At the heart of Bernie Sanders’ campaign is a promise to bring about sweeping change. But on some of the top issues at the center of Sanders’ presidential bid — health care, taking on the big banks and corporations, fighting for rights, raising attention to income inequality — the revolution has been slow in the 25 years he’s spent in Congress.

During the Democratic debate in Miami on Wednesday, Sanders and Hillary Clinton each repeatedly turned to the Vermonter’s Senate record. Clinton hit him for voting against the Troubled Asset Relief Program II bailout, arguing that “if everyone had voted as he voted, we would not have saved the auto industry,” and she attacked him for voting against the 2007 immigration reform bill.


“Madam Secretary, I will match my record against yours any day of the week,” Sanders responded, in one of the many moments he brought up his Senate work.

He was on the committee that wrote Obamacare, he said, and he introduced what he called “the most comprehensive climate change legislation in the history of the Senate.”

“I have been criticized a lot for thinking big, for believing we can do great things as a nation,” Sanders said.

Rarely has that thinking translated into actual legislation or left a significant imprint on it, according to Democratic lawmakers and staffers who have worked with him.

Several top Democrats say the difference is a complete contrast to another progressive, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has had a much clearer impact on the financial and inequality discussions in just the three years she’s been in the Senate.

As for taking on Wall Street, one of the issues Sanders is most identified with on the campaign trail, former Democratic Rep. Barney Frank said Warren’s done much more to protect the landmark Dodd-Frank financial regulation law in the years since its passage.

“She has been more effective at blocking efforts to weaken the bill. [Sanders’]mind-set is that there’ll be a revolution,” said Frank, adding that he doesn’t remember Sanders being involved in any of the affordable housing work he did in the House. “He plants his flag and expects that someday everyone will see he was right.”

Liberal Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), a Hillary Clinton supporter who describes herself as a big Sanders fan, struggled when asked ahead of last month’s debate in Milwaukee if she could point to examples of the Vermont senator’s actually influencing the outcome of legislation, other than the much praised bipartisan Veterans Affairs reform he led as chairman of that committee in the Senate.

“Um,” she said, pausing for a full eight seconds while thinking, “I’m sure I could. In terms of the things that he talks the most about, is when he was chair of the Veterans Affairs committee. But he actually compromised on a whole heck of a lot. Back in … it’s not coming to my mind right now.”

On the progressive causes that are his core, an episode during the Affordable Care Act debate provides insight into his approach to lawmaking, say those who have worked with him.

While sitting down with then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who was meeting with members of his conference one on one during the difficult days in 2009, Sanders told the then-Senate majority leader not to worry: He was going to vote for Obamacare, though he would continue speaking publicly as if he wouldn’t so he could continue to rail against the absence of a public option.

At the time, Ted Kennedy was dying and Reid was nervously locking down votes. Sanders assured him he wasn’t going to be one of the problem senators.

The Vermont senator’s approach seemed to capture the essence of his Capitol Hill style: more influential than his detractors often give him credit for, more of an inside player than his supporters tend to admit or than he likes to project, though often less consequential in others’ retelling of events than in his own version. In his 16 years in the House, he was generally dismissed as being off on his own and irrelevant to the Democratic conference he caucused with and its leadership, people involved at the time say, but in the smaller, more collaborative Senate, he’s been much more of a factor.

Frank, former chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, offered an unblinking assessment.

“His legislative record was to state the ideological position he took on the left, but with the exception of a few small things, he never got anything done,” said Frank, who has endorsed Clinton. “Senators are not impotent.”

To hear Sanders aides describe the previously unreported meeting with Reid about Obamacare, Sanders had a condition for his support. Reid aides and others familiar with the conversation remember it as more of a suggestion: community health centers, to address lack of medical access in urban and rural areas.

Either way, Reid took the idea back to his staff, while Sanders pushed it from his spot on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Reid put $10 billion in the bill for facilities across the country funded by the federal government that don’t require insurance and charge based on ability to pay.

When Reid called with the news, Sanders told him that was going to be more important than anything else in the bill.

The Vermont senator often mentions his success on community health centers when he talks about health care on the campaign trail. While he rails about tearing down Obamacare and starting over, Sanders leaves out his early assurances of support to Reid behind closed doors (at one point during the committee markup, then-New Hampshire Republican Sen. Judd Gregg asked him whether he was going to vote for the bill, given all the complaints he was making about the lack of the public option, and Sanders said he wasn’t sure).

People who worked on Obamacare in the White House and in the HELP Committee say that they never paid much attention to him. “His contribution was more than that of many senators. But he did not help get the bill passed or help shape its architecture,” said Topher Spiro, a top HELP Committee staffer who helped draft the bill and is now a vice president for health policy at the Center for American Progress.

“His support for the most consequential legislation in years was lukewarm,” said Spiro, noting that in his years of work on the bill, he does not remember a conversation with Sanders on an issue.

That read gets Sanders wrong, say aides who insist the community health centers essentially created a mini-public option and are a lot closer to what he wanted than anyone else would have been able to get.

“Sen. Sanders does not start the conversation off with half a loaf. He starts the conversation off with a full loaf, and then negotiates from there,” said Warren Gunnels, the senator’s senior policy adviser and a member of his campaign staff.

“He had certain things that he was particularly focused on, and one of those was the expansion of community health centers,” said former Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), one of the top members of the HELP Committee at the time. “He was actively involved, and he was putting forth suggestions.”





Bingaman said that was similar to the role that he often admired Sanders for playing on the Energy Committee, where the Vermont senator would talk about “a lot of different proposals” related to solar panels and renewable energy, and sometimes direct attention to them.

“He didn’t win all his amendments, but he certainly championed the issues that he feels strongly about,” Bingaman said.

As far as taking on the banks and large financial interests — the central theme of Sanders’ 2016 campaign — there isn’t anything nearly as significant as community health centers in his record that his staff or anyone else can point to.

“He was not a major participant in the financial reform debates, either in the Clinton administration or in the Obama administration,” said Michael Barr, a Treasury official during the Clinton and Obama administrations who helped write the Dodd-Frank financial regulations. “Broadly speaking, I think he’s been consistent in his politics. But when it came to the substance of financial reform, he just wasn’t that involved, except on the Audit the Fed amendment.”

That amendment, for which Sanders partnered with then-Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), would have required all of the Federal Reserve’s financial dealings with institutions to be made public, sparking major concerns from banks and other senators. Eventually, then-Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) collaborated on a reduced version that did become part of the Dodd-Frank bill.

Paul at the time complained Sanders had “sold out.” Gunnels credits the compromise for changing the entire dynamic of the financial regulations and exposing $16 trillion in low-interest loans made by the Federal Reserve, making it a major accomplishment even if not central to the bill.

“I would say that Audit the Fed was a historic achievement that took countless hours from the senator and countless hours from his staff,” Gunnels said.

Others involved with the development of Dodd-Frank say they don’t remember hearing from Sanders, or being asked for briefings by him or worrying that his vote was at all in the air.

Frank, the leader of the bill in the House, said that he remembers Sanders coming up in conversations only when Dodd said he was proud of getting Sanders to back down.

“He has always talked about revolution, but on Dodd-Frank and Obamacare, he left the pitchfork at home and joined the Democrats because he knew what we were doing was more important than getting half a loaf or no loaf at all,” said one top Senate aide.

Aides to President Barack Obama and to other progressive Democratic senators have trouble pointing to much collaboration with Sanders over the past seven years. As people on both Obama’s and Sanders’ staffs acknowledged when the president hosted the senator in the Oval Office in late January, the two had rarely spoken one-on-one before.

People around Sanders tend to place more importance on some of the interactions than do others who were involved. Asked for an example of Sanders’ influencing the White House on progressive economics, Sanders staffers pointed to another previously unreported meeting the senator hosted in his Capitol Hill office in late 2013 with White House chief of staff Denis McDonough, attended also by Democratic Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. The staffers said the meeting was aimed at improving communication between Senate progressives and the White House, but quickly centered on urging Obama to sign an executive order raising the minimum wage for federal contractors to $10.10 per hour.

Progressives had been pressuring Obama to move for months, including a protest outside the White House that Sanders attended. In his State of the Union address the following January, Obama announced he’d do it.

Sanders aides say they believe the McDonough meeting was the tipping point by raising the conversation at the highest levels. The White House says the reality is that the president already wanted to and was prepared to raise the minimum wage for federal contractors, but knowing of the strong support in Congress was a factor in the decision to move forward.

Speaking about his consistent support of gay rights, Sanders often reminds people he was one of the small minority who voted against the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. Aides also point to a 1995 floor speech during the debate about the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, when he blasted then-Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-Calif.) for referring to “homos in the military.”

“You have insulted thousands of men and women who have put their lives on the line,” Sanders said at the time.

LGBT advocates and others involved with those fights over the years credit Sanders for his support but say he was not really involved in the efforts beyond voting the way they hoped.

“In my entire time doing work for the LGBT community, I never met Bernie Sanders,” said Joe Solmonese, a former president of the Human Rights Campaign.

On repealing DADT, for example, Solmonese said Sanders was never involved in either the daily strategy sessions or the public relations push that led to the policy being killed in 2010.

“It doesn’t take away from the fact that he’s 100 percent in his voting record,” Solmonese said. “Anybody willing to step up and sit at the table and plan a path forward was more than welcome.”

In the House, leadership aides say Sanders was generally off on his own, essentially ignored by leadership and largely invisible on the floor. In the Senate, where policy discussions are held weekly during conference lunches, Sanders has consistently pushed for more attention to income inequality. Senators and leadership aides say that’s influenced their thinking and, to an extent, their actions.

“On the issues that are his bread and butter issues on the campaign trail, he’s certainly altered the conversation, but in terms of the change and the result, I haven’t seen a lot of it in three years,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who serves with Sanders on the Budget Committee and has endorsed Clinton, though he also describes himself as a Sanders fan.

That’s the same amount of time Kaine has served with Warren. Kaine said the contrast is clear. She’s influenced the debate “dramatically.”

John Bresnahan contributed to this report.