Bernie Sanders, Ever the Outsider, Plays to Win
by Cynthia Close


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Hillary's article.

On an unseasonably hot May 26, 2015, afternoon in Burlington, Vermont, thousands of people jostled for position on the grass in Waterfront Park, and it wasn’t to get the free Ben & Jerry’s ice cream being offered. Enthusiastic college students stood shoulder to shoulder next to white-haired seniors discussing politics, as young children squeezed themselves through the crowd to get a better view of the main event. Following several speeches by local dignitaries, Ben (Cohen) and Jerry (Greenfield) among them, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders took the podium to announce his bid to be the next president of the United States. The cheers of the crowd rose to a deafening roar.

The senator gave no sign of his 74 years that day as he spoke passionately about his long-held belief that the income gap between rich and poor had reached historic and untenable proportions. He gestured and stabbed the air with his finger as if to drive home each point when he declared, “Enough is enough. This great nation and its government belong to all of the people, and not to a handful of billionaires, their super PACs, and their lobbyists.”

Senator Sanders had earned the early support of fellow Vermonter, author, and environmentalist Bill McKibben. It was McKibben who stood with him that first day of his campaign when Sanders made a plea for “environmental sanity” to fight the “planetary crisis of climate change.”

Long Progressive History

The Brooklyn-born son of Polish immigrants, Bernie (as he is commonly known, a moniker his campaign actively promotes) moved to Vermont in 1964, following his graduation from the University of Chicago.

Senator Bernie Sanders talking to supporters on the champaign trail. photo: Courtesy of Bernie 2016

Childcare

Clinton would give money to states to provide preschool for every 4-year-old within a decade. Only a fraction of those children are currently in publicly funded prekindergarten. Clinton and her advisers are considering a mix of tax relief and new federal spending to expand programs for children from birth to age 3. Clinton would also double federal spending on Early Head Start programs. Sanders says he’ll make high-quality childcare and pre–K available to every American, regardless of income.

College

Sanders would eliminate tuition for the roughly seven million undergraduates at four-year public colleges and universities. He wants the federal government to spend $47 billion a year and states to provide about $23 billion. The money would come from taxes on Wall Street stock, bond, and derivatives trades. Clinton would offer a debt-free college education for students, paid for by capping the value of itemized deductions that the wealthy can take on their tax returns. This newly available tax money would fund federal grants to states totaling about $175 billion to guarantee that students would be able to cover tuition at four-year public colleges and universities without taking out loans.

Health Care

Sanders and Clinton both want to repeal a planned tax on high-cost employer-sponsored insurance, known as the Cadillac tax. Both have put forth proposals to reduce patients’ prescription drug costs. Clinton would leave Obamacare in place. Sanders would replace Obamacare with a “Medicare-for-all” single-payer system that guarantees health care to all Americans as a right. He would pay for the program with a higher payroll tax paid by employers and a progressive “health care income tax” that would hit those earning more than $600,000 the most.

Social Security

Sanders says he will fight to expand Social Security benefits by an average of $65 a month; increase cost-of-living-adjustments to keep up with rising medical and prescription drug costs; and expand the minimum Social Security benefit to lift seniors out of poverty. Women will benefit the most by expanding Social Security: more than twice as many elderly women lived in poverty than men in 2013 and without it, nearly half of all elderly women would be living in poverty. Clinton says she will defend against the efforts to privatize Medicare and Social Security and will work to enhance both programs for our most vulnerable seniors.

Prison Reform

Sanders has been a vocal advocate for criminal justice reform and in mid-September proposed a bill that would ban government contracts with private prisons. Until recently, Clinton was receiving campaign donations from federally registered lobbyists or PACs for private prison companies. In late October she announced that she would no longer accept this money and is opposed to private prisons and mass incarceration.

Corporations and Taxes

Clinton and Sanders would both end the “carried interest” loophole, which allows hedge funds, private equity firms, and venture capitalists to avoid billions of dollars in taxes each year.

Sanders plans to stop corporations from shifting their profits and jobs overseas to avoid paying U.S. income taxes. He proposes a progressive estate tax on the top 0.3 percent of Americans who inherit more than $3.5 million and a tax on Wall Street speculators and has said that he plans to increase tax rates for the wealthiest, mentioning that under Eisenhower rates on the wealthiest were 92 percent.

Clinton proposes an increase in the capital-gains tax rate paid by the highest earners on short-term investments to encourage long-term interests and boost worker pay.

She also plans to cut taxes for businesses that share profits with their employees and to enact the Buffett Rule, a minimum tax rate of 30 percent on those making in excess of a million dollars per year.

Wall Street and the Banks

Clinton and Sanders support a financial transaction tax to limit high-frequency trading.

