Editor’s note: This is the last of a five-part series of stories to appear weekly until Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses Feb. 1.
[W]ashington, D.C., writer Harry Jaffe was bicycling through the nation’s capital last Sept. 22 when, taking a break from researching a biography of Bernie Sanders, he glanced toward the sidewalk and spotted the subject himself.
The first time Jaffe saw Sanders 40 years ago, the journalist — then a twentysomething cub reporter at Vermont’s Rutland Herald newspaper — was watching a 1976 Green Mountain gubernatorial debate featuring two clean-cut major party candidates and a mop-topped self-described socialist chastising “the richest ½ of 1 percent.”
“It was such an amazing contrast,” the writer recalls. “I remember saying to myself, ‘What the hell is that?’”
But last fall, that alternative also-ran had morphed into a U.S. senator and Democratic presidential candidate who, just that day, had greeted Pope Francis at the White House.
“I couldn’t believe my luck,” recalls Jaffe, who had tried and failed for months to arrange a meeting. “Fair game, I figured.”
Sanders thought otherwise.
“Senator,” Jaffe said, “are you ever going to let me interview you?”
“I’m trying to take a walk with my wife,” the candidate reportedly grumbled before hailing a cab and hustling off.
Jaffe never did nab any time to talk with the senator, he notes in his new book, “Why Bernie Sanders Matters.”
“Most politicians running for president have written autobiographies that try to give voters a glimpse into their past, albeit a very rosy one,” Jaffe writes in the 240-page Regan Arts paperback. “For Sanders, allowing a journalist to delve into his past to understand his motivation, his character, the genesis of his political positions is a waste of time.”
The feeling is sometimes mutual. The New York Times reported the presidential campaign announcements of Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republicans Ted Cruz and Donald Trump on its front page.
Sanders? Page 21.
The Washington Post began its own story: “He seems an unlikely presidential candidate — an ex-hippie, septuagenarian socialist from the liberal reaches of Vermont who rails, in his thick Brooklyn accent, rumpled suit and frizzy pile of white hair, against the ‘billionaire class’ taking over the country.”
That was more than ABC World News Tonight’s 18-second report, a campaign press release titled “Why the Bernie Blackout on Corporate Network News?” would go on to note.
But with Sanders drawing record crowds and contributions on the eve of Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses Feb. 1 and New Hampshire’s kickoff primary Feb. 9, the story’s changing. In an analysis titled “How the media missed Bernie Sanders,” CNN reporter Dylan Byers chronicles a growing gaggle of journalists (“At the Hotel Vermont, CBS’s John Dickerson was there to interview Sanders for ‘Face The Nation’ …”) now covering the candidate.
“I’ve never been in an avalanche,” Sanders’ spokesman Michael Briggs told Byers, “but I’m beginning to think I know what it feels like.”
How it all ends, however, is anyone’s — and seemingly everyone’s — guess.
‘Time to take Sanders seriously’
The question is summed up by a recent New York magazine headline, which rewinds back to the success of current President Barack Obama and the scream of former candidate and fellow Vermonter Howard Dean to ask, “Which Precedent Will Bernie Sanders’s Campaign Follow in Iowa: Obama 2008 or Dean 2004?”
Twelve years ago, Dean was, like Sanders, a scrappy, straight-talking Green Mountain insurgent stoking grassroots energy, scoring headlines and surprising the Democratic Party establishment.
“Now, Dean had some problems Sanders may not have,” New York reporter Ed Kilgore notes, “most notably the momentum of his principal rival, John Kerry, and the presence of a third candidate in the field, John Edwards, who caught fire late and won a lot of the voters who had previously looked inclined to the Vermont governor. But for all their impressive field operation and rising poll numbers, Team Bernie has to be haunted by the specter of all those orange-hatted Dean volunteers in Iowa who may have discomfited actual caucusgoers as much as they mobilized them.”
This time, the biggest obstacle is former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who has spent the past month presenting her challenger with “the toughest onslaught of his political life,” MSNBC reporter Alex Seitz-Wald observes in a Jan. 22 story titled “Bernie Sanders is feeling the heat — can he handle the burn?”
