Posts published in “Campaigns and Elections”

Bernie’s surge in Iowa and his steadfast core of support nationwide mask his extreme left-wing views. Most political reporting, after all, is focused on the competitive horserace and not on matters of substantive public policy. This has resulted in the norming or legitimization of Bernie’s far-left ideas, as voters are led to believe that the Vermont senator is just the latest in a long line of conventional Democratic presidential frontrunners.

Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Bernie, remember, is an avowed socialist fully committed to the redistribution of wealth, punishing and punitive rates of taxation, government control and coercion, public-sector monopolies, and American military withdrawal and retreat.

In short, Bernie is no JFK. He isn’t even Jimmy Carter or Barack Obama. How, then, did we arrive at this improbable and frightening moment where Bernie has become a bona fide presidential frontrunner who might well capture the Democratic presidential nomination and perhaps even the Presidency of the United States?

In an illuminating piece published today, National Review’s Jim Geraghty helps answer this question. Bernie, Geraghty points out, has led a charmed political life marked by incredible luck and a series of one unlikely success after another.

For example, Bernie first ran for office “in late 1971 because he volunteered and no one else did… He received one percent of the vote,” but gained valuable political experience. “In 1980, when he first ran for mayor of the town [of Burlington, Vermont, Bernie] won by 10 votes over a wildly overconfident five-term incumbent who ‘hardly bothered to campaign.’

“…In 1988,” Geraghty notes, Bernie “ran for Vermont’s open U.S. House seat and lost, in what could have been the end of his political career.” But alas, he ran again two years later in a six-way race.

The incumbent, Republican Peter Smith, had changed his mind on the so-called assault-weapons ban, infuriating gun owners and their political leaders. This led to an endorsement of the then-independent Sanders by . . . NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre. (“The gun vote brought us down,” Smith’s campaign manager later lamented.) Thus, with the help of the nation’s most powerful gun-rights group, Sanders was first elected to Congress. He’s been there ever since.

Yes, Bernie has been incredibly lucky. But as the old adage has it, you make your own luck. “Eighty percent of success is showing up,” explained Woody Allen.

Bernie has shown up, and he has competed politically, often when no one else would. Consequently, he is today knocking on the door to the Democratic presidential nomination, and he may well push the door open in Iowa Feb. 3. We’ll see.

The Trump Resemblance. In this way, Bernie bears a striking political resemblance to Donald Trump, another extraordinarily lucky politician who won (in 2016) largely just by showing up and competing politically. But like Trump, Bernie has his own peculiar ideas that run crosscurrent to the political mainstream.

We don’t hear much about these ideas because political reporting is what it is, and because of the cult of personality that surrounds “The Bern.” But make no mistake: Bernie’s radical positions are the essence of who and what he is politically. And precisely because his ideas are ideologically moored and grounded, they threaten to radically disrupt American life in ways Trump never dreamed of or even thought possible.

Trump’s peculiarities, after all, are his utter and complete self-absorption and narcissistic personality disorder. Bernie’s peculiarities, by contrast, have nothing to do with personality and everything to do with ideology, and, for that reason, are arguably far more dangerous. We will feel the burn, indeed.