What Sanders Fans Don't Get About Bernie

There are two things that Bernie Sanders fans, far too many of them, are not getting. And if they’re not getting it, you can be sure most other Americans -- most critically, the ones whose support is necessary for Sanders to win the nomination and the White House -- don’t get them either.

The first is tactical:

1.    If you’re knocking Hillary Clinton as a person (or any other candidate, really), you’re not doing what Bernie does or wants.

Sanders has run the most gracious campaign for national office in modern memory. He has complimented his opponent, sincerely and without sarcasm or snark, multiple times over the campaign. As he told NBC’s “This Week” back on Nov. 8, “…on her worst day, Hillary Clinton will be a better candidate and President than the Republican candidate on his best day.” He has repeated this in subsequent debates with her.

Mostly, he focuses on where we’ve gone wrong as a nation, his goals, and the job to be done, both in terms of winning the nomination and the November vote, but mostly where this country needs to go to become stronger and better. He has a vision and sticks to it.

The common wisdom -- handed down by highly paid election consultants -- has been that to win, you have to go dirty. The trick of course is not to appear to be going dirty; you get your supporters, ostensibly independent contributors, and strategists, to do the work while you, the candidate, pretend to be above the fray.

As in so much else, Sanders is pretty much what he appears to be. He doesn’t say one thing and do another; he states where he stands and sticks by it. Even Republican politicians, conservative commentators, and polls agree on that (although, let’s be honest: they could afford to be generous as long as they believed he wasn’t going to be the Democratic nominee).

This has been his approach throughout his career. During the 1996 race for the House, Dick Armey, Newt Gingrich’s right-hand man, House Majority Leader, went to Vermont to campaign for Sanders’s opponent, Susan Sweetser. Presidential candidate Steve Forbes, House Budget chair John Kasich (there’s a familiar name), and Republican convention keynote speaker Susan Molinari also showed up to campaign against Sanders.

The NRA poured money into the state to defeat him. The National Right to Work Organization, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, and the National Federation of Independent Businesses had Sanders on their “hit list.” The Wall Street Journal published an editorial against Sanders. The Republican National Committee funded Sweetser to the tune of $153,000.

That’s an extraordinary amount of opposition to a Congressman in a tiny Northeastern state. Also, it was a three-way race: Sanders wasn’t even the Democratic candidate, but an Independent. A Democrat named Jack Long was also running against him.

Sweetser’s TV blitz portrayed Sanders as “out of touch, a fringe-type who consorts with out-of-state leftwing extremists,” according to political columnist Peter Freyne. Her campaign hired a private investigator to dig up dirt on Sanders. This backfired because the investigator contacted Sanders’s ex-wife Deborah Messing, who is on friendly terms with Bernie and resented having her privacy invaded when the story hit the news and Sweetser’s campaign denied it was responsible.

Pollsters showed Sanders losing ground to Sweetser. In response, media consultant Tad Devine produced an ad for Sanders that was “not quite what we had in mind,” Sanders wrote in his 1997 political memoir, Outsider in the House. Bernie and his wife Jane agreed that, while it was by no means a negative ad, it still seemed “too hard, and we ask him to soften it.” Eventually they decided not to run it at all.

“I have never run a negative TV ad in my life,” Sanders wrote then. “I have never run a TV ad for the express purpose of attacking an opponent.” Attacking fellow citizens as individuals is not part of the greater message of bringing them together. Sanders has worked with political enemies to find common ground all his career. He had to, because as an Independent he was a party of one in Congress.

Saying nasty things about Clinton’s character is just poor tactics: It’s not going to make undecideds feel any warmer toward Sanders, and it’s not what Bernie wants. Because whether he wins or loses, he will be working with these people … and so will we, which brings us to the second and much bigger point that too many Sanders fans don’t get:

2. If Bernie is the Democratic nominee, and is elected President in November, nothing will change.

If you just vote for Bernie Sanders, nothing will happen. You won’t see three weeks’ family leave, or single-payer health care coverage, or tuition-free college, or Wall Street thieves go to prison any time soon.

That’s because Bernie is not the political revolution. Electing him President is not the goal. He won’t be able to do any of the things he says this country needs if most of us aren’t there to back him up every step of the way.

We have to vote out state and local officials who don’t reflect our views -- especially the ones who have been digging in their heels against President Obama for the past eight years on everything from raising the minimum wage to giving Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland his nomination hearing.

We have to let sympathetic politicians know we’re behind them if and when they take politically risky stands against the NRA or yet another wasteful and pointless war in the Middle East, and we have to keep pressure on them to do the hard tasks.

Bernie won’t be able to do this alone. He’s got to have us behind him: not only the people who have voted faithfully in elections, and maybe even donated a little money in the past, but all the Americans who have never voted before 2016 and are enthused about Bernie.

The revolution Sanders is talking about is the mammoth but critical task of shifting the direction this country has wrongly been headed since at least 1980, when it elected a President who deregulated corporate activities, fought unions, cut taxes to the wealthy, sold nuclear and biological weapons manufacturing equipment to Saddam Hussein, and assured us we needed “Star Wars” technology to beat a nation that was already on the verge of collapse due to its own internal contradictions.

Or maybe our wrong turn goes back to 1968 when the U.S. elected a President who conspired to use fearful, conservative voters who had always voted Democratic in the South to win elections for reactionary Republican candidates. (See Nixon: Southern Strategy. Just last month, Harper’s magazine published an excerpt from a 22-year-old interview with Nixon aide John Ehrlichman in which he admitted the “war on drugs” was a racist political ploy to demonize blacks and antiwar activists and reelect the President).

If you treat the election as if it’s a consumer purchase -- I pay with my vote, and I get goodies in return -- it ain’t gonna happen. When he talks about a “political revolution,” Bernie is asking everyone to do more for their country as a citizen, to love it actively and help make it what it should be, over the long run. Partly inspired by Occupy Wall Street, he’s trying to lead a minority push from the left, the way the Tea Party came to wield inordinate power from the right over the last eight years.

Sanders may not win the Democratic nomination or the White House. But the good news is that his political revolution will go on. He’ll continue to fight for it in Congress, the way he has for decades in a stealth way until he went big and national last year.

If you vote for him and then go back to your life of consumption, entertainment, and grumbling about how government doesn’t work and it’s a rigged game, then you will have failed him. Together, we can beat the powers that be, even if Sanders loses this election.

If you don’t get that, you don’t get Bernie.