Editor’s note: Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political columnist.
[L]ike most Vermonters, Sen. Bernie Sanders is probably looking forward to the coming of spring.
Maybe more than most. For Vermont’s once and possibly future presidential candidate, this has been the winter of his discontent.
His presidential campaign got fined $14,500 by the Federal Elections Commission. The investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election revealed that the Russians tried to help Sanders as well as (though not nearly as much as) Donald Trump. His stepdaughter, Carina Driscoll, lost the race to be mayor of Burlington last week. His son, Levi, is being criticized because he’s running for Congress in a New Hampshire district in which he does not live.
Above all is the federal probe into the multi-million-dollar real estate deal involving the now-defunct Burlington College when Sanders’ wife, Jane O’Meara Sanders, was the college president. Investigators are examining whether, in applying for a bank loan to finance the deal, O’Meara Sanders exaggerated how much the college was going to receive in donations.
Both Sanders and his wife have denied that she did anything wrong. But people facing a federal investigation in which FBI agents are questioning former colleagues can never be certain they will not be charged with a crime. If nothing else, the federal probe has to be an unpleasant distraction for the Sanders family.
Even some Sanders allies concede that the drumbeat of bad publicity and whispers of potential indictments could be affecting the mood of the senator and his political allies.
“It would bother anybody,” said Burlington lawyer John Franco, a left-of-liberal activist and longtime Sanders associate. Huck Gutman, the University of Vermont professor who is on the board of directors of Our Revolution, the political organization Sanders formed last year, agreed.
“Does constant sniping have a cost?” Gutman said. “Yeah, it’s hard to have stuff coming at you all the time.”
The truly committed Sanders supporters – Berniecrats in political jargon – dismiss all these episodes as meaningless, or maybe even dirty tricks by anti-Sanders politicians and what he calls “corporate media.”
They may have a point. Sanders and his campaign had no dealings with the Russian trolls and hackers who interfered in the election. The FEC fine, like many campaign finance cases, was much ado over very little. Carina Driscoll got a respectable 35 percent of the vote against a strong incumbent. Levi Sanders is hardly the first person to trade on a famous name to run for office where he does not live. Robert F. Kennedy and Hillary Clinton did it, too.
To some Sanders supporters, even the Jane Sanders investigation smacks of political dirty tricks. It began two years ago after Charlotte lawyer Brady Toensing wrote to federal officials urging a probe of “what appears to be federal loan fraud.” Toensing is a vice chair of the Vermont Republican Party.
Still, perhaps a candidate who rails against “special interests” and “big money in politics” should be especially careful about adhering to the letter of campaign finance law. Perhaps a candidate who insists on maximum “transparency” in politics should not order his staff to tell reporters what questions they may or may not ask the senator in an interview.
And while Sanders did nothing wrong in connection with the Russian meddling, his denial that the Russians were trying to help him (they were) and his muddled – and inaccurate – attempts to explain what happened and what he did about it only led to more confusion and more questions about whether he was being candid.
Or whether, after his surprisingly strong run in 2016, he had succumbed to the common political temptation of believing his own press releases.
Sanders certainly seems more comfortable with his own press releases than with the actual press. He has barked at reporters, cancelled interviews, and in January suggested that Seven Days political editor Paul Heintz was a “gossip columnist,” apparently because he was going to ask about the Jane Sanders investigation.
Bank fraud is not a personal peccadillo, so asking about it isn’t “gossip,” however unwelcome the questions may be. People who know Sanders say that he dislikes Heintz and Seven Days, though Burlington’s weekly is hardly part of the “corporate media.”
It isn’t that Sanders is at war with all journalists. Elizabeth Hewitt, VTDigger’s Washington reporter, was on vacation this week, but her editors reported that Sanders is usually responsive and cooperative with her, but on one recent occasion was “brusque.”
Though he is a pragmatist, Sanders is also an ideologue, and ideologues often assume that whoever is not wholeheartedly with them must be against them. The idea that there is such a thing as a disinterested observer – which is what most journalists are – is foreign to them. In his book, “Our Revolution,” Sanders insisted that he does not believe “corporate bosses get on the phone and tell a journalist what to write.” But sometimes he seems to think that this is what does happen, if more subtly. It does not.
Sanders’ office did not respond to emails seeking a response to this story.
Sanders is hardly in political trouble. If he runs for another term this year (likely), he should win easily. If he runs for president again in 2020, he would probably start off as the first choice of the growing left-of-liberal faction of Democratic primary voters.
It’s a loyalty he has earned by his persistence and tenacity.
“He keeps fighting for people and opposition is always strong,” Gutman said. “He fights against the ruling class, and that’s a grinding battle. But he keeps making a point of the serious issues.”
He does. Interviewed last week on CNN, Sanders was immediately asked about the actress who said she had an affair with President Donald Trump.
“There are millions of people … going crazy with deductibles and co-payments, who can’t pay high cost of prescription drugs,” Sanders said. “We haven’t dealt with immigration reform … We’ve got a gun crisis out there … And what are we talking about over and over again? Stormy Daniels.”
So Sanders has not lost his focus or his mojo. As his friends noted, anyone would be miffed about critical news coverage, especially if he found it unfair. And any man whose wife was being investigated for possible criminal activity would be upset, especially if he was convinced of her innocence.
But there might be another reason Bernie Sanders could be feeling out of sorts these days.
When he lost the presidential nomination, Sanders acted like a loyal Democrat. He endorsed Hillary Clinton and did as much as he could to help her win.
Not all the Berniecrats followed their leader. Some of them did just what the Russian trolls did, used social media to trash Clinton, to urge leftish voters to stay home or to vote for another candidate. They did it on their own, with no help from Russia or any knowledge of what the Russians were doing.
They were far outnumbered by the pro-Trump “alt-right” bloggers doing the same thing, and no one can say what impact all of them combined had on the outcome.
But it might be a subject Bernie Sanders would rather not discuss, or even consider.