Bernie: Breaking The Cycle Of Mediocrity And Mendacity

As Jonathan Bernstein made clear in an OpEd yesterday for Bloomberg News, Americans have become inured to deceit and manipulation from our political class. And he wasn't even speaking about Trump. His piece was on Paul Ryan's farewell speech. Unlike many inside the Beltway, Bernstein has long recognized Ryan as a faker and a fraud. "The same people," are wrote, "who celebrated him as a wonk-- something he never has been, as Paul Krugman and others have pointed out for years-- have also declared President Donald Trump’s clearly inadequate policy knowledge to be sufficient. It’s not just about false perceptions: One of the main reasons that Ryan’s agenda has gone nowhere, despite his ascent in the House and his party’s unified control of government, is precisely that Republicans didn’t have well-developed policy options ready to go. That was true for all of Ryan’s supposed areas of interest, from entitlement reform to immigration to poverty, and of course it was very much true of health care... [T]hings got even worse with Ryan in charge than they had been during Boehner’s tenure, and that’s at least partially on him. As is the least productive period of unified party government in decades."

Is this all we can expect from government? Conservatives would like us to believe so. It's a win/win for them. If they succeed with their dreadful agenda, they accomplish specific goals; if they fail-- as they inevitably do-- then people lose faith and trust in government, an even bigger goal for conservatives. It is absolutely crucial for conservatives-- regardless of party-- to defeat Bernie. The establishment can not tolerate him and his campaign against the status quo. The carefully crafted comfort of conservatism in this country will crumble if he becomes president and conservatives will fight to the death to prevent that from happening.

This week, writing for The Intercept, Mehdi Hasan dismisses their arguments against him and points out that "the case for Sanders in 2020 is as strong as it was in 2016-- if not stronger. He now has much better name recognition, a standing army of loyal and experienced activists, an unrivaled social media presence, an authenticity that cannot be bought or taught, and a string of substantive policy wins under his belt, from big-name Democratic support for his Medicare for All bill to the Stop BEZOS Act to the historic Senate vote on Yemen last week." Nathan Robinson, writing on the same day for The Guardian made similar points. "Based on his record, Sanders should be the progressive favorite by default. In 2016, he ran an impressive insurgent campaign that came close to defeating the party elite’s handpicked candidate. Savvier Democrats have already recognized that Sander’s message is the one that best suits the mood of the electorate."

His ideas have set the agenda for the Democratic party for the past two years, with elected officials trying to burnish their progressive credentials by doing photo ops with Sanders and adopting his policies, from free college to Medicare for All (a plan that even the majority of Republican voters now favor). Many polls suggest he is the most popular politician in the country, and would be the clear favorite in a match-up against Trump. Attempts to portray Sanders as the candidate of white “Bernie Bros” ignore the facts-- Sanders has higher favorability ratings among people of color than any other Democratic politician. It’s obvious that he’s the party’s best shot. He has a formidable team of experienced organizers, national popularity and name recognition, and a clear, bold agenda that can win over working-class people of all genders and races.

...A candidate should be judged on their record. Based on how recently most of the 2020 prospects have embraced the progressive agenda, it’s reasonable to suspect some opportunism. Sanders, on the other hand, has a lifelong history as a thorn in the side of the establishment. Even as a teenager, Sanders was getting himself arrested in civil rights demonstrations.

As mayor of Burlington, he pioneered an innovative community land trust approach to affordable housing. He has been an efficient legislator, even earning the title “amendment king” for his success in getting measures through Congress. And he has shown a willingness to take principled stands, including his early opposition to the Iraq war plus his votes against the Defense of Marriage Act and the Patriot Act.

There are only a few serious criticisms of Sanders, the main one being “he’s too old.’ But while age might be a more serious factor if the current president were far younger, Trump is a septuagenarian like Sanders. Sanders still shoots hoops, he criss-crosses the country giving speeches, and he has more energy than many of us who are less than half his age. If Trump tries to make an issue of Sanders’ superior age, experience, and wisdom, Sanders can just challenge him to settle it on the basketball court.

There are a few other criticisms that can be made of Sanders, including his unfair criticism of leftist “open borders” advocates. He has cast bad votes (the 1994 Clinton crime bill comes to mind) and sometimes makes frustrating gaffes. I do not think Sanders is the ideal candidate, the one I would make in a laboratory. It would indeed be nice to have someone younger, ideally a woman of color (if only the constitution didn’t bar Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez!) But the question isn’t “Is Sanders flawless?” Rather, it’s “Is Sanders the best candidate we have available?” To that, the answer is clear. No other 2020 prospect comes close.

