Editor’s note: This commentary is by Garrison Nelson, who is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Vermont.
In 1939, playwrights Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman wrote the play “The Man who Came to Dinner,” in which an invited dinner guest Sheridan Whiteside arrives at the home of a wealthy Ohio businessman and promptly falls on a patch of ice and breaks his hip. Brought inside to convalesce, the guest, a well-known newspaper and radio critic, is told that he should remain bedridden for weeks.
Finding his new surroundings quite comfortable, he tries to extend his stay and begins to take over the house and the lives of its owners and staff. Based on the noted critic Alexander Woolcott, a presumed pal of the authors, the play was a success and ran on Broadway for more than two years and was made into a successful movie.
I am struck by a similar circumstance of an uninvited guest who arrived on the doorstep of the national Democratic Party four years ago. It was Vermont’s independent U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who was elected in 2006 to fill the vacancy of independent Sen. Jim Jeffords.
A three-term U.S. senator and seven-term U.S. House member, Jeffords left the Republican Party in 2001 to be seated as an independent. Jeffords defected over massive George W. Bush tax cuts that came at the expense of special education programs that he had sponsored. Jeffords’ defection transferred control of the Senate from the Republicans to the Democrats, but he never became a Democrat.
Likewise Bernie Sanders never became a Democrat. Since 1971, 49 years ago, he has run for office in Vermont 22 times – three times for governor, five times for U.S. senator, nine times for the U.S. House, four times as mayor of Burlington, and once for president of the United States. This latest presidential bid is his 23rd political contest. Calling Bernie a professional politician is not in dispute. He has been on the public payroll for two generations.
While Sheridan Whiteside was an invited guest, Bernie was not.
Although never a Democrat, he has made multiple demands on the party to advantage his candidacy. Believing that his losing 2016 challenge to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was undermined by the “lack of transparency” in that year’s Iowa caucus, he contributed to the chaos that unfolded this year by insisting that the Iowa Democrats publicly issue three sets of results. That led to their inability to declare a winner.
In spite of this fact, Bernie has already declared himself the victor. The ultimate consequence of this fiasco will remove this unique event, a political fixture since 1972, from the nomination calendar.
This Sanders-related event departure will accompany the earlier removal of first-ballot Democratic super delegates that Sanders believed denied him the 2016 nomination.
Super delegates were added in 1984 to counter the electoral incompetence of the McGovern-Fraser reforms that denied automatic seats to Democratic office-holders and party officials. Those “reforms” led to the nomination of George McGovern in 1972, who lost 49 states; the election of one-term Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter, who gained the distinction in 1980 of being the worst-defeated incumbent Democratic president in U.S. history; and the subsequent 49 state loss of Walter Mondale, Carter’s vice president.
That super delegates now can only be counted on the second ballot is a blatant charade given that the last multi-ballot Democratic presidential nomination occurred in 1952, 68 years ago.
In March 1981, I had the unique distinction of being the first person to publicly announce Bernie’s initial mayoral victory on WJOY-AM, Burlington’s CBS radio affiliate. I had been invited by my dear friend and legendary Vermont broadcaster Jack Barry to be his analyst on that evening’s broadcast of Burlington’s 1981 mayoral contest. I said at the time, “Burlington, Vermont, will never be the same again. Bernie Sanders has just been elected mayor.”
I also pointed out that Bernie’s narrow 10-vote victory had been measurably aided by the presence of two other candidates, Dick Bove and Joe McGrath, who had a combined total of 1,230 votes, most of which would have gone to incumbent Mayor Gordon Paquette, especially those in Ward 4, the city’s New North End.
The post-broadcast encounters were dramatic. At the Democrats’ liquor-fueled gathering upstairs at Nector’s, my public declaration of Bernie’s victory was greeted with hostility. Shooting the messenger is the appropriate phrase. A former statewide office holder pressed two fingers firmly into my chest and declared: “You should have seen the voters in Ward 2. They weren’t out-of-staters, they were Lithuanians.”
Sensing that rationality was in short supply, I crossed the street and went two blocks down Main Street to the less liquor-fueled Sanders victory celebration. Once again, I was rebuked because I had contended that Bernie’s victory was less due to his being wonderful and more due to the presence of two other candidates who had split the anti-Paquette vote. My two challengers this time were women of whom I am fond who gained prominence in the Sanders years. I quickly left this gathering also.
Little did I know then, that I would be called upon countless times by reporters throughout the nation and the world to discuss Bernie Sanders. Since the job is both unpaid and time-consuming, I have no further interest in it and will gladly refer requests to anyone who wants it.
