Bernie Sanders: A Man With a Cause

BY JOHN CASSIDY


Six days after formally entering the 2016 Presidential race, Senator Bernie Sanders is having some time of it. After attracting overflow crowds at a number of stops in Iowa late last week, Sanders moved on to Minnesota on Sunday, where he appeared at the Minneapolis American Indian Center and declared, “Our country belongs to all of our people and not just a handful of billionaires.” According to a report in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, about three thousand people turned out. A local television station estimated the number of attendees at four thousand.

Whatever the exact number was, the seventy-three-year-old from Vermont appears to be attracting bigger crowds than any other candidate, Democrat or Republican. With one recent national survey finding that fifteen per cent of likely Democratic voters support him, and a new Des Moines Register poll showing him picking up sixteen per cent of the Democratic vote in Iowa, the media is starting to accord him some serious attention. The Times, having initially failed to report Sanders’s formal announcement of his candidacy in its print edition, ran a front-page story on Friday about his appeal to senior citizens, and another piece over the weekend about the enthusiastic reception he was receiving in Iowa. Before speaking in Minneapolis on Sunday, Sanders appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” where he highlighted the “grotesque level of income and wealth inequality” in the U.S. and said, “I think we need a political revolution in this country.”

To be sure, not all of the Sanders coverage has been helpful to his campaign. Last week, Mother Jones, as an accompaniment to an interesting piece about his early years in left-wing politics, reprinted an article he wrote in 1972 for an alternative newspaper called the Vermont Freeman, the subject of which was male and female power relations, and sexual fantasies. One line in particular got quite a bit of media attention, including an explainer by NPR’s Danielle Kurtzleben. “A woman enjoys intercourse with her man—as she fantasizes being raped by 3 men simultaneously,” Sanders wrote. On “Meet the Press,” the host, Chuck Todd, asked the senator about the piece. Sanders described it as fiction, adding, “It was dealing with gender stereotypes, why some men like to oppress women, why other women like to be submissive. You know, something like ‘Fifty Shades of Grey.’ Very poorly written, forty-three years ago.”

While it is embarrassing to Sanders, the flap about his literary effort, which he wrote while trying to get by as a carpenter and freelance journalist, seems unlikely to have much lasting effect on his campaign. That’s partly because Sanders’s run for the White House isn’t based on his personal character, or even his record as a mayor, congressman, and U.S. senator. Sanders is running for a cause—a resurgent progressivism that was conceived during decades of wage stagnation and rising inequality, born during the great financial crisis of 2008, and announced on the political stage by the street protests of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the widespread public support they engendered.

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