Bernie Sanders was muttering to himself on a hand-me-down couch in a Capitol Hill row house, watching the second Republican debate with a handful of young staffers.

The Vermont Democrat, who eats as haphazardly as the college kids who idolize him, had ordered pizza for the first debate, but during the second forum, he was too overwhelmed by tsuris to take an offered slice. “Come on! This is pathetic!” he howled at the TV when the moderator asked the candidates to choose a cute Secret Service code name for themselves.


To the surprise of one staffer there, the senator was so exasperated, he abruptly stopped his tweeting as the debate was winding down, threw his hands in the air and left. Enough was enough.

Sanders’ boiling impatience with the performance and fakery of modern presidential campaigns is what has made him an earthy, authentic alternative to Hillary Clinton. But that same honest streak is the very thing that holds Sanders back from mounting a focused counterattack against a front-runner whose resurgence has pundits talking again about inevitability heading into Saturday’s Democratic debate in Des Moines.

“He believes he knows what he’s doing ... he’s got total confidence in his own ability,” said a veteran Sanders operative. “Overall, that’s great. But it can go a little too far. He’s yelling at everybody, telling them what he wants — but this is a guy, last time I checked, who never ran for president.”

The campaign is clearly reaