Can He Be Elected?

Yes, Bernie Sanders could be the next President of the United States. His campaign is an extreme longshot but it is not impossible. Winning the Democratic nomination would likely require a epic meltdown in the Hillary Clinton camp (which is absolutely not out of the question) and it would require the Republicans to nominate a candidate without any moderate mainstream appeal (which is absolutely not out of the question).

Sanders is not a scary politician. He’s no Kshama Sawant, Seattle’s firebrand socialist city-council member. Bernie projects a kind of reassuring normalcy. You might not agree with his politics but you don’t get the sense that he’s outrageously on the fringe. Americans would be comfortable voting for him.

If you put Sanders up against Trump, Santorum, Paul, or many of the other Republicans who are out of step with the mainstream, Sanders would win.

Being an outside longshot is a pretty great place to be in American politics if you have the money to stay in the race. Trump is just going to write himself checks. Sanders is backed by a legion of fans who want to see someone unafraid to say what they want said. It frees you from having to tack to the middle on every issue. Nobody in your campaign is telling you to be cautious and avoid angering or upsetting anyone. The only way you can win the nomination of your party is to be the clearly different choice if the party decides en masse that this is the year when enough is finally enough of politics as usual.

What I Saw At The Revolution

Attending the event I was looking for 3 things:

Is the campaign leveraging the event to gather data

Is the campaign able to operate at scale

What was the call to action

We “pre-registered” for the event using an on-line form on Sanders’ website. That didn’t guarantee us admission or give us access; I assume it was used mostly to get a sense for the level of interest.

Seattle is a very liberal city and we’ve just gone through a very liberal wave of activism on issues like pot legalization, gay marriage and raising the minimum wage. The interest in seeing Sanders was going to be big but the campaign may not have realized how big.

On site the campaign had covered the basics. They had arranged for a good facility (the Hec Edmondson pavilion where the UW Huskies play basketball) and they had the requisite number of event staff there to handle parking and crowd control. The campaign had been disrupted earlier in the day when a previous event in downtown Seattle was hijacked by 2 people representing the “#blacklivesmatter” activists and we talked to a police officer who had planned to be providing security for the Taylor Swift concert that night until he’d been called in to beef up the police presence for the Sanders’ rally. That showed flexibility on the part of the campaign and enough ground work with local authorities to meet a fluid and somewhat chaotic situation. Good signs.

The announced attendance was 12k inside the building and 3k outside who couldn’t be admitted due to lack of room. I find those estimates entirely credible. The facility was packed with no empty seats and we saw a huge line behind us as we entered and it was obvious that not all would be admitted.

The local Democratic party had its volunteers at the site but they were focused on getting people to sign petitions to fight the Citizens United ruling. Kshama Sawant had volunteers in the crowd but they didn’t seem to have any specific agenda other than waving a few signs. The Sanders campaign itself was almost invisible. As we neared the entrance we were told that we needed a sticker to gain admission, and the stickers were being distributed by volunteers who were having people sign attendance cards and provide email addresses and opt in to receiving campaign communications.

I didn’t see representatives of any other cause or campaign at the site.

Overall, I’d say that was a missed opportunity. Good for the Sanders campaign to gather some data but I wonder how useful the hastily written email addresses will really be, and they didn’t get much else that might help with segmentation and positioning.

Nobody was registering people to vote. Nobody was building a Democratic party mailing list. There is a city council election in November in Seattle that will have a huge effect on local politics and none of the candidates had any presence (that I could see).

Nobody gave me a Bernie Sanders sign to wave. Nobody was selling campaign merchandise (I pre-ordered a shirt weeks ago and though I was told it had shipped it didn’t arrive in time). The only things we saw being sold were buttons and they were pretty generic buttons not tied to any campaign or issue and it was unclear if that was just a local entrepreneurial venture or a part of anyone’s organization.

This was the largest Presidential political event in Seattle in recent memory and it didn’t feel like the politicians had a plan to realize the potential value.

As someone who has spent a lot of time figuring out how to make event marketing work, I have many ideas about how to make improvements. Maybe someone will ask. :)

Inside the hall there was no decoration. There was one large Bernie sign that was positioned to be in the backdrop during the speech but no other banners or branding. Most of the audience had no campaign branding. There was no attempt made at dramatic lighting — the house lights were up, and some additional lights were positioned on the speaker’s podium but nothing that drew the eye to the candidate. The large overhead projection screens were not used to show the candidate to the crowd, about 30% of whom were behind him.

There was no call to action. I was not asked at any time to form a support node for the campaign (or even for the Democratic party). I wasn’t asked to engage on social media. I wasn’t asked for money (although there were people handing out envelopes for donations, the approach was so low-key and invisible it might as well not have even happened). Neither the volunteers, nor the introductory speakers, nor even Sanders himself asked me for my vote. It was almost like there isn’t an election going on and this was just a public civics discussion without consequence.

The only thing I was proactively engaged about was signing a petition to oppose Citizens United. First, that’s pointless. Second, was that really the most useful thing the collective political system of Seattle could have done with my time & attention?

Yeah But What About the Speech?

I have seen Sanders speak on the floor of the Senate, heard him interviewed at length and watched the edited version of the stump speech his campaign started circulating in the past week. So I already had a sense of what Sanders would say and how he would say it. I was interested to know if he’d deviate from the boilerplate and where he would place his points of emphasis.

Bernie is an excellent public speaker. He knows how to use his voice and his posture to keep the audience focused on him. He speaks clearly and with good tone and modulation. He has a trace of a New York accent but to me that’s just “Americana”.

Bernie looked a little rumpled. He did not wear a jacket and his shirt was loose on his frame. It was hard to see him as “Presidential”. I know he wants his style to be informal but I think maybe the campaign has gone too far in the “casual” direction.

His biggest crowd reaction came when he asked the men in the audience to stand with the women for equal pay. I think it surprised him a bit how the crowd responded — actually getting on their feet — and it felt to me like a mismatch between the theater and the message. He should pick something else in the speech to be the “stand together” moment.

The speech is filled with specific plans. He wants to provide 12 weeks of paid medical leave to every employee. He wants every employee to have 10 days of paid vacation. He wants college tuition to be free. He wants a single-payer healthcare system modeled on Medicare. He wants a national jobs program for infrastructure. He wants to raise the federal minimum wage. He wants to overturn Citizens United. He wants to end the privatization of jails. He opposes and wants to block the Trans Pacific Partnership treaty.

He did not talk about paying for any of that.

Other things he did not talk about:

Unions. He did not advocate for the idea of getting more people into unions, or any union-friendly policies like altering the process to certify a union (“card check”), or trying to unionize key employees like Wal*Mart.

The military. He didn’t talk about the size of the force, or how to deploy it.

Foreign policy. He didn’t have much to say other than to mention that he was going to support the President on the Iran nuclear deal.

Fracking. He did not talk about energy at all except to say that the country had an obligation to lead the world in eliminating our use of fossil fuel and replacing our energy generation with renewable and sustainable sources — of which he did not say “nuclear”.

Socialism. He did not use that word at all in any context.

Terrorism. No discussion of radical Islam, ISIS, Syria, Libya, Yemen, or Nigeria. No discussion of al-Qaida, the Taliban or Boko Haram.

Russia, Ukraine, or NATO. Not a peep about his thoughts regarding these crucial flashpoint topics.

China. No thoughts about China’s claims to vast swathes of ocean, Tibet, its relationship with Taiwan, human rights, or economics.

The 4th amendment. Sanders did not tell us what he thinks about domestic surveillance or privacy rights. He did not say where he stands on strong encryption without government-controlled back doors.

Hillary Clinton. No actual electioneering is in the speech at all. No contrasts with the front-runner. No positioning.

My vote. He did not ask me to vote for him. He did not tell me he needed my support to win. He did not ask for a contribution of time or money.

Sanders is, I think, an isolationist at heart. He represents the growing segment of mainstream America that is sick and tired of dealing with foreign policy and foreign people. He wants to turn inward and try to make America a more equal place where people face less stress. He doesn’t seem engaged in the issues of globalism and creating stable world order.

The crowd loved him. The energy level was high. Lots of applause lines. But the event felt more like a church service than a political rally. The preacher got up and told us about sin and redemption and how to live better lives and the congregation made the appropriate responses then walked out shriven and a little smug.

I don’t think anyone who was there came away with a sense of mission nor do I think he converted any skeptics. This was Sanders’ base and he wasn’t here to change hearts and minds, or raise troubling questions, or make waves in the Party. He was here to let his people have a day in the sun.

What Are My Politics?

I need to say a little bit about my personal politics to provide context to this essay for those who don’t know me.

I think the most important issue facing the country in the next 30 years is how do we deal with a rapidly increasing package of entitlement spending driven by Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. I believe that burden is going to reduce overall government spending for every other program and that many programs will be terminated; we are entering an era of “either/or” budgeting.

I believe the best configuration of the government in this era is a Democrat in the White House, and a Republican controlled House. I think the system works best if the Republicans hold both House and Senate but the House is the critical piece. In my lifetime, this is the only configuration that has acted in what I could call a “fiscally rational” way.

I don’t believe any of the social issues of the day matter for Presidential politics. Abortion, gay marriage, free speech, etc. are all now solely the purview of the courts and I think it highly unlikely that appointments to the courts will have meaningful effects on those outcomes. Policing and civil rights appear to be matters for state and local authorities. A rational drug policy is going to emerge from states asserting rights and the Feds opposing the states and letting the courts settle the disputes.

In other words, most of what the Presidents want to talk about in terms of issues that fire up the base are things that Presidents no longer control. What they really control is signing budget deals.

So I’ll be voting for whomever the Democrats put on the the ticket for President. Bernie will get my vote if he’s the nominee.

That effectively makes me a “Democrat” for the purpose of the Democratic primaries. Right now, I’m not very happy with Hillary Clinton. I think she’s tired, I think she’s deeply compromised, and I don’t think she has any reason to want the job other than to be the first woman President. If I had to cast a primary ballot today, I’d vote for Sanders. Hillary could win my vote though. She has to prove to me that she’s got an agenda and a vision for where she wants to lead the country.

I dismiss Martin O’Malley outright; he’s a no-chance candidate. If a surprising new option emerges (like an Elizabeth Warren) I’m open to considering new choices. I’m pretty skeptical though. I think Clinton & Sanders are going to be the two contenders.

I really enjoyed my day with Bernie Sanders. It was my first time attending a major political event. I learned a lot, and came away with an appreciation again for how special American democracy is. I’m so proud to be a part of it and to be participating. I hope you will too!