Most People Never Saw the Best of Bernie Sanders’s Campaign

17 March 20

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16 March 20

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Most People Never Saw the Best of Bernie Sanders’s Campaign

Eric Lach, The New Yorker
Lach writes: "Sanders is known for delivering fiery civic sermons in front of arena-size crowds, but it was in smaller rooms that his 2020 campaign was at its best."

uring the first week of January, Bernie Sanders held a town hall in Grundy Center, Iowa, a dot on the map, eighty miles northeast of Des Moines. Just twenty-seven hundred people live in Grundy Center, and maybe two hundred people had packed into the town’s community center. Sanders is known for delivering fiery civic sermons in front of arena-size crowds, and his critics like to obsess over the sometimes noxious behavior of his most ardent online fans, but it was in these smaller rooms that his 2020 campaign was at its best. The same electricity that shot through the big events was there, but the connection between candidate and citizen was direct and personal. Halfway through his stump speech, right when he would get to the section on Medicare for All—his signature policy proposal—and the arguments about how it would be paid for, Sanders would stop and cede the floor to his audience. “ ‘How are you going to pay for Medicare for All?’ Fair enough. Fair question,” he said. “Somebody help me out here. How much do you pay a month in premiums? Who wants to volunteer?”

As if at some radical Quaker meeting, people stood up to speak when injustice moved them. “A mike is coming,” Sanders told them, as campaign staff members trotted through the audience. “Just give us your name, and tell us your story.” A woman named Rachel stood up. Her husband was a patent attorney. They were paying nineteen hundred and eleven dollars a month in premiums for a family of four, for a plan with a five-thousand-dollar deductible. “This is crazy!” Rachel shouted. A man named Ryan stood up. “I just went to the emergency room this last Sunday, feeling like I was going to have a heart attack,” he said. He spoke of being afraid of getting too many tests done, of getting too much treatment, because he couldn’t afford it and didn’t want to leave his wife responsible for his medical debts. “It’s humiliating,” Ryan said. “I felt like I was a little kid, poor, and I had the different-colored lunch card.” A woman stood up, without giving her name, and with a shaky voice she said that her husband’s union job provided them with a plan that costs a thousand dollars a month in premiums, with a seven-thousand-dollar deductible. “I’m not healthy,” she said, softly. “We can’t do other things.”

Sanders listened, occasionally interjecting to do some arithmetic, translating monthly costs into yearly totals. This was Sandersism with the ideology all stripped away, starting from a place of common human need. “More discussion on the cost of health care and how we are paying for it right now?” Sanders asked, calling for more stories. “We’re hearing we’re paying for it with people who have no health insurance. We’re hearing we’re paying for it with outrageous premiums, outrageous deductibles.”

One of the reasons that Sanders’s collapse—and Joe Biden’s corresponding surge—has come as such a surprise to the political world (and the journalists who cover it) is that, whether you supported him or not, the Vermont senator’s events, up close, were compelling. Sanders was offering regular people a platform to describe what was happening around them. “His suggestion, by asking you to speak up about your private anxieties, many of them financial, is that you . . . will begin to see your struggles not as personal failings, but systemic ones,” BuzzFeed’s Ruby Cramer wrote, in December. Sanders held these events throughout the fall and winter, campaigning in Iowa and elsewhere. It wasn’t just college kids venting. Older people were standing up to tell their stories. Immigrants were standing up. Members of minority groups. This was not the vibe at Biden’s events, where the candidate tended to ramble, and where you could feel the audience, even if they were loyal to him, go slack.

Yet it wasn’t enough. In the states where Sanders campaigned the most—Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada—he triumphed. But his movement proved not as big as he and his supporters believed it to be: he never made inroads with older black voters—older voters generally seemed completely turned off by his pitch. One of the supposed lessons of 2016 was that Hillary Clinton lost states in the Midwest where she underinvested resources and campaign time. But, on Super Tuesday, Biden won states he never even campaigned in. And, this week, Sanders, after putting years of organizing work into Michigan, the site of his most significant victory in 2016, watched Biden take every county in the state.

