Bernie Sander's Unlikely Rise to Stardom

I will confess that for a long time I have liked some of the statements that Bernie Sanders and his followers have posted on Facebook.  He has a blunt way of talking about America's problems and is an unapologetic liberal in the good sense of the word.  Yet never did I expect his campaign for the presidency to take off as it has.  But then, neither did Hillary Clinton who so far remains way ahead of Sanders in polls.  Like his positions or not, Sanders is blunt speaking and direct.  He's in someways the polar opposite of Donald trump, but on speaking out he is cut from similar cloth.  The difference, of course is that Sanders believes what he says whereas the Donald merely likes to hear himself talk and to cause sensation.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at Sanders' unexpected rise.  Here are excerpts: 

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

[T]ruthfully, the socialism rap has been blown out of proportion as well: Sanders accepts “democratic socialist” as an accurate descriptor of his philosophy, but he never sought it as an identity.

“The campaign is moving so fast the infrastructure can’t keep up,” Sanders confesses. “It sometimes reminds me of a military campaign, where the front line of the army is moving faster than the supply chain.” Since Berniemania began this summer, he and a small band of aides have been scrambling to turn it to their advantage.

Sanders and his team have a bracing habit of saying things politicians and their aides are not supposed to say—a minor violation of norms that reminds you how accustomed we are to being lied to in politics.

Another basic tenet of campaign spin is that consultants must never admit their candidate isn’t totally perfect, but Sanders’s people apparently missed that lesson as well.

Sanders is drawing a steady quarter-to-a-third of the vote in Iowa and New Hampshire, pulling within 10 points of Clinton in some New Hampshire polls. Some Clinton aides have begun floating the notion that she could lose one or both of those early-voting states, though this seems like an attempt to lower expectations. But Clinton is still the favorite of Democratic voters nationally by nearly 30 points. She has the money, she has the endorsements from the party elite, and she has the massive teams of staff and advisers.

When Sanders set out to run, he tells me, his main fear was that doing so might prove harmful to his ideas. . . . But the ideas that I am talking about—if the campaign did badly, then it would give the establishment the opportunity to say, See, Sanders ran on a platform calling for single-payer national healthcare system, and he did really poorly,” he continues. “He ran on a platform calling for the creation of millions of jobs through rebuilding the infrastructure—nobody really supported him. He talked about income and wealth inequality; it didn’t go anyplace. Those aren’t really good ideas!”

Now comes the ultimate test of Democratic unity: a dynastic, centrist, seemingly unstoppable frontrunner—someone who, despite decades in public life, had to convene a committee of 200 advisers to figure out where she stood on economic issues. Finally, the left has been pushed to the breaking point. It has turned, in protest, to the most un-Clinton-like candidate there is—the nutty Vermont uncle of Democratic politics.

At the press conference, I meet Les Bailey, a retired ironworker who lives in Marion, Iowa. He has a salt-and-pepper goatee and wears his hair in a mullet under a black Vietnam-veteran cap. In 2008, he wore himself out walking miles and miles knocking on doors for Barack Obama. Now, he thinks Sanders can win Iowa in a similar upset. “This is not the country I fought for, where billionaires buy elections and anyone can get a gun,” he says.

Every Sanders crowd is full of die-hards like Bailey, passionately committed to their unlikely hero. Every Clinton crowd, on the other hand, is full of lukewarm rank-and-file Democrats who will not hesitate to tell you they have some qualms about supporting her. As Sanders’s press conference ends, a line is forming around the block for the party Clinton is about to throw in the basement of the same building. “I’m with Hillary because I don’t have any choice,” a retired schoolteacher named Elwood Garlock tells me as he waits to pass through the metal detector. “I think she’ll be good. But it would be nice if she’d take up some of Bernie’s ideas.”

It is easy enough to see where Berniemania is coming from. Anti-establishment passion, left and right, is in the air. People are angry all over, fed up with a system that isn’t working, an elite that doesn’t listen, a politics perpetually conducted within a narrow, unrepresentative band of acceptable opinion. “I think there is a lot more anger and frustration on the part of the American people toward corporate America, toward the political establishment, toward the media establishment, than I think inside-the-beltway pundits perceive,” Sanders tells me. If he does nothing else in this campaign, he will have succeeded in driving home that point.

