Bye-Bye Bernie

Bye-Bye Bernie

I want to write a piece about the resurgence of Bernie Sanders in the latest polls. I want it to be a well-balanced discussion about the man, the politics and supporters that stalwartly stand behind the guy. I was torn between this title and the more obvious Weekend at Bernie’s. Since I’m publishing this piece on Sunday, the alternate title seemed initially more appropriate, but it was just too easy so I chose to go a bit retro with the Bye-Bye Bernie for reasons I will develop.

Bernie was bar-mitzvahed in Brooklyn in 1954, the year I was born. That makes it easy for me to imagine him as being thirteen years older than me. Somewhere between Midwood grade school, Brooklyn’s James Madison High School and starting in Brooklyn College, the track and basketball athlete lost two years on me and graduated from the University of Chicago in 1964 with a degree in political science. Not unlike other city boys, he hankered for the countryside, but that liberal Brooklyn mentality, honed razor-sharp in the socialistic hotbed of the University of Chicago progressive community kept him in the city for a while. His activist themes centered around racial equality, civil rights, socialism and non-violence. Bernie was a hippie’s hippie in the activist sense, doing so early in the turbulent decade of the 60’s when young people his age were still getting crewcuts and wearing poodle skirts.

Bernie’s activism and progressive agenda are honest, true and early. There is nothing Johnny-come-lately about his beliefs. He was there in D.C. when MLK gave his I Have a Dream speech. He was fighting police brutality in Chicago when no one was making Mayor Daley pay attention to political correctness. He was anti-war before the major Vietnam protesters even knew what was what. If you stop and think about all the progressive activism he advocated in the 60’s you quickly realize that we as a nation have pretty much adopted all of those norms into our mainstream thinking in one way or another. That doesn’t mean there aren’t pockets of bigotry, war-mongering and gun-culture thinking still hiding in the corners. But when Bernie forged his beliefs, he was out ahead of the trends and generally on the right side of them if we define righteousness by the standards we generally live by today.

New England is a funny place. There are equal quotients of hardscrabble conservatism bordering on Puritanism and liberal idealism of the ultimate granola-crunching order. I had the opportunity to witness this first hand several times in my life. I lived in south-central Maine for two and a half years and saw both the Appalachian attitudes of hillbillies as backward as any in Kentucky or West Virginia and, in my last year, at a snooty old-line prep school, where I saw the children of second-tier Boston Brahmin (the first-tier were at Philips Andover, Philips Exeter and Choate) preening and trying desperately to improve their social positioning through improved odds of admission to Harvard and Yale or at least Amherst or Tufts. I saw both ends of the conservative spectrum from the uneducated deplorables that lived on roadkill venison to the landed gentry of mill and shoemaking family fortunes who meant to keep themselves on the mountaintop. As for the liberal side of the equation, I’m not altogether sure how New England turned liberal. Maybe it was the Kennedy effect. Whatever caused it, it took root most noticeably in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Vermont. New Hampshire with its Live Free or Die libertarian attitude and Maine with its old saltiness were less convinced.

Anyway, Bernie found his way to Vermont in the late 60’s. He managed to find the most rural and least Brooklyn-like part of the state in what they call the Northeast Kingdom. This was one of the most progressive parts of the country and its hard to tell cause from effect as per Bernie and the Kingdom. He ran for office on a third party ticket for the Liberty Union Party and gummed up the political works enough to be noticed, but not enough to give him a job in politics. That was the moment when Bernie temporarily went bye-bye from politics and took jobs in journalism and not-for-profit management. But you can’t keep a good liberal man down in Vermont and he spent the 80’s as the mayor of Burlington working openly under the banner of socialism. By that time Bernie was a political phenomenon who spent a few years lecturing at Harvard before winning a Vermont Congressional seat in 1990. Since then there has been no stopping Bernie.

Sixteen years in the House and now fourteen so far in the Senate has made Bernie the longest serving Independent member of Congress. And all through that tenure Bernie has stood up for consumerism (specifically anti-repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which my firm, Bankers Trust, and I led the march to repeal), anti-wealth progressivism, both anti-gun legislation and pro-gun legislation (for his hunting constituents), anti-Patriot Act, anti-Iraq War, anti-bailout, anti-tax cuts, pro-veteran, pro-universal healthcare, pro-labor (especially living wage), and pro-climate change fixes. Bernie is a self-described Democratic Socialist in the vein of FDR and LBJ. He has garnered the support of the progressive fringe including AOC and Michael Moore among others.

Some say the Democratic Party stole the nomination from Bernie in 2016. He has been a top contender over the past year for the 2020 nomination having his share of setbacks ranging from wild-eyed Larry David SNL impersonations to a cardiac event. Bernie at 79 would be the oldest man ever elected President should he win in 2020. He would be nine years older than Trump and ten years older than Reagan. That would put him in office at an age older that 29 of the 40 dead presidents (72.5%) and mean that after two terms he would have outlived all but seven other Presidents.

There is so much to admire and disagree with in Bernie’s policy stands. The consistent progressive themes are all about making life better for the majority of people. There is no false liberalism threat here. It is genuine and consistent over sixty years and deserves a great deal of respect. I bought a Bernie T-shirt in 2016 which I thought was fun, not funny, just fun. I ran across it the other day in my clothes triage exercise. I can point to many troubling things about a Bernie candidacy. I am clearly troubled by his age and perhaps now his health. I did not agree with his anti-banking positions and his pro-gun, pro-hunting positions. Mostly, I am troubled by his supporters unyielding support to the detriment of displacing Donald Trump, which I and many others consider our biggest national problem. I know our problem is less Donald and more the alienation of those who support him. That is why I feel Bernie’s biggest drawback is that a democracy demands compromise and bringing factions to the middle. Bernie knows no middle ground just as his supports die hard.

All this tells me that as I hear that Bernie is back on top of the polls, just under Joe Biden, I want Bernie to go away. I love his passion, but he is no good for our country and I care more about country than ideology. So, please Bernie, go bye-bye.