“On paper, it’s not even a fair fight,” Seitz-Wald writes. “On Clinton’s team in the battle for hearts and minds are the majority of Democratic Party power brokers: more than 100 members of Congress; nearly 40 senators; a former president; nearly all of the powerful party-aligned interest groups and labor unions; and a large swaths of the party’s donors, operatives and policy experts.”
Sanders, as the MSNBC reporter sees it, is countering with a ragtag team made up of the co-chairmen of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (U.S. Reps. Keith Ellison of Minnesota and Raúl Grijalva of Arizona), self-described “provocative public intellectual” Cornel West, rapper Killer Mike, former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner and a handful of liberal grassroots groups headed by MoveOn.org and the Dean-founded Democracy for America.
“He does have some powerful other assets,” Seitz-Wald adds of Sanders, “including plenty of money, which he has now used to outspend Clinton on TV advertising. He has a massive army of committed grassroots supporters, eager to convert friends and family and evangelize on social media. And he has incredibly high approval rating among Democrats — 91 percent in New Hampshire and 89 percent in Iowa, according to a recent CNN and Des Moines Register poll, respectively.”
When Sanders announced his presidential bid last spring, he was David to Clinton’s Goliath.
“She was 50 points ahead of me,” Sanders reminded viewers at the NBC News-YouTube Democratic Debate Jan. 17 in South Carolina. “We were all of 3 percentage points. Guess what? In Iowa, New Hampshire, the race is very, very close.”
So much so, more and more national media outlets writing headlines about Sanders are replacing “socialist” with a new “s” word: “serious.”
Take New York writer-at-large Frank Rich’s “It’s Time to Get Serious About Bernie Sanders”:
“Who would have imagined that an election that was destined to be Bush versus Clinton stands at least a small chance of yielding Sanders versus Trump?” Rich says.
Or Yahoo columnist Matt Bai’s “Time to take Sanders seriously.”
“It’s hard to know exactly what we’re looking at here,” Bai observes. “Is Sanders making a last, spirited stand before reality crashes down on him? Or is this the year when the molecular structure of our politics — on both sides — is about to be smashed apart and scrambled?”
Or the Wall Street Journal editorial “Taking Sanders Seriously”:
“He would be the most left-wing Democratic nominee since George McGovern in 1972, but his economic agenda is more radical and hasn’t been seen in the U.S. since the 1930s,” the paper opines. “In a campaign that has already busted normal American political conventions, the possibility of an extreme election outcome is no longer unthinkable.”
The woman aiming to be the nation’s first female president appears to agree, as seen in a recent front-page New York Times story headlined “Hillary Clinton Gets Set for a Long Slog Against Bernie Sanders.”
“Clinton’s campaign is preparing for a primary fight that could stretch into late April or early May and require a sprawling field operation in states and territories from Pennsylvania to Guam,” Times reporter Amy Chozick writes. “The scramble after the contests in Iowa and New Hampshire will be intense. If Mrs. Clinton fails to win either state and her campaign seems to be stumbling, her donations could dry up. But a loss could also motivate donors who had viewed her nomination as a foregone conclusion.”
‘I would not vote for Bernie Sanders’
Sanders still faces big challenges, Washington Post reporter Callum Borchers notes in his Jan. 19 story “Bernie Sanders wants more media coverage — he should be careful what he wishes for.”
“Considering the kind of coverage — however limited — that Sanders has received, it’s easy to understand why he would crave more of it,” Borchers writes. “An affable underdog, he has been largely portrayed in a highly favorable light. Think about the themes of Bernie Sanders stories: Wow, he’s getting really big crowds. Wow, he’s doing better in the polls than anyone expected. Wow, it’s funny how young people seem to love this old guy. Wow, he won’t bash Hillary Clinton over her private email server or her husband’s personal issues. What a guy!”
