his, and he drew them consistently, from South Carolina to Iowa to Colorado. Candidates as varied as [corporate conservative] Jacky Rosen, who won her Senate race, and [moderately progressive] Andrew Gillum, who narrowly lost his governor race in Florida, were eager to appear with him. On the way to the University of Reno rally, Sanders stopped by the Culinary Workers’ union hall and was greeted with chants of “2020! 2020!” There were a number of events like that off the public schedule during Sanders’s tour, as well as meetings with local politicians and other leaders who struck the senator and his team as being much more open to him than they were the last time around.

And he and the crowd were both clearly enjoying it in Reno when he directly took on the protesters holding a Trump flag off the side of a multistory parking lot. “Really?” he said. “Do you really want to give a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the 1 percent? Do you really want to throw 32 million Americans off the health care that they have?”

On the other hand, many of the candidates Sanders campaigned for lost, and many of the bigger calculations that would be part of a 2020 run are setting in. In a field this big and fluid, none of the candidates can claim their chances of winning are high, and Sanders has slowly accepted that he’d likely start with a much smaller share of the vote than he ended up with when it was a binary choice between Hillary Clinton and him in 2016. He is high up in the polls, and he might have high name recognition, but he’d be fighting for attention and votes in a field that could range from Elizabeth Warren to Mike Bloomberg, and include everyone in between.

...Ro Khanna, a California congressman who in 2016 knocked out an incumbent Democrat on his second try for the seat, said he thinks Sanders should run again—and he has told the senator directly.

The goal, Khanna said, is “not simply occupying the presidency, but shaping the policy direction for the nation and the policy direction of the progressive movement and the country … I don’t think you can do that behind the scenes being a kingmaker.”

In Where We Go From Here, Sanders notes his successes in getting the Democratic National Committee to eliminate superdelegates and in persuading many Democratic politicians to sign on to Medicare for All. He lays out his foreign-policy philosophy. He also devotes chapters to his support for gun-control laws, addressing a weakness in his record that Clinton exploited in the 2016 campaign, and another to Martin Luther King Jr., which seems aimed at the weakness he had attracting black voters.

“The political revolution is about thinking big. It’s not about one election, one candidate, one issue. It’s about creating a movement that will transform the economic, political, social and environmental life of our country,” Sanders writes in the final chapter.

A few pages later, he ends the book on a vaguer note than Weaver, whose own book, out this past spring, ended, “Run Bernie run!”

“This is not a time for despair. This is not a time for depression. This is a time to stand up and fight back,” Sanders writes. “Please join us.”

That doesn't sound vague to me. Join him-- and if you're ready to contribute, you can do it directly by tapping this link to the 2020 Bernie For President page. Federal money-- like contributions that slow into a Senate campaign-- are 100% fungible within the federal system. In other words, while Bernie could not use donations to his Senate campaign to run for governor of Vermont or mayor of Burlington, he can use it to run for president. Let's have one truly great president in our lifetimes-- not an OK president or a so-so president, one who has at least chance to turn out to be like a Lincoln or a Roosevelt. (And believe me, that's not Ami Klobuchar or Michael Bloomberg or John Hickenlooper.) Watch Bernie's appearance from this morning on Face the Nation: