Bernie Sanders says he is “prepared to
run for president of the United States.” That’s not a formal announcement. A
lot can change between now and 2016, and the populist senator from Vermont
bristles at the whole notion of a permanent campaign. But Sanders has begun
talking with savvy progressive political strategists, traveling to unexpected
locations such as Alabama and entertaining the process questions that this most
issue-focused member of the Senate has traditionally avoided.
In some senses, Sanders is the
unlikeliest of prospects: an independent who caucuses with the Democrats in the
Senate but has never joined the party, a democratic socialist in a country
where many politicians fear the label “liberal,” an outspoken critic of the
economic, environmental and social status quo who rips “the ruling class” and
calls out the Koch brothers by name. Yet, he has served as the mayor of his
state’s largest city, beaten a Republican incumbent for the US House, won and
held a historically Republican Senate seat and served longer as an independent
member of Congress than anyone else. And he says his political instincts tell
him America is ready for a “political revolution.”
In his first extended conversation about
presidential politics, Sanders discussed with The Nation the economic
and environmental concerns that have led him to consider a 2016 run; the
difficult question of whether to run as a Democrat or an independent; his
frustration with the narrow messaging of prominent Democrats, including Hillary
Clinton; and his sense that political and media elites are missing the signs
that America is headed toward a critical juncture where electoral expectations
could be exploded.
John Nichols: Are you going to run for
president in 2016?
Bernie Sanders:
I don’t wake up every morning, as some people here in Washington do and say,
“You know, I really have to be president of the United States. I was born to be
president of the United States.” What I do wake up every morning feeling is
that this country faces more serious problems than at any time since the Great
Depression, and there is a horrendous lack of serious political discourse or
ideas out there that can address these crises, and that somebody has got to
represent the working-class and the middle-class of this country in standing up
to the big-money interests who have so much power over the economic and
political life of this country. So I am prepared to run for president of the
United States. I don’t believe that I am the only person out there who can
fight this fight, but I am certainly prepared to look seriously at that race.
When you say you are “prepared to run,”
that can be read in two ways. One is to say you have the credentials, the
prominence, the following to seek the office. The other is to say that you are
making preparations for a run. How do you parse that?
If the question is, am I actively right
now organizing and raising money and so forth for a campaign for president, I
am not doing that. On the other hand, am I talking to people around the
country? Yes, I am. Will I be doing some traveling around the country? Yes, I
will be. But I think it’s premature to be talking about (the specifics of) a
campaign when we still have a 2014 congressional race in front of us.
I want to push back at some of what you
are saying. Political insiders define presidential politics, and they are
already hard at work, in both major parties and in the broader sense, to erect
barriers to insurgent, dissident, populist campaigns. Don’t progressives who
come at the process slowly run the risk of finding that everything has been
locked up by the time they get serious about running?
Obviously, if I run, both in terms of
the positions that I’ll be advocating, and the process itself, it will have to
be a very unconventional campaign. I hear what you are saying, and I think
there is truth in what you are saying. But, on the other hand, I think there is
profound disgust among the American people for the conventional political
process and the never-ending campaigns. If I run, my job is to help 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.
I think we’ve got a message that can
resonate, that people want to hear, that people need to hear. Time is very
important. But I don’t think it makes sense—or that it is necessary—to start a
campaign this early.
If and when you do start a full-fledged
campaign, and if you want to run against conventional politics, how far do you
go? Do you go to the point of running as an independent? That’s a great
challenge to conventional politics, but it is also one where we have seen some
honorable, some capable people stumble.
That’s an excellent question, and I
haven’t reached a conclusion on that yet. Clearly, there are things to be said
on both sides of that important question. Number one: there is today more and
more alienation from the Republican and Democratic parties than we have seen in
the modern history of this country. In fact, most people now consider
themselves to be “independent,” whatever that may mean. And the number of
people who identify as Democrats or Republicans is at a historically low point.
In that sense, running outside the two-party system can be a positive
politically.
On the other hand, 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. It would certainly be very hard if not
impossible to get into debates. It would require building an entire political
infrastructure outside of the two-party system: to get on the ballot, to do all
the things that would be required for a serious campaign.
The question that you asked is extremely
important, it requires a whole lot of discussion. It’s one that I have not
answered yet.
Unspoken in your answer is the fact that
you have a great discomfort with the Democratic Party as it has operated in
recent decades.
Yes. It goes without saying. Since I’ve
been in Congress, I have been a member of the Democratic caucus as an
independent. [Senate majority leader] Harry Reid, especially, has been
extremely kind to me and has treated me with enormous respect. I am now
chairman of the Veterans Committee. But there is no question that the
Democratic Party in general remains far too dependent on big-money interests,
that it is not fighting vigorously for working-class families, and that there are
some members of the Democratic Party whose views are not terribly different
from some of the Republicans. That’s absolutely the case. But the dilemma is
that, if you run outside of the Democratic Party, then what you’re doing—and
you have to think hard about this—you’re not just running a race for president,
you’re really running to build an entire political movement. In doing that, you
would be taking votes away from the Democratic candidate and making it easier
for some right-wing Republican to get elected—the [Ralph] Nader dilemma
You’re not really saying whether you
could run as a Democrat?
I want to hear what progressives have to
say about that. The more radical approach would be to run as an independent,
and essentially when you’re doing that you’re not just running for president of
the United States, you’re running to build a new political movement in
America—which presumably would lead to other candidates running outside of the
Democratic Party, essentially starting a third party. That idea has been talked
about in this country for decades and decades and decades, from Eugene Debs
forward—without much success. And I say that as the longest serving independent
in the history of the United States Congress. In Vermont, I think we have had
more success than in any other state in the country in terms of progressive
third-party politics. During my tenure as mayor of Burlington, I defeated
Democrats and Republicans and helped start a third-party movement. Today, there
is a statewide progressive party which now has three people in the state
Senate, out of 30, and a number of representatives in the state Legislature.
But that process has taken 30 years. So it is not easy.
If you look back to Nader’s candidacy
[in 2000], the hope of Nader was not just that he might be elected president
but that he would create a strong third party. Nader was a very strong
candidate, very smart, very articulate. But the strong third-party did not
emerge. The fact is that is very difficult to do.
You plan to travel, to spend time with
activists in the Democratic Party and outside the Democratic Party. Will you
look to them for direction?
Yes. The bolder, more radical approach
is obviously running outside of the two-party system. Do people believe at this
particular point that there is the capability of starting a third-party
movement? Or is that an idea that is simply not realistic at this particular
moment in history? On the other hand, do people believe that operating in
framework of the Democratic Party, getting involved in primaries
state-by-state, building organization capability, rallying people, that for the
moment at least that this is the better approach? Those are the options that I
think progressives around the country are going to have to wrestle with. And
that’s certainly something that I will be listening to.
You have always been identified as a
democratic socialist. Polling suggests that Americans are not so bothered by
the term, but it seems to me that our media has a really hard time with it. Is
that a factor in your thinking about a presidential race?
No, that’s not a factor at all. In
Vermont, people understand exactly what I mean by the word. They don’t believe
that democratic socialism is akin to North Korea communism. They understand
that when I talk about democratic socialism, what I’m saying is that I do not
want to see the United States significantly dominated by a handful of
billionaire families controlling the economic and political life of the
country. That I do believe that in a democratic, civilized society, all people
are entitled to health care as a right, all people are entitled to quality
education as a right, all people are entitled to decent jobs and a decent
income, and that we need a government which represents ordinary Americans and
not just the wealthy and the powerful.
The people in Vermont know exactly when
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. 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.
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. These countries, which
have a long history of democratic socialist or 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.
What you seem to be saying is that, as a
presidential candidate, you would try to make the very difficult combination of
not just being a personality that people would like, or at least want to vote
for, but also educate people about what is possible.
My whole life in politics has been not
just with passing legislation or being a good mayor or senator, but to educate
people. That is why we have hundreds of thousands of people on my Senate email
list, and why I send an email to all Vermonters every other week. It is why I
have held hundreds of town meetings in Vermont, in virtually every town in the
state.
If you ask me now what one of the major
accomplishments of my political life is, it is that I helped double the voter
turnout in Burlington, Vermont. I did that because people who had given up on
the political process understood that I was fighting for working families, that
we were paying attention to low and moderate-income neighborhoods rather than
just downtown or the big-money interests. In fact, I went to war with virtually
every part of the ruling class in Burlington during my years as mayor. People
understood that; they said, “You know what? Bernie is standing with us. We’re
going to stand with him.” The result is that large numbers of people who
previously had not participated in the political process got involved. And that’s
what we have to do for the whole country.
I think one of the great tragedies that
we face today politically, above and beyond the simple economic reality of the
collapse of the middle-class, more people living in poverty, growing gap
between the rich and poor, the high cost of education—all those objective,
painful realities in American society—the more significant reality from a
political perspective is that most people have given up on the political
process. They understand the political deck is stacked against them. They think
there is no particular reason for them to come out and vote—and they don’t.
So much of what [media-coverage of]
politics is about today is personality politics. It’s gossip: Chris Christie’s
weight or Hillary’s latest hairdo. But the real issue is how do you bring tens
of millions of working-class and middle-class people together around an agenda
that works for them? How do we make politics relevant to their lives? That’s
going to involve some very, very radical thinking. At the end of the day, it’s
not just going to be decisions from Washington. It really means empowering, in
a variety of ways, ordinary people in the political process. To me, when you
talk about the need for a political revolution, it is not just single-payer health
care, it’s not just aggressive action on climate change,
it’s not just creating the millions of jobs that we need, it is literally
empowering people to take control over their lives. That’s clearly a lot harder
to do than it is to talk about, but that’s what the political revolution is
about.
One of the things that I find most
disturbing—in fact, beyond comprehension—is that the Democrats now lose by a
significant number the votes of white working-class people. How can that be?
When you have a Republican Party that wants to destroy Social Security,
Medicare, Medicaid, ect., ect., why are so many people voting against their own
economic interests? It happens because the Democrats have not been strong in
making it clear which side they are on, not been strong in taking on Wall
Street and corporate America, which is what Roosevelt did in the 1930s.
So, to me, what politics is about is not
just coming up with ideas and a legislative program here in Washington—you need
to do those things—but it’s about figuring out how you involve people in the
political process, how you empower them. It ain’t easy, but that is, in fact,
what has to be done. The bad news is that people like the Koch brothers can
spend huge sums of money to create groups like the Tea Party.
The good news is that, once people understand the right-wing extremist ideology
of the Koch brothers, they are not going to go along with their policies. In
terms of fundamental economic issues: job creation, a high minimum wage,
progressive taxation, affordable college education—the vast majority of people
are on our side.
One of the goals that I would have, politically,
as a candidate for president of the United States is to reach out to the
working-class element of the Tea Party and explain to them exactly who is
funding their organization—and explain to them that, on virtually every issue,
the Koch brothers and the other funders of the Tea Party are way out of step
with what ordinary people want and need.
You have made it very clear that you
have no taste for personality politics. But a part of why you are thinking of
running for president has to be a sense that the prospective Democratic
candidates are unlikely to do that or to do that effectively.
Yes.
Is it your sense that Hillary Clinton,
the clear front-runner at this point, is unlikely to do that?
Look, I am not here to be attacking
Hillary Clinton. I have known Hillary Clinton for a number of years; I knew her
when she was First Lady a little bit, got to know her a little bit better when
she was in the Senate. I like Hillary; she is very, very intelligent; she
focuses on issues. But I think, sad to say, that the Clinton type of politics
is not the politics certainly that I’m talking about. We are living in the
moment in American history where the problems facing the country, even if you
do not include climate change, are more severe than at any time since the Great
Depression. And if you throw in climate change, they are more severe.
So the same old same old [Clinton
administration Secretary of the Treasury] Robert Rubin type of economics, or
centrist politics, or continued dependence on big money, or unfettered free-trade,
that is not what this country needs ideologically. That is not the type of
policy that we need. And it is certainly not going to be the politics that
galvanizes the tens of millions of people today who are thoroughly alienated
and disgusted with the status quo. People are hurting, and it is important for
leadership now to explain to them why they are hurting and how we can grow the
middle class and reverse the economic decline of so many people. And I don’t
think that is the politics of Senator Clinton or the Democratic establishment….
People want to hear an alternative set of policies that says to the American
people: with all of this technology, with all of this productivity, the truth
of the matter is that the average person in this country should be living
better than ever before—not significantly worse economically than was the case
thirty years ago. That’s what we need. That’s what I want to talk about… I
think that the class message, that in this great country, especially with all kinds
of new technology and increased productivity, that we can in fact provide a
decent standard for all people, I think that resonates in fifty states in
America. I think what people are looking for is leadership that is prepared to
take on the big money interests (to deliver that message). That’s not what
we’re seeing, by and large, from most Democrats.
Are they missing something?
I think so. My experience and my
political instinct tells me that a lot of the discussions about 2016 are
minimizing the profound disgust that people are having now with the status
quo—and they’re desperate for a message that addresses that disgust. If I run,
I’m not going to be raising hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. I
think I have the capability of raising a lot of money and that’s important, but
that at the end of the day is not going to be what’s most important. What’s
most important is this idea of a political revolution—rallying the working
families of this country around a vision that speaks to their needs. People
need to understand that, if we are prepared to stand up to Wall Street and the
big-money interests, we can create a nation that works for all Americans, and
not just the handful of billionaires.
John Nichols is the author, with Robert
W. McChesney, of Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is
Destroying America (Nation Books), for which Senator Bernie Sanders wrote an
introduction.
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