(The latest example: People magazine’s “exclusive” “5 Fun Things We Learned Hanging Out at the Candidate’s House,” in which Sanders chases after two giggling grandchildren in a game of “Monster” as wife Jane O’Meara Sanders confides, “Sometimes he is grumpy with reporters when they’re not covering the important issues, but not with us.”)
But moving from “fringe candidate” to “front-runner” can change everything. Borchers points to neurosurgeon turned Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson, “whose media narrative was about captivating voters with an inspiring personal biography — until he surged to the front of the Republican pack. Then the story quickly became about his poor grasp of foreign policy.”
“With prominence,” the Post reporter concludes, “comes scrutiny.”
Sanders is starting to receive it. In a Jan. 11 Bloomberg Businessweek cover story, writer Joel Stein — known for his unorthodox Time magazine columns — aimed his sardonic humor at “the slouching, rumpled 74-year-old, who was slouching and rumpled in his 20s.”
“Even more than most candidates, Sanders is better at identifying problems than offering solutions,” Stein began. “Most of the plans he does offer require turning America into Scandinavia. The answer to all problems, he argues, is something like an $18 trillion Great New Deal, $15 trillion of which is for a ‘Medicare for all’ health plan. It includes more Social Security, a $15-an-hour minimum wage, free public college, family leave, more pensions, and a lot of infrastructure jobs. This would all be paid for by ‘a tax on Wall Street speculation,’ a tax on the rich, and a higher business tax. In the Bernie Sanders drinking game, every time he mentions a free government program, you drink someone else’s beer.”
Sanders was happy to help Stein flame the fears of the top 1 percent. Asked what he would say to reassure Businessweek’s wealthy readers, the candidate responded: “I’m not going to reassure them. Their greed, their recklessness, their illegal behavior has destroyed the lives of millions of Americans. Frankly, if I were a hedge fund manager, I would not vote for Bernie Sanders.”
Liberal commentators can be equally skeptical. Take TheWeek.com correspondent Damon Linker, whose self-described respect and admiration for the candidate didn’t stop him from penning the Jan. 19 essay “Bernie Sanders will not be president.”
“Lily-white Iowa isn’t especially representative, and neither is even more lily-white New Hampshire, which also just so happens to border Sanders’ home state of Vermont,” Linker writes. “Once the voting moves on to states in the South, West, and Midwest, and to bigger, more demographically diverse states where vastly more delegates are at stake, Clinton is quite likely to come out on top over and over again.”
Linker points to national polling averages by RealClearPolitics that show Clinton consistently on top, currently by nearly 15 points.
“But what about the 2008 scenario?” TheWeek.com correspondent continues. “That’s when Barack Obama leapt ahead of Clinton in February after trailing her handily up to that point and ended up beating her to the nomination. That’s obviously the script that Sanders supporters hope to see repeated this time around.
“The problem is that Bernie Sanders isn’t Barack Obama — and no, I’m not just talking about Obama’s presumably much greater ability to mobilize the African-American vote,” Linker writes. “I also mean his enviable capacity to inspire moderates as well as liberals to vote for him. Sanders, by contrast, is the strong favorite of those who identify as ‘very liberal’ but understandably polls weakly among self-described ‘moderate’ Democrats.”
But Sanders’ highest-profile and hardest-pressing doubters are less interested in whether he can win than if he could govern in the nation’s polarized capital.
“On the left there is always a contingent of idealistic voters eager to believe that a sufficiently high-minded leader can conjure up the better angels of America’s nature and persuade the broad public to support a radical overhaul of our institutions,” Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman wrote Jan. 22. “The question Sanders supporters should ask is, When has their theory of change ever worked? Even F.D.R., who rode the depths of the Great Depression to a huge majority, had to be politically pragmatic, working not just with special interest groups but also with Southern racists.”
Stronger still is New York magazine commentator Jonathan Chait, whose Jan. 18 essay “The Case Against Bernie Sanders” has gone viral (62,000 shares and counting) and generated venom (Consider Gawker’s headline “‘The Case Against Bernie Sanders’ Is Dumb”).
