Bernie Sanders signs copies of 'Our Revolution: A Future To Believe In' at Barnes & Noble on Nov. 14 in New York City. | Getty The Democratic primary according to Bernie Sanders

For a candidate aspiring to America’s highest elected office, Bernie Sanders was famously averse to talking about politics or process during his presidential campaign.

Not so in his new book, “Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In,” where the Vermont senator is a little more expansive on the details of his White House run — and what transpired on the 2016 trail.


There are a few aspects of the campaign that Sanders just can’t let go.

Sanders reminisces fondly — very fondly — about the rallies, luxuriating in the details provided in news accounts and delighting in how his ever-ballooning following forced his staff to struggle to find venues that could hold his concert-sized crowds.

"This was not only the largest turnout for an event in our campaign, it was the largest turnout so far for any presidential candidate," Sanders writes of a July 1 rally in Madison, Wisconsin.

He’s still miffed about the New York and Arizona primaries, where many of his supporters believe that election administration issues — such as New York’s closed primary system and Arizona’s huge lines at some polling places — undercut his efforts.

“This was on the surface, an absurd and undemocratic process,” he writes of New York’s early deadline to register for the closed primary, which limited the ability of independents to vote for Sanders or new voters to register closer to the primary date, a hurdle that many of Sanders backers were unable to clear.

In Arizona, where the Justice Department later investigated claims of voter suppression and the lack of polling places in predominately Latino neighborhoods, he describes a voting process that was “an absolute disaster and an embarrassment to the American democracy.”

Then there’s California, where the revolution finally expired on June 7. Sanders continues to lambaste the Associated Press for its story declaring that Clinton had enough delegates to claim the Democratic nomination — one day before the nation’s biggest state and a handful of others held their primaries. Such a move was, he wrote, “one of the more outrageous moments of the entire campaign.”

“It’s not clear to me why they did that, but I believe strongly that their action had a negative impact on voter turnout and hurt us,” he writes.

Overall, Sanders stays true to his brand: as political memoirs go, the amount of score-settling is limited. Even former Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, widely viewed as a villain by Sanders supporters who believe she worked aggressively against his interests in the 2016 primaries, receives only perfunctory mentions.

Hillary Clinton is a different story — there’s plenty on her. The Vermont senator is deeply respectful, retelling a story of the time the two spoke at health-care reform event in 1993 at Dartmouth.

"Twenty-five years later, I still marvel at that performance," he writes of watching Clinton discuss the ins-and-outs of healthcare for over an hour without notes.

Even so, it doesn’t take a close read to understand how he feels about the Clinton family’s brand of Democratic politics.

“Hillary Clinton was a key player in the centrist Democratic establishment, which had, over the years, been forged by her husband Bill Clinton,” Sanders writes. “The Clinton approach was to try to merge the interests of Wall Street and corporate America with the needs of the middle class — an impossible task.”

He still argues that Clinton’s constant barrage of criticism about his record on guns was “unfair,” but concedes that he “did not handle well.”

Sanders saves his toughest criticism not for his political foes but for the “corporate media” and its approach toward news — a familiar theme from his campaign.

While he admits that are exceptions, Sanders views contemporary political journalism as “dedicated to personality, gossip, campaign strategy, scandals, conflicts, polls and who appears to be winning or losing …”

He points to a CNN interview where he was told that his elbows were not sharp enough for the national stage, and recalls the countless pundits who wrote him off as “fringe candidate.”

An example of this circus-style coverage, Sanders asserts, came when his vehicle was pulled over for speeding by the Iowa State Police as his team sought to quickly shuttle him around the state. Unfortunately for Sanders, a New York Times reporter who was shadowing him for a story was in the backseat as the scene unfolded.

“The state trooper was professional and polite and gave us a warning,” Sanders writes. “Not so, who, it goes without saying, made it a major part of her coverage.”

To Sanders, the lack of national media attention to America’s pressing problems is “like living in a parallel universe” compared to what he heard from attendees at his events.

The disdain for political coverage dates back to the earliest memories of Sanders’s political career. The future presidential hopeful recalls how, when he was a third-party candidate in a 1972 Senate special election, his Democratic opponent used the gimmick of skiing across the state to buck up his campaign.

“Here I was, pontificating about the major issues facing humanity, and the TV cameras were focused on the blisters on Randy’s feet,” Sanders writes.

His frustrations did not end when he finally won a race, first as mayor of Burlington.

Depicting a pitched fight with the Burlington Free Press, which the Vermonter describes as “the voice of the business community,” Sanders remembers that the paper urged local Democrats and Republicans to combine their efforts in order to oust him.

In case anyone misses his point about the media, Sanders returns to it in the final chapter of the book. Titled “Corporate Media and The Threat to Our Democracy,” the Vermont senator offers a collection of complaints as well as a discussion of media consolidation. And he doesn't stop there. Sanders also offers a detailed break down of the various units of the most powerful media companies to illuminate his argument.