Outsider in the White House (36 page)

“The people in Vermont know exactly what I mean, which is why I won my last election with 71 percent of the vote and carried some of the most conservative towns in the state,” he continued. “If I ran for president, and articulated a vision that speaks to working people, I am confident that voters in every part of this country would understand that.” In fact, he seemed to relish the prospect of opening up the discussion. “The truth is that, very sadly, the corporate media ignores some of the huge accomplishments that have taken place in countries like Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Norway,” he explained. “These countries, which have a long history of democratic socialist or labor governments, have excellent and universal health care systems, excellent educational systems and they have gone a long way toward eliminating poverty and creating a far more egalitarian society than we have. I think that there are economic and social models out there that we can learn a heck of a lot from, and that's something I would be talking about.”

Even with that said, however, the gap between talking about big ideas, great ideas, and actually making them central to the discourse requires a level of focus and organizing that dissident campaigns often imagine but rarely achieve. And the challenge of building coalitions that might be rooted in economic common interest but that would need to embrace the broader “rainbow” politics that Jesse Jackson developed in his 1984 and 1988 presidential runs—and that at least to some extent shaped the remarkable campaign that elected Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008—was real for every progressive pondering a 2016 run. Sanders recognized these daunting prospects, and he wrestled with them for more than a year, as he and the activists he met with around the country considered the possibility of what would eventually become a run for the Democratic presidential nomination. The decision to run as a Democrat excited activists with groups such as Progressive Democrats of America, which had urged Sanders to run inside the party and move the debate left from there. At the same time, it frustrated independent progressives who argued that change would only come from a challenge to both major parties. Ultimately, Sanders, the outsider, decided to enter the Democratic fold because of the structural barriers to independent and third-party politics on the national level (“given the nature of the political system, given the nature of media in America, it would be much more difficult to get adequate coverage from the mainstream media running outside of the two-party system”) and because, he said, he would not play a “spoiler” role that might “[make] it easier for some right-wing Republican to get elected.”

Uncharacteristically, what animated Sanders through this period and once he announced his candidacy was not a specific game plan, but rather a leap of faith. Yes, of course, the odds against a seventy-something democratic socialist from one of the nation's smallest states winning the nomination of a party he had always refused to join, let alone the presidency, were overwhelming. But so, he suggested, were the odds against working Americans in a globalized economy defined by race-to-the-bottom “free-trade” deals. So, he suggested, were the odds against African-American young people in deindustrialized and abandoned urban neighborhoods where unemployment rates rivaled those of the Great Depression. So, he suggested, were the odds against the planet if immediate action was not taken to address climate change. It was too easy, he argued, to be overwhelmed. What was needed was a sense of what the great organizer and author Michael Harrington used to refer to as “the left wing of the possible.” Jettisoning the standard candidate line about what he or she would do, Sanders talked about what everyone would have to do to “bring together the kind of coalition that can win—that can transform politics. We've got to bring together trade unionists and working families, our minority communities, environmentalists, young people, the women's community, the gay community, seniors, veterans, the people who in fact are the vast majority of the American population. We've got to create a progressive agenda and rally people around that agenda.”

To do this, Sanders suggested, America did not need a political campaign. America needed “a political revolution.”

“When I talk about a political revolution, what I am referring to is the need to do more than just win the next election. It's about creating a situation where we are involving millions of people in the process who are not now involved, and changing the nature of media so they are talking about issues that reflect the needs and the pains that so many of our people are currently feeling,” the senator said of his presidential run. “A campaign has got to be much more than just getting votes and getting elected. It has got to be helping to educate people, organize people. If we can do that, we can change the dynamic of politics for years and years to come. If 80 to 90 percent of the people in this country vote, if they know what the issues are (and make demands based on that knowledge), Washington and Congress will look very, very different from the Congress currently dominated by big money and dealing only with the issues that big money wants them to deal with.”

That may sound like a romantic notion. It may be a romantic notion. But politics, at its best, is about more that cold calculation. It is about believing in a “left wing of the possible.” What distinguishes Bernie Sanders, however, is that some of his romantic notions have succeeded. This talk of a “political revolution,” for instance, is not new. In
Outsider in the House
, Sanders wrote of a political revolution not as a possibility but as something that had happened. “A political revolution had occurred in Burlington,” he explained. “The people had spoken, loudly and clearly. With a very high voter turnout, the citizens of Burlington informed the Democrats and Republicans that they wanted change—real change. Progressives were on the move.”

Bernie Sanders knows a few things that more cautious politicians will never understand. Sometimes the outsiders win. Sometimes the left wing of the possible simply becomes the possible. Sometimes, political revolutions occur—in cities, in states, and perhaps even nations.