Sanders’s campaign is a temporary vehicle for those still naïve enough to see American politics as a vehicle for transformation rather than a hopelessly corrupt compromise. Yet he is also the product of a specifically liberal moment, when rising inequality has powered new skepticism about the adequacy of American-style market capitalism.

“We have some very specific proposals,” he says. “We want to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. I believe we need a massive federal jobs program to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure—trillion-dollar legislation, over a 5-year period, which would create 13 million jobs.” Sanders points to his longtime opposition to trade deals, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is currently under consideration. His opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline. His support for single-payer healthcare, tuition-free public college, and worker-owned companies.

“Those are my views,” he says, a sarcastic edge creeping into his voice. “I suspect you will find them different from Secretary Clinton’s.” 

Bernie Sanders Shakes Up Hillary Clinton in Iowa

If Hillary Clinton envisioned a smooth serene passage to the Democrat 2016 presidential nomination, it seems that Bernie Sanders is hell bent to cause some waves and make the passage a bit more storm tossed and stressful.  A case in point?  Sanders has been seeing sizable crowd turnouts, including  2,500 people in Council Bluffs, Iowa, for a Sanders appearance.  Sanders' populist message appears to be resonating and Clinton may need to rethink some of here strategy and agenda.  A piece in the New York Times looks at how Sanders is rocking Clinton's boat.  Here are story excerpts:

The ample crowds and unexpectedly strong showing garnered by Senator Bernie Sanders are setting off worry among advisers and allies of Hillary Rodham Clinton, who believe the Vermont senator could overtake her in Iowa polls by the fall and even defeat her in the nation’s first nominating contest there.

The enthusiasm that Mr. Sanders has generated — including a rally attended by 2,500 people in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on Friday — has called into question Mrs. Clinton’s early strategy of focusing on a listening tour of small groups and wooing big donors in private settings. In May, Mrs. Clinton led with 60 percent support to Mr. Sanders’s 15 percent in a Quinnipiac poll. Last week the same poll showed Mrs. Clinton at 52 percent to Mr. Sanders’s 33 percent.

Some of Mrs. Clinton’s advisers acknowledged that they were surprised by Mr. Sanders’s momentum and said there were enough liberal voters in Iowa, including many who supported Barack Obama or John Edwards in 2008, to create problems for her there.

“I think we underestimated that Sanders would quickly attract so many Democrats in Iowa who weren’t likely to support Hillary,” said one Clinton adviser, who like several others spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly share views about the race. “It’s too early to change strategy because no one knows if Sanders will be able to hold on to these voters in the months ahead. We’re working hard to win them over, but, yeah, it’s a real competition there.”

Those who see Mrs. Clinton as being at risk in Iowa say she is still far better positioned to win the nomination than Mr. Sanders, who lags by double digits in Iowa polling. Mr. Sanders is an untested national candidate who has far less money than she does, and his self-announced “democratic socialist” leanings are anathema to many Americans.

But a loss in an early state like Iowa would signal a vulnerability for Mrs. Clinton at a time when she has sought to unite the Democratic Party behind her candidacy, and especially to demonstrate to its restless liberal wing that she can represent their interests. A Sanders victory could also further energize his fund-raising base.

Mr. Sanders’s rising fortunes pose a bind for the Clinton team. Directly challenging the senator on his policies and record could elevate his candidacy, alienate some liberal Democrats and make Mrs. Clinton look anxious. Yet continuing the current strategy — vigorously courting voters while hoping they conclude that Mr. Sanders is unelectable — requires Mrs. Clinton to put faith in an Iowa electorate that snubbed her seven years ago, choosing Mr. Obama and Mr. Edwards over her.

Carter Eskew, a Democratic political consultant, said the strength of the Sanders candidacy should stop further talk of a “coronation” of Mrs. Clinton as the Democratic nominee. “From the Clinton perspective, Sanders has gone from an annoyance to a threat,” he said. “One consolation, Sanders won’t creep up on anybody anymore. The Clinton camp has time to adjust expectations, if not strategy.”

Advisers to Mr. Sanders said voters flocked to his events because he offers ambitious proposals to major problems, such as his plans to eliminate tuition at public colleges, to reduce student debt and to spend $1 trillion on public works programs to create more jobs, though he proposed paying for them with huge tax increases. His advisers also argued that voters viewed him as willing to go further in championing significant tax increases for wealthy Americans to support programs to benefit low- and middle-income Americans.