Bernie Sanders's Campaign Isn't Over - August 7 & 14, 2017 Issue - The New Yorker

The Political Scene
August 7 & 14, 2017 Issue - The New Yorker
In Trump’s America, the Independent senator is fighting to win back the heartland for Democrats.

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5978f40efe4d9616c4bfd08d/master/w_649,c_limit/170807_r30352.jpg
Sanders is not a natural storyteller; his great political gift is his relentlessness.Illustration by Bendik Kaltenborn

Excerpts:

For decades, Sanders has argued for a single-payer health-care system, and he is getting ready to introduce a “Medicare for All” bill in the Senate. This summer, however, he assigned himself the task of leading the campaign against efforts, by Republicans in the House and the Senate, to repeal the Affordable Care Act. On the Sunday after the Fourth of July, as Senate Republicans prepared to release their bill, Sanders took a charter flight from Burlington to West Virginia and Kentucky, for a pair of hastily arranged rallies. He and his staff had chosen states whose Republican senators were pivotal in the health-care debate. Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, the Majority Leader, was shepherding the bill toward a vote without any public hearings. Rand Paul, of Kentucky, and Shelley Moore Capito, of West Virginia, were indicating that they might vote against it.

Sanders talked about the Senate bill’s likely effects in McConnell’s home state. “How do you throw two hundred and thirty thousand people off the health care they have without hesitation?” he asked. “It happens because the Democratic Party is incredibly weak in states like Kentucky. And so he doesn’t have to face the wrath of the voters.” But it wasn’t just the Democrats who were absent in Kentucky, he said; it was also a balanced press. “In many of these conservative states, you get a media that is all right wing.” One purpose of his visit, he said, was to generate local coverage, so that he could explain to ordinary people “what’s in the bloody legislation.”

In Washington, Sanders has been trying to build support for his single-payer bill. His recent progress may be the clearest measure of his influence on the Democratic Party. In the House, a majority of Democrats now support a version of Sanders’s bill, the Medicare for All Act (which Representative John Conyers, of Michigan, has proposed each year since 2003). Several prominent senators have expressed their support, including Kirsten Gillibrand, of New York, and Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts. Warren has said she believes that “now is the time for the next step—and the next step is single-payer.”

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/07/bernie-sanders-campaign-isnt-over