“Sanders has promised to replace Obamacare with a single-payer plan, without having any remotely plausible prospects for doing so,” Chait wrote in one section. “Many advocates of single-payer imagine that only the power of insurance companies stands in their way, but the more imposing obstacles would be reassuring suspicious voters that the change in their insurance (from private to public) would not harm them and — more difficult still — raising the taxes to pay for it. Vermont had to abandon hopes of creating its own single-payer plan. If Vermont, one of the most liberal states in America, can’t summon the political willpower for single-payer, it is impossible to imagine the country as a whole doing it.”
‘Well positioned to make good’
Back in Washington, Jaffe remembers sharing his book proposal for “Why Bernie Sanders Matters” with publishers last year.
“The first response was, ‘Who’s he?’”
Today, win or lose, Sanders is a part of the American lexicon.
In the past 12 months, the New York Times alone has printed his name in more than 2,000 articles. It’s not just in news reports like the recent Sunday front-page story headlined “Clinton Campaign Underestimated Sanders Strengths, Allies Say.” Consider the recent arts-page analysis about “Sesame Street” moving its first-run episodes from public television to pay cable:
“Parents have invested a lot of trust in ‘Sesame Street,’” the Times noted. “That may be why the HBO deal, even if it got Big Bird a new nest, inspired such Bernie Sandersian outrage.”
The candidate also crept into the public editor’s take on a food critic’s takedown of Manhattan’s $325-per-person Per Se restaurant:
“The review had over 1,000 comments, some expressing what the food editor, Sam Sifton, terms ‘populist schadenfreude’ — a sense that a negative review somehow is a well-deserved comeuppance for the 1 percent and their dining choices,” the editor wrote. “Others, like Susan Miller, had something to say about income inequality: ‘Well, I’ve been on the fence for a while now, but this column has helped me make up my mind. I’m voting for Bernie Sanders!’”
Sanders has told Time magazine he’ll continue his presidential bid, no matter what, until the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia July 25-28.
“With 1.2 million Americans giving to his campaign, millions of dollars in the bank and bigger ground operations than Clinton in some states, he is well positioned to make good on the promise,” Time reporter Sam Frizell writes.
Yet for all the profiles about the man the New Yorker calls “the seventy-four-year-old Larry David look-alike from Vermont,” a number of reporters are starting to wonder if the media is missing the real story.
As Stein notes in Bloomberg Businessweek: “Bernie Sanders is more an idea than a person. An idea does not need to comb its hair. An idea can get away with skipping the task that occupies so much of most politicians’ time — phoning the rich to ask for money — by instead writing fundraising letters, which contain words that make people with money anxious, like ‘oligarchy.’ An idea can give speeches filled with so many statistics and numbers that they’re really just white papers with hand gestures. Bernie Sanders is not a leader so much as a messenger.”
Adds New Yorker staff writer John Cassidy: “When Sanders uses words like ‘revolution,’ he isn’t talking about deposing a dictator or storming Congress. He is talking growing a mass, democratic movement that can reverse the direction that the American polity has taken over the past few decades. From the days of Chartism and Progressivism to the civil-rights era, such movements have rarely triumphed in national elections. But when the history books came to be written, that turned out not to matter so much. The movements changed the terms of the political debate. Sanders, in his own irascible way, is trying to do the same thing.”
London’s Guardian, in an article titled “Inside the mind of Bernie Sanders: unbowed, unchanged, and unafraid of a good fight,” asked the candidate about “beating the same drum” for close to half a century.
“Sadly enough, I suppose, the world has caught up with what I have been saying for many years,” Sanders replied, adding that he was, perhaps, “a bit ahead of his time.”
And finally ready for his close-up.
“Whether Sanders can win the nomination may be beside the point,” CNN’s Byers concludes. “The fact may be that, after being written off by the media, the 74-year-old Democratic socialist from Vermont is threatening to take both Iowa and New Hampshire from Hillary Rodham Clinton, a towering political figure with unparalleled experience, vast financial resources, and the backing of the Democratic establishment. In other words, Sanders has come a long way from Page 21 and ‘the liberal reaches of Vermont’ — and the media is finally taking note.”