Matt Taibbi was at Berniepalooza and his report is in the new issue of Rolling Stone.He sounds sold. He wrote that "After seizing 43 percent of the Democratic vote in the 2016 primaries and winning high-profile battles against companies like Amazon and Disney to raise their workers’ minimum wages to $15 an hour, Sanders in some circles is something it would have been hard to imagine him being years ago: a celebrity."

It’s possible the Democratic brand has been rehabilitated in the public’s eyes since 2016, and a combination of a new candidate, better tactics and voter experience of two years of a Trump presidency would spell victory for any Democrat in 2020.

It’s also possible this is not the case, however, and the absence of someone like Sanders in the race would mean surrendering all that populist anger out there into Trump’s cynical hands, again.

Campaign reporters constantly make the mistake of thinking politicians are causes, not effects. They’ve been trained to think of candidates as consumer creations that succeed or fail on the strength of concept (and if not the concept, the execution).

Bill Clinton is the sui generis of Third-Way-ism, a southerner who offered a mix of aw-shucks stump charisma, fiscal conservatism and a whiff of post-Sixties social liberalism. His 1992 run perfectly executed the plan for victory that folks in the Democratic Leadership Council dreamed might work, after the catastrophe of Walter Mondale in 1984. Offer voters the right political product, they thought, and they will buy.

But in the real world, these things can work backwards. The 2016 electorate was so profoundly dissatisfied with the usual choices that when Donald Trump slipped in the polls briefly in late October and early November of 2015, the immediate beneficiaries were two other non-politicians, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina.

Pundits had been predicting that a Pat Buchanan-style protest curiosity like Trump would sooner or later fade, and he did. But he didn’t stay “faded,” among other things because 2016 Republican voters could not and would not consider any establishment alternative, not even fringy, mean ones like Ted Cruz.

Sometimes voters go through drastic changes of mind before parties even have a chance to offer them choices. After years of not embracing big shifts, they may suddenly decide they want universal health care, free college tuition, a slashed defense budget, a national minimum wage, and other sweeping ideas.

Other younger politicians may end up offering those same things, which would be great. But with Sanders, voters burned by past broken promises have probably guessed by now he’s constitutionally incapable of deviating from his platform. I don’t even think Sanders would know how to betray his own ideas for political gain.

About that: He was roundly mocked in 2016 for describing his campaign as a revolution, but as the policy discussions at the Gathering showed, his platform is actually revolutionary, in a specific way.

UMass-Amherst economist Robert Pollin appeared to unveil a massive plan to cost out the Medicare-for-All proposal Sanders is likely to spend the next years stumping.

Pollin’s plan is to reduce medical costs in America from 18 percent of GDP to between 9-11 percent, using a single-payer plan that mainly targets the waste in the system (read: corporate profits). He addressed the “biggest insurance companies in America,” saying half-wryly, half sternly: “We’re going to put you out of business.”

Sanders is no Lenin or Trotsky. He doesn’t want to overthrow free enterprise or establish a national ice cream. But the movement he and his wife are leading has goals that are genuinely threatening to the traditional funders of presidential campaigns of both parties in America: banks, defense contractors, pharmaceutical and energy companies, etc.

Sanders and co. hope to plow the proceeds of these conquests into an FDR-scaled “Green New Deal,” aimed at a fundamental transformation of the country’s transportation, housing, energy and agricultural systems.

It’s ambitious and drastically different from what Democratic voters have been offered by any viable candidate for a while. If voters aren’t behind such a program, that’s what primary seasons are for, finding that out. If they are, however, it would be a huge error not to have someone in the running backing it.

...[C]ynics always respond negatively to Sanders. In their world he doesn’t compute at all, so they keep inventing angles to explain him: he’s an “egomaniac,” or in it for personal gain somehow (“He has three houses!”), or a delusional bumbler out to poison the electorate with irresponsible and unrealistic expectations.

As to that last point: Sanders in 2015-2016 went from harmless, terminally ignored fringe-left curiosity to despised, possibly Russian-backed Hillary Spoiler virtually overnight. He’s probably second only to Trump as a target of press and social media invective, which paints him as a racist, socialist serpent in the fallen Eden of the should-have been Clinton presidency.

Some of this negativity is predictable, given that the Sanders platform would massively disenfranchise the traditional financial backers of the modern Democratic Party: Wall Street, pharmaceutical and insurance companies, Silicon Valley, lobbyists and corporate law firms, etc.

Whether it’s now or later, whoever takes on those interests is going to take a hell of a beating. That Sanders seems willing to be that person seems reason enough to embrace another run. Someone has to take up those fights eventually. It might be a while before anyone else volunteers for the job.