Neera Tanden still feels the Bern, and — to her chagrin — so does Hillary Clinton.

Tanden, a longtime Clinton confidante and influential policy-politics-communications adviser, likes Sanders, respects his people (after dutifully detesting them in the primary) and helped broker the progressive policy deal that led to Bernie Sanders’ early summer surrender.


But even now, a month after the Vermont senator pledged his sincere if grumpy Philly fealty to the nominee, Tanden frets that the attacks Sanders made on Clinton during the primary have done irreparable damage by eroding trust and feeding Donald Trump’s Crooked Hillary crusade.

“I actually have to say, I think he brought a lot of really important issues to the floor, but Sen. Sanders was prosecuting a much tougher character attack” than Barack Obama waged in 2008, Tanden told me last week during an hourlong sit-down for POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast.

“He did do significant damage to Hillary's negatives,” she added. “I mean, he drove a lot of those negatives, and the truth of it, I mean, just to be candid — or honest about it, I think getting those kinds of attacks from another Democrat or another liberal or another progressive is much tougher for Hillary. … If you look at her trust numbers the last six months of that primary, it was much — those numbers took a much sharper dive and hard to recover from.”

Tanden, who succeeded Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta at the helm of the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, has spent the better part of two decades at Clinton’s side — first as a White House aide, then as a top staffer in her Senate office, later as policy director of the 2008 campaign and now as a powerful outside adviser who will play a central role in the transition, if there is one.

But the 45-year-old Massachusetts native is more than that: She’s Clinton’s edgy public alter ego, whose stiletto-elbowed Twitter presence is said to closely echo the candidate’s own caustic private musings. And while Tanden respects Sanders and his staff (she helped negotiate the joint Clinton-Sanders college and health proposals and says “they were great”), she echoes Clinton’s own opinion that Sanders let the primary go on too long, too noisily and too nastily.

“This primary was much tougher [than 2008]. There were many more open attacks on being 'bought and paid for' and all that stuff,” said Tanden, who didn’t like it, not one little bit.

What she doesn’t mind, as one of the most progressive voices in Clinton’s inner circle, was the leftward-pushing impact of the Sanders candidacy overall, which allowed her former (and perhaps future) boss to public embrace a more outwardly liberal agenda. Tanden has always played that role internally: Like many of Clinton’s East Wing advisers (led by Clinton’s then-chief of staff Melanne Verveer) she opposed Bill Clinton’s welfare reform measure.

Tanden’s power in Hillaryland had always emanated from the wonk bond she developed with Clinton in the 1990s when the first lady favored headbands and Tanden was a star-struck 20-something Yale Law grad. Over the years, Clinton has, undeniably, tried to have it both ways when it comes to party ideology, portraying herself in 2008 as a responsible, middle-of-the-road Clintonian pragmatist, while suggesting she was always a behind-the-scenes liberal spur during this year’s battle against the socialist Sanders.

Tanden bearhugs the Prog Princess narrative. President Bill Clinton’s aides would “play hide the ball from Hillary” on issues ranging from guns to trade to keep her from messing with their centrist schemes, she said. And when I mentioned former British Prime Minister Tony Blair recently told me that Clinton was the West’s last, best hope for centrist common sense, Tanden rolled her eyes. “I don't really think Tony Blair has the adequate sense of Hillary's views on every issue,” she quipped.

Many members of Clinton’s 2016 campaign staff in Brooklyn don’t know the candidate especially well (when Clinton isn’t traveling, she spends most of her time at her two mansions or a Manhattan office). But Tanden hails from an earlier era when the now-distant Clinton was a more familiar and less fussy presence, gobbling junk food, grilling aides bluffing through briefings, grousing about the media, and cracking jokes about Al Gore’s waistline and her husband’s propensity for showing up 15 minutes late to everything.

Her familiarity has bred a contempt (shared by Clinton) for the media, and she’s fiercely defended Clinton’s decision to eschew news conferences. More than anything, Tanden hates the “trust” narrative pushed by Sanders and Trump — and she practically leaps out of her chair in her Washington office when I ask about the Clinton Foundation and Hillary's emails.

“Should I get a tattoo myself of saying it was a mistake?” she said, adding: “She shouldn't have done it, dah-dah-dah-dah-dah, you know?”

Tanden makes a point a lot of Clinton people make: that the candidate is widely misunderstood and unfairly scrutinized, but in doing so she paints a more three-dimensional portrait, with the force of somebody who has spent years navigating Clinton’s complex personality.

“She’s [not] looking at things in some crazy Lady Macbeth way,” Tanden told me. “What I've never understood about her is this space she rents in people's heads. Like, she's a person. She's a normal person. She laughs. She cries. She's not normal, OK, maybe ‘normal’ is overstated, but it's not … [there’s] a grand theory behind everything she does.”

Tanden knows from normal. Unlike most of Clinton’s top people, she comes from a childhood of hardship and turmoil unusual in the rarified upper levels of Washington politics. When she was in elementary school, her father — who dabbled in real estate — sold the family home in a Boston suburb and skipped out without giving Tanden, her stunned mother and older brother any warning. Her mother, a tough but untested immigrant from Uttar Pradesh, near Delhi, took control — signing up for food stamps, welfare and Section 8 housing while taking a job in a local travel agency — so her kids could remain in Bedford’s top-shelf schools.

“I remember being in the lunch line, and I was the only kid using the voucher back then for food stamps or reduced lunch,” Tanden recalled. “I paid 10 cents; everyone was paying like $1.50. And I remember being at the Purity Supreme, which is our supermarket, and my mom was using the food stamps, and everyone else was paying with cash. And I asked her like, ‘Why do we have to use the funny money?’”

Her mother, she added, “is very strong, a strong-willed person … she was incredibly resilient.”

Tanden sees resilience as Clinton’s strongest asset too, but she’s got a nervous streak (earned from the disastrous ’08 primary fight) and is keeping her eye out for “exogenous” events and an October surprise — most likely emanating from a diabolically timed WikiLeaks document dump.

But the thing that worries her most long term is the reported meddling by Russian leader Vladimir Putin in U.S. internal politics, amid reports that Moscow was behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee on the eve of the late-July convention in Philadelphia. The revelation that DNC staffers had coordinated activities with the Clinton campaign resulted in the forced resignation of Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a polarizing figure Brooklyn was glad to see go. The leak, Tanden said, was clearly designed to spur an unstoppable insurrection among Sanders supporters geared to help Trump.

“I think Putin is definitely not a fan of Hillary Clinton's, I mean, look at his own rhetoric,” she told me. “Hillary was very clear in her condemnation of his actions toward democracy protesters. She was very strong and he took that as a very strong affront.”

Tanden, like many other Clinton advisers, won’t go so far as to allege collusion between Putin and top officials Trump’s campaign — especially former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was a high-paid consultant for Putin allies in Ukraine. But she thinks the U.S. body politic is experiencing a foreign invasion unprecedented in history by a Russian interloper she describes as a “proto-fascist” strongman.

“If you're in Europe, the Russians are openly funding the far-right groups, from [Britain’s] UKIP to [French political leader] Marine Le Pen ... There is widespread knowledge among the center-left parties that that is a rising development,” Tanden added.

“Look at [Putin-funded cable channel] RT, Russia Today. The amount of time they spend propping up the third parties in the United States, the amount of time they spend attacking Hillary, and in ways that are just very aligned with the arguments of the Trump campaign," she said. "Russia has a history of playing in European politics. And we should not be surprised if they are attempting to do the same here.”