Sanders has argued for breaking up the nation’s largest banks and for restoring the Glass-Steagall Act, which had separated commercial and investment banking. Clinton has argued for imposing a “risk fee” on the largest financial institutions, and although she would give regulators more authority to break apart big banks, she has stopped short of calling for the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall. (This act was repealed in 1999, under President Bill Clinton.)

Jobs and Infrastructure

Both candidates have called for increasing the minimum wage. Clinton supports a $12 an hour minimum; Sanders goes further, proposing $15 an hour. Promising to create 13 million jobs, Sanders has proposed a $1 trillion infrastructure plan to improve or rebuild roads, bridges, and other transit systems over the next five years, in an effort to battle income inequality and create more jobs for lower- and middle-income workers. He would raise the money by closing tax loopholes that corporations use and by overhauling taxes on inheritances and the oil, gas, and coal industries. Clinton has promised to create an infrastructure bank and sell bonds to pay for improvements to roads, bridges, railways, and other job-generating projects.

Trans-Pacific Partnership

Sanders opposes TPP, saying that the agreement would be bad for American workers. Clinton championed the pact when she was secretary of state. She had avoided taking a position on the completed agreement until recently, when she announced that she was against it.

Immigration

Sanders and Clinton support the DREAM act and a path to citizenship for immigrants and have said they would go beyond the president’s actions, including shielding parents of young immigrants from deportation. Sanders has been critical of guest worker programs, saying that allowing more temporary foreign workers drives down wages for American workers and hampers efforts to reduce unemployment.

Gun Control

Sanders and Clinton support closing the so-called gun show loophole that allows people to purchase guns online or at gun shows from a private seller without a background check. Sanders has called for a ban on assault weapons. Clinton favors overturning a law that shields gun manufacturers and dealers from lawsuits. Sanders, who has had a mixed record on guns, voted for that shield law in Congress.

Climate Change

Sanders and Clinton oppose drilling in the Arctic and the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, though Clinton did not come out against it publicly until September. They also support eliminating tax breaks for fossil fuel companies. Sanders has proposed taxing carbon emissions. Clinton wants renewable energy to account for 33 percent of all energy produced in the US by 2027 and proposes installing half a billion solar panels by 2020. As a senator, Sanders has introduced a number of bills aimed at ending tax deductions and credits for fossil fuel producers, creating green jobs, and making alternative energy more affordable, most recently the Low-Income Solar Act.

Foreign Policy

Sanders and Clinton support the nuclear deal with Iran, though Clinton expressed skepticism about Iran’s intentions. Sanders opposes a no-fly zone over Syria, which he believes will lead to escalation in war. Clinton has called for a no-fly zone over Syria and has advocated arming moderate Syrian rebels. Sanders has said that war should be a “last resort” and has called on Muslim nations to lead the fight against the Islamic State.
 

Back in the 1970s, as a member of the Liberty Union Party, Bernie was not winning elections. He ran for governor and the US Senate in four elections, all of which he lost, but these attempts had given him a platform to attack both major political parties.

He also had tenacity, proving that he was able to learn from his losses, and he moved on to win the 1981 Burlington mayoral election by ten votes. In 1990, after serving four terms as mayor, he ran for the state’s lone seat in the House of Representatives and won with 56 percent of the vote. All during that time, and right up to the present, he lead campaigns sounding like the progressive he is—favoring taxing the rich, supporting health care as a human right and free higher education, and voting against the Iraq War and the North American Free Trade Agreement.

In 2006, he ran for the previously held US Senate seat of the then Independent, former Republican, Jim Jeffords. Running as an Independent, Sanders won with 65 percent of the vote. Bernie is now serving his second term in the US Senate after winning re-election in 2012 with a resounding 71 percent of the vote.
Since then he has caucused with the Democrats and held key committee posts. These include chairing the Committee on Veterans Affairs, where he forged a bipartisan agreement for a huge reorganization and funding for the VA. When the Democrats lost majority status in 2014, Bernie kept his seat on the Veterans Committee but agreed to be the ranking member of the powerful Senate Budget Committee.

He also serves on the Committee on Environment and Public Works, where he has pressed his views that the United States must take the lead in addressing climate change. Via his service on the Committee on Energy and Natural Resource, he champions a move toward renewable solar and wind power and away from fossil fuels . He also wields a powerful influence to improve workers’ lives, a major part of his constituency, via his work on the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

A Thorn in the Side

Bernie Sanders has long been a thorn in the side of the Democratic Party. As a self-described democratic socialist, Bernie was quoted in Politico saying, “My feeling is that the Democratic Party is ideologically bankrupt.” It is nothing short of astounding that though Senator Sanders caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate, he has never been a registered member of the Democratic Party—the very party he is now hoping will nominate him as their standard-bearer.

Former Vermont governor Madeleine Kunin, a staunch Democrat who in 1986 won a reelection bid fending off attacks from Sanders, has said of him, “He plays it both ways”—a legitimate observation. Many Democrats still feel the pain inflicted by Bernie’s relentless critique of the party throughout his political career, who at one point said in an interview that there was basically “no difference” between the Republicans and the Democrats. This lingering animosity is apparent today, demonstrated by the fact that leaders of the Democratic Party in his home state, such as Senator Leahy and Governor Shumlin, are backing Clinton.

In the early days of his campaign, many political observers did not take him seriously. Major media outlets largely ignored him. Back in July, head political correspondent Jamie Bouie, writing for Slate, compared Bernie to other fringe candidates in the past, like the Republican Ron Paul, who had fervent base support but never gained traction nationally.

In spite of the fact that Bernie was drawing the largest crowds of any political candidate so far (he had spoken to a crowd of 10,000 in Madison Wisconsin, compared to Hillary’s 5,500 on Roosevelt Island in NYC, and Jeb Bush drew just 3,000 when he announced at Miami Dade College in Florida), Bouie contended he would never be embraced by the Democratic Party machine. Bouie claimed his relative independence from the Democratic Party—one of the qualities that has made him appealing to so many across party lines—along with his call for an outright revolution in American politics would make Bernie Sanders “unsuited for a major party nomination, much less the Democratic one.”

Coming from Behind

The large crowds showing up at Bernie’s live events initially seemed to catch his campaign off guard. Even Bernie at times appears surprised when entering a filled-to-overflowing auditorium of enthusiastic supporters. But he, along with the full backing of his wife, Jane O’Meara Sanders, friends, and family, has steadily built a viable campaign, utilizing a very successful approach to social media fundraising.

In their last quarterly report, the Sanders campaign had raised $26.2 million, just behind Hillary Clinton’s take of $29.9 million. This is all the more impressive when considering more than 88 percent of Sanders’ money comes from individual donations of $200 or less, the average donation being under $25, while Clinton’s coffers are filled primarily from big-ticket fundraisers organized by super PACS and party insiders. The main super PAC supporting Clinton’s presidential bid brought in $15.6 million in the first six months of 2015—a haul that includes a $2 million donation from a single donor and six other $1 million checks.

Women for Bernie

Women’s support for Clinton slipped nationally during the summer; according to a Washington Post–ABC News poll, she dropped from 71 percent in July to 42 percent in mid-September. But there has since been a significant rebound: a more recent poll by the same research association has Clinton at 61 percent among Democratic women.

No polling data is available indicating what percentage of Vermont women support Bernie versus Hillary, but general indicators are that support for him still remains high in the state. Vermont women who have decided to support Sanders are not necessarily opposed to Clinton but find Bernie’s stands more compelling and believe he can be counted on to not waver.

Carmen George, former Burlington Democratic city councilor and currently vice chair of Burlington’s Ward 7 Democrats, said, “My support for Bernie is not a vote against Hillary. I respect all that she has fought for. However, I first heard Bernie in 1992 when he spoke for the working class. His commitment is authentic. I trust his long-term integrity.”

That notion of integrity is echoed by businesswoman Shari Powers, owner of Sequoia Salon in Burlington: “I’m voting for Bernie to make a statement that integrity and common sense can exist in the political arena.”

Longtime democratic activist Nancy Ellis of Burlington has also chosen to throw her support behind Sanders: “I have confidence that Bernie’s views on the economy and the gap between the richer 1 percent and the poorer majority won’t change after he’s elected and that he will continue to support social services such as health care for all.”

She added, however, that she hopes “he will also support stringent background checks on gun sales and tighter gun control laws.” Her comment points up the one aspect of Bernie’s campaign that troubles many progressives—his weak stand on gun control.

The Candidates Debate

The October 13, CNN televised Democratic debate was Bernie’s first opportunity to present himself and his progressive ideas to the nation. Over 15 million people watched, the most of any previous Democratic debate. His campaign had encouraged over 4,000 Debate Watch Parties across the country—about half in large public venues—guaranteeing an engaged grassroots public response.

The morning after, both sides, not surprisingly, claimed victory. Bernie’s refusal to go after Clinton’s “damned e-mails” (though Clinton didn’t repay him the favor, never cutting him any slack) played well, and Bernie’s campaign got a big financial boost after the debate. A number of post-debate polls and focus groups claimed Bernie as the winner (for example, 68 percent of respondents to a Time magazine online poll and 84 percent in a US News & World Report poll pegged him the winner). But the consensus of the punditry was that Hillary Clinton, with her competent and confident delivery, came out on top.

It may be debatable who won, but what is clear after the debate is that the only real and viable challenge to Clinton’s nomination is coming from Bernie Sanders. The first primaries are months away; it’s still a horse race. And thanks to Bernie Sanders, it’s a race worth watching.

 

Cynthia Close is a contributing editor for Documentary Magazine, art editor for the literary journal Mud Season Review, and an advisor to the Vermont International Film Festival. She lives in Burlington, Vermont, with her doggie, Ethel.