This story first appeared in Burlington, Vermont-based newsweekly Seven Days, which is chronicling Sen. Sanders’ political career from 1972 to the present at BernieBeat.com. Like Bernie Beat on Facebook for the latest on the campaign, or follow Bernie Beat on Twitter.
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ernie Sanders became impossible to ignore this summer. On July 1, as 10,000 people cheered and chanted his name, the 73-year-old U.S. senator from Vermont stepped onto a stage in a Madison, Wisconsin, arena and took his place behind a wooden podium. He raised his right arm to wave at a sea of supporters and embraced his wife, Jane, with his left. Then, peering up at the distant nosebleed seats, Sanders did something unusual: He grinned. “Whoa,” he said.
Whoa, indeed. In the 43 years since Sanders first ran for office, skeptics have doubted him at every turn. They never believed he could serve as mayor, defeat an incumbent congressman or chair a senate committee. Well before he entered the presidential race in April, Beltway pundits had long since written him off as an also-ran—a latter-day Dennis Kucinich. But by the time Sanders arrived in Madison at the start of a three-state, four-day tour of the Midwest, CNN had declared it the “summer of Sanders.” By the time he departed, new polls and fundraising reports showed him gaining on Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton. And in perhaps the clearest validation, reporters who’d been asking Sanders about Clinton in every last interview started asking Clinton about Sanders. At Wisconsin’s Veterans Memorial Coliseum, the senator let loose a few more “whoas” as he scanned the crowd of mostly white faces holding blue and white “Bernie” signs. “In case you haven’t noticed,” he said, “there are a lot of people here.” He grinned again. But Sanders’ smile quickly faded. As he launched into an hour-long stump speech, any hint of optimism was supplanted by his dour assessment of modern America. The economy, he said, was rigged by greedy billionaires more interested in tax breaks than in feeding hungry children. Republicans held a “warped view of family values” and had “gotten away with murder for too many years.” His opponents would exploit a corrupt political system to defeat him, while a shallow news media treated the democratic process like a popularity contest. “The greed of corporate America and the billionaire class has got to end, and we are going to end it for them!” he shouted. “Ber-nie! Ber-nie! Ber-nie!” the crowd chanted. No matter how Sanders fares in the nation’s never-ending presidential tryouts, this was the moment his campaign became real. No candidate to date had attracted so many supporters
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is drawing the biggest crowds, but does he have a shot at the White House?
FEATURE STORY
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ARTS&CULTURE
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ART OF THE STATE
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under one roof, as the senator himself triumphantly observed. But with success comes scrutiny. A super PAC allied with third-place Democratic rival Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor, had already trained its sights on Sanders, airing a negative television ad focused on the Vermonter’s mixed record on gun control. And now that Sanders has gotten Clinton’s attention, he’s sure to face incoming fire from perhaps the most formidable campaign apparatus ever assembled by a nonincumbent presidential candidate. But Sanders, a former long-distance runner, has been training for this race all his life. His sneakers are laced—and he’s ready to run. ••• Sanders should’ve been pleased the next day when he reached Fort Dodge, Iowa—a 25,000-person town with an economy based on corn and gypsum. This was, after all, one of the most successful weeks of his three-and-a-half decades in office. After filling the Madison arena the night before, he had lured 600 people to a breakfast speech that morning in Rochester, Minnesota. Hours earlier, Quinnipiac University had released a new poll showing that he’d more than doubled his support in Iowa in the previous month, from 15 to 33 percent. And his own campaign had announced he’d raised an impressive $15 million in his first two months in the race. Despite the good news, the senator sounded like he had an ax to grind. He repeatedly ripped into the news media that afternoon during an 80-minute town hall meeting in an auditorium at Iowa Central Community College. “The media regards politics as either a baseball game or a soap opera,” he said. Yet the most recent coverage of his ascendant campaign has been fawning and uncritical. The national political media has appeared eager to replace the tired storyline of Clintonian dominance. But Sanders surely understands the cyclical nature of a long presidential nominating contest, and he knows that what goes up must come down.
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MUSICBEAT
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NIGHTCLUBS/CASINOS
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THIS WEEK
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MISCELLANY
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AUGUST 27, 2015
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