It’s official. Bernie’s running, and although I wasn’t among the folks who contributed oodles of money the day he announced (I was a day late), I am enthusiastic about him. I said before that he probably doesn’t have a reasonable chance to win, but that the level of support he would get will be greater than the folks who own the discourse believe. That already seems to be the case, and I think more surprises are ahead. It may well just be between Hillary and Bernie, which means Bernie’s message will be heard.
Over at Hullabaloo they put it like this:
What Sanders offers is the opportunity to change a narrative that has been beating on us for at least the last fifteen years—a narrative that excludes good, popular public policy from consideration. Raising the minimum wage to where it was in the 70s, adjusted for inflation, is good, popular public policy. Recognizing that the 401K experiment for replacing pensions has failed, and we need to increase social security benefits to make up for that failure is good, popular public policy. Making it possible for a student to graduate from college without a crushing debt burden is good, popular public policy. So is the adoption of trade and industrial policies that benefit everyone, not just the rentiers.
This stuff polls well. Really well. In the 70s, even the 80s. We don’t hear about it because the gatekeepers—the centrist media and the campaign funders–don’t want these issues on the table. These are unifying issues. How do you think 50 something white men in West Virginia feel about medical coverage in the years between the corporate job with health benefits and Medicare? How do you think they feel about their retirement security?
via Hullabaloo
I’d take issue with one point here. The narrative has been beating on us for far more than fifteen years. I’d put it at more like 42, the number of years since the Democratic Establishment walked away from George McGovern en masse. That walk out, by the way, was led by George Meany and the unions, who just couldn’t back a guy who was against a senseless war. How did that work out for them, I wonder?
Anyway, with some minor exceptions, ever since that year the Democratic Party has shied away from actually championing progressive policy, preferring, at best, to offer half throated defenses of progressive victories of the past. The defensive crouch has gotten more pronounced over the years, and has become such a norm that many people don’t recognize it, or prefer to talk themselves into believing that they are hearing what they want to hear. I plead guilty to having heard what Obama wasn’t truly saying in 2008. It turns out that hope and change meant running interference for Wall Street, stripping us of our civil liberties, and giving us a health care plan that is more a gift to insurance companies than anything else. He’s still better than McCain would have been (can you just imagine that?), but that’s a pretty low bar.
Rachel Maddow says that no one could have predicted how well Bernie’s fundraising would go, but that only shows how even Rachel can catch Beltway bubble disease. Any politically engaged progressive could have predicted the response, and would predict, as well, that Sanders will do far better against Hillary than the pundits could ever predict. A lot may depend on how successful the media is in freezing Sanders out; but they really don’t have that capability to the extent they did before the internet. They will, of course, try to paint him as an out of touch socialist and an extremist (can it really be extreme to want to protect New Deal programs and reinstate now-repealed New Deal checks on big banks?), while ignoring the fact that the Republican candidates are in a competition to see which of them can best cater to the crazy vote without alienating whichever billionaire happens to own them. I don’t think there’s anything they can do to prevent some surprises in Iowa, New Hampshire and the states beyond. Will Bernie win the nomination? Probably not, but it’s not impossible, and if he gets the nomination I think he’d be a lock to win the presidency. His biggest challenge, going forward, is to anticipate the media’s assassination attempts (remember the Dean scream?) and take effective action once they start.
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