Wayne O'Leary

Getting Bernie

Yogi Berra said it best: “It ain’t over till it’s over.” And when it comes to the lingering trauma of 2016 pressing down on the fragile psyche of the Democratic Party, it’s far from over. The intra-party cold war between the Berniecrats and the Clintonites, between progressive populism and incrementalist centrism, never really ended, and it’s begun heating up again in earnest.

On the surface, Democrats appear united around the proposition that Donald Trump must be defeated at all costs, that the only issue in the primaries will be which potential nominee can best do the job. This seems to be the basis for Joe Biden’s early broad appeal as the candidate who can, it is believed, attract votes across the political spectrum without regard to age, class, race, party, belief system, or any other variable.

Given this mindset, which is especially prevalent among establishment Democrats of the centrist persuasion, ideology will be expected to take a distant back seat. There will be no further idealistic talk about democratic socialism, economic populism, or any other line of dangerous leftist thought.

Notions about expansive government programs (Medicare for All, Green New Deal) will give way to lowered expectations and inoffensive minimalist initiatives of the sort Bill Clinton pioneered in the 1990s and bequeathed, as the standard Democratic M.O., to Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and (the conventional wisdom holds) to its latest practitioner, Joe Biden. We’ll all be “progressives” now, whatever that is, and truthfully, it can be whatever you want it to be.

Above all, the pragmatic centrism suddenly dominating the Democratic presidential scene requires shunting Sen. Bernie Sanders, presumed next in line for nomination based on prior performance (23 primary or caucus victories in 2016), to the sidelines. A Sanders nomination means thinking big, expressing clear ideological differences, confronting monied interests within and without the party, and running on a frankly populist platform; it’s a scary prospect to the forces of bipartisanship and national reconciliation backing Biden’s “unity” candidacy and Pete Buttigieg’s equally content-free generational campaign. (Mayor Pete is firmly ensconced as the next-gen moderate alternative, should Biden stumble.)

The consensus establishment picks, Biden and Buttigieg, are short on specifics. Not important, declares the glibly facile Mayor Pete, whose signature campaign line tells us all we need to know on that score. Facts, figures, positions, and proposals can’t be allowed to intrude, he says, “before we’ve vindicated the values that animate our policies.” You say you don’t know what that means? Well, welcome to the noncommittal center, where personality and a compelling narrative trump everything else.

The problem for Bernie Sanders (and Elizabeth Warren, too) is an excess of specificity. People know where he stands; that’s a risky proposition, so he must be stopped. There’s more to it than that, of course. Key veterans of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign view Sanders as a spoiler, the Ralph Nader of 2016, who kept Hillary from her appointed rendezvous with history by daring to contest that year’s Democratic primaries, thereby softening her up for Trump. A Clinton denied coronation is a sight to behold, and so the long knives are out for the Vermont senator.

The first outward hint of a movement to derail Sanders came to light in mid-April, when the New York Times swallowed its anti-Bernie bias long enough to report on the internal party dustup. The initiator was the Center for American Progress (CAP), a centrist think tank funded by the likes of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg with ties to the Clintons and the Democratic establishment. Founded by longtime Clinton ally John Podesta and presently run by former Hillary aide Neera Tanden, the CAP is dedicated to arresting the Sanders-inspired leftward shift of the Democratic Party.

CAP’s website ThinkProgress has been recently engaged in subtle attacks on left-leaning presidential candidates Sanders, Warren, and Cory Booker to which Sanders has responded critically by letter, accusing CAP of smear tactics. Complicating the situation is a personal and ideological animus between Tanden, noted for a belligerent style, and Bernie Sanders’ new campaign manager Faiz Shakir dating back to the 2016 campaign, when Shakir apparently pledged insufficient fealty to the Clinton organization.

Also prominent in the simmering row is the venomous David Brock, another 2016 Clinton operative notorious for hitting below the belt, whom the Times quotes as believing a full-blown anti-Sanders campaign should begin “sooner rather than later” and organizing accordingly. Other players in the get-Sanders cabal include deep-pocketed Democratic donor Bernard Schwartz, an avowed Sanders antagonist, who has sponsored secretive party dinners in New York and Washington to discuss the Bernie threat. In addition to CAP’s Tanden, reported attendees have included House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, former governor of Virginia (and old Clinton hand) Terry McAuliffe, and the fair-haired Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

Buttigieg, who seems at times a stalking-horse for Joe Biden, is playing a curious role in the stop-Sanders effort. In late April, he reportedly told a New Hampshire audience that Sanders and Trump were opposite sides of the same coin – disruptive threats to the system and equally counterproductive. Sanders, he implied, was too old (Biden apparently not) and unelectable as a democratic socialist to boot.

All this ultimately redounds to the benefit of ex-veep Biden, Buttigieg himself being too young and inexperienced to go the distance. If Biden is, indeed, to be the nominee, the consensus view at the moment, he has some serious explaining to do. His past senatorial votes alone are problematic: for repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, for the Iraq war resolution, for NAFTA, for permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) with China, for the prosecutorial 1994 crime bill, for the banker-friendly 2005 bankruptcy reform bill — a two-decade catalogue of centrist mistakes. And on health care, he’s nowhere.

Biden has also made it painfully obvious that, in contrast to Sanders, he has a comfortable affinity for large Democratic campaign donors, and they for him; it’s a weakness he shares with Buttigieg. With both, you get a return to the old politics of big money.

In the end, it may come down to Biden versus Bernie, centrism versus populism, a third Obama term or something new. If so, the naked stop-Bernie movement could come back to bite the Democrats. Both candidates have pledged mutual support, but their supporters have not.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2019

Populist.com