![]() He may have lost a nomination, but he won the argument over what today’s Democratic Party is: more taxes, more spending, more borrowing.” He’s been the champion of the $15 minimum wage that his party now almost universally embraces.Īs the Prince of Darkness, Mitch McConnell, said last year of Sanders’s influence: “Bernie Sanders is really happy. During the early days of the pandemic, even Republican members of Congress realized they needed to shovel money out the door to keep things going. Since it turned out that Bernie’s ideas were more popular than many realized, he got Democrats out of their deficit-hawk mode and convinced them that it was OK to spend money to help people. Old orthodoxies about government spending and foreign policy have crumbled as a result of the unceasing efforts by an old socialist.” “While Bernie Sanders will never be president, his two campaigns have transformed the Democratic Party and this country. The author sums up with a trenchant point: Bernie may never see “the promised land,” but he did win. He has a fundamental belief that he could lead an uncompromising movement that would challenge those who ran the Democratic Party while also leading that same institution, one he steadfastly refused to join.” Bernie listened to Obama, but it was clear to me he never accepted that premise. Rabin-Havt (whose brother, Raphi, worked with me at The Times for a spell) writes: “Obama continued, making the point that to win the Democratic nomination, Bernie would have to widen his appeal and convince the party to back him - which would mean being a different type of politician and a different type of candidate than he wanted to be. Kings have to make choices prophets don’t. When Sanders met with Barack Obama at his Georgetown office in 2018 to tell him he was thinking about running for president again, Obama offered this advice: “Bernie, you are an Old Testament prophet - a moral voice for our party giving us guidance. The rapper had also endorsed him in 2016, sending out an Instagram video in which she instructed her followers to “Vote for daddy Bernie, bitch.” Rabin-Havt tells about the time the candidate happily Facetimed with Cardi B., who was wearing a white bathrobe. He informed me in no uncertain terms that romance with Jane was beside the point Medicare for All was the point!ĭuring that run, Bernie was game for anything as long as it promoted his causes. 14 and asked him what he had gotten his wife, Jane, for Valentine’s Day. I had my own Bernie swatting moment when I interviewed him during the 2020 primaries on Feb. “Bernie would have been more likely to stop for a teacher, a nurse, or a mechanic,” Rabin-Havt writes. The former Disney chairman and DreamWorks C.E.O., and a prolific fund-raiser and donor, introduced himself. for the second debate, Bernie was stopped on the street by Jeff Katzenberg. “Barely paying attention, Bernie used his right hand to swat Biden away.” “As they were about to go onstage, Biden rubbed Bernie down the full length of his back with his hands,” Rabin-Havt writes. When staffers at Jim Clyburn’s World Famous Fish Fry in South Carolina insisted that all the candidates go onstage in matching Clyburn T-shirts for their speeches, Bernie balked at the goofy suck-up idea.īefore the first debate in Miami during the Democratic primaries in 2019, Joe Biden was standing right behind Bernie as the candidates were having their makeup touched up. I don’t need four bottles of water in my room.” “Ari,” he told his aide, “I’m not the president of the United States. Once, in Bloomington, Ind., the Vermont senator got grouchy because the advance staff left four big bottles of water in his hotel room. I relish hearing about what Rabin-Havt calls “Bernie’s natural impatience” with the frivolous - pretty much everything except the sweeping changes he wants in the country. In “The Fighting Soul: On the Road With Bernie Sanders,” the former adviser offers an intimate portrait of his cranky boss, writing about everything from Sanders’s famous mittens, to his love of picket lines and Motown songs, to his distaste for “the inane droning of cable news commentators,” to his prescient fear that Donald Trump was “nuts” and would upend democracy. I work for a 78-year-old Jewish socialist, who had a heart attack a few months ago and has won the popular vote in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada.” With an expletive, he added, “That’s remarkable.” When a reporter asked the deputy campaign manager for Bernie Sanders why he was so happy, he replied, “Simple. WASHINGTON - Ari Rabin-Havt could not stop smiling in the winter of 2020.
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