Even in a political atmosphere as intense as this, the reality is that most voters have not attended a campaign rally. The further Democrats were from the Sanders campaign, it seemed, the easier it was to reject it. Sanders and his supporters will point to the media, for questioning the extent of the problems he has identified, or for being downright hostile to the solutions he has proposed. And yet polls have found that Sanders, despite being filtered through the media, is considered one of the most honest politicians in the country. Something about what was happening in those town-hall rooms simply never translated to a national audience.

On Wednesday, Sanders gave a press conference in Vermont and declared his intention to stay in the race, despite delegate math that makes his nomination look extremely unlikely. “On Sunday, I very much look forward to the debate in Arizona, with my friend Joe Biden,” he said. But the confidence that he displayed in February is gone. An outbreak of the coronavirus is starting to paralyze life in the United States, and both Sanders and Biden have begun cancelling campaign events, complying with expert advice to avoid large gatherings of people. (The location of Sunday’s debate between the two has been moved from Arizona to Washington, D.C., for the same reason.) For Sanders, this means giving up the best of his campaign. He’s not ready to give up the rest, yet.

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Nancy Pelosi. (photo: Reuters)

Dear Congress: Send Americans Cash. Send It Now.
Dylan Matthews, Vox
Excerpt: "Any coronavirus package needs to have big cash payments to Americans, right now."

EXCERPTS:

There are two reasons for this. One is the severe economic threat posed by the coronavirus, which is already putting Americans out of work. Prominent economists are saying the crisis is faster-moving and more alarming than the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the crisis it sparked in 2008. That crisis needed an immediate stimulus, and even the roughly $1 trillion total appropriated in 2008-2009 was not enough.

Direct cash payments are a better policy than other suggestions for stimulus, like payroll tax cuts or additional quantitative easing from the Federal Reserve. But the Fed is working on interest rates that are already close to zero. And payroll tax cuts only benefit working people, excluding hourly workers in restaurants, gyms, and other businesses that are rapidly shutting down entirely due to coronavirus. 

The employed people who do benefit from a payroll tax cut are, by definition, higher income than the unemployed, less likely to spend the cash, and more likely to save it in an account where it does nothing for the economy. Direct cash payments put money directly in the hands of poor and unemployed people likely to spend it.

The second reason is humanitarian. To some extent, we need a slowdown in economic activity for public health reasons. We need the economic activity generated by people buying in-person tickets to sporting events or movie theaters or yoga classes to cease, to prevent disease transmission. 

But we also need the millions of people employed in in-person service jobs, and the millions of unemployed people (including those unemployed due to layoffs in this crisis), to have the food, shelter, and medical care they need to survive and stay healthy amidst the crisis. They need money, and the easiest way to get it to them is to send checks.

This is not the only policy that is needed. We need paid sick leave, and support for states buckling under Medicaid costs. We need universal coverage of coronavirus testing and care.

But cash is an issue where economists of all stripes are speaking with one voice. We need cash. We need it now. Congress should appropriate it immediately. To quote Sahm, “WE KNOW WHAT TO DO. DO IT NOW.”

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Jane Addams Senior Caucus members demand support for Medicare for All at the office of Illinois Democratic Rep. Mike Quigley on February 13. (photo: Kelly Viselman)

Guess Who’s Rallying for Medicare for All? Senior Citizens
Taylor Moore, In These Times
Excerpt: "Single-payer healthcare would be valuable for everyone, including seniors."
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A patient being screened for coronavirus at the University Hospital in Bordeaux, France, on Thursday. (photo: Caroline Blumberg/EPA/Shutterstock)

Government Official: Coronavirus Vaccine Trial Starts Monday
Zeke Miller, Associated Press
Miller writes: "The first participant in a clinical trial for a vaccine to protect against the new coronavirus will receive an experimental dose on Monday, according to a government official."

EXCERPT:

Dozens of research groups around the world are racing to create a vaccine as COVID-19 cases continue to grow. Importantly, they’re pursuing different types of vaccines — shots developed from new technologies that not only are faster to produce than traditional inoculations but might prove more potent. Some researchers even aim for temporary vaccines, such as shots that might guard people’s health a month or two at a time while longer-lasting protection is developed.

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A handful of foreign-language academic editions of Mein Kampf currently remain available on Amazon’s UK bookstore, including a heavily-annotated German language edition published in 2016 entitled: A Critical Edition. (photo: Matthias Schrader/AP)

Amazon Bans Sale of Most Editions of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf
Jim Waterson, Guardian UK
Waterson writes: "Amazon has banned the sale of most editions of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and other Nazi propaganda books from its store following decades of campaigning by Holocaust charities."
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Supporters of Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs block access to the Port of Vancouver as part of protests against the construction of the Coastal GasLink pipeline. (photo: Jennifer Gauthier/Reuters)

The Wet'suwet'en Crisis Has Exposed Deep-Seated Racism in Canada
Tara Houska, Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Native communities do not hurt the economy - they bear the hurt of corporations ruining the land."

EXCERPT:

I recall how a group of men driving by an Anishinaabe woman walking down a pavement in Thunder Bay, Canada, allegedly threw a trailer hitch at her and struck her in the stomach. Barbara Kentner, 34, later died of her injuries. The man charged with her killing faces trial in April. Internet rumours attacking Barbara Kentner grew so malicious that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) ran a piece debunking one claiming Kentner assaulted a child. The celebrations around the killing of Colton Boushie - a young Cree man shot in the head by a white farmer who was subsequently acquitted of his murder and manslaughter - was another moment that should have cued folks to the deep-seated racism towards Native people. So is the literal epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women on both sides of the colonial border.

Throw in extractive industrial projects that hold the boon of hundreds of well-paying jobs, a way to keep food on the table, and that ignorance explodes to the surface. The Native person trying to protect their land, the deepest part of their identity, becomes an obstacle blocking a good job. Such a narrative benefits the company seeking its latest fossil fuel project. Stories of Coastal GasLink pipeline, Enbridge, TransCanada and many others' failing profit margins, uncertain oil forecasts and lack of demand are buried. It has to be somebody's fault, we are told, but it never seems to be the companies making these destructive choices.

I was born and raised in North Country; I grew up with loggers and miners, the folks who use their hands and backs for a living, as my family members and neighbours. Distrust and lack of understanding between rural communities and the Native folks nearby are a constant. Exploitation of the lands and waters we call home is also a constant. The jobs that pay well are usually jobs that require taking far, far more than we need, for shipment somewhere else.

When the mine finally gives out, it is our water that sits contaminated, our children that play on the soil with a spreading chemical plume below it. When the old growth timber is gone, it is our ecosystem that is disrupted, the wild game many of us still depend on that disappears. We bear the risk of spills, of explosions, of all the immediate risks of bodily harm associated with extractive industry. When Coastal GasLink bulldozes its way through the unceded territory against the authority of the Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs, it is our communities that bear that hurt and destruction, it is our people, our youth that carry those wounds and further separation between Native and non-Native neighbours.

We are at the point now where the climate crisis has extended serious risks outside of our local communities. The polar ice caps are melting, the Global South has rising seas and burning rainforests, North America's own western seaboard is on fire for longer and longer periods in these recent times. It is not just our problem and reality any longer; it belongs to the whole of humanity.

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A bear. (photo: Getty Images)

Why Bears Are Coming Out of Hibernation Early
Manish Pandey, BBC
Pandey writes: "According to wildlife expert Alan Wright, the early emergence from hibernation isn't good for the bears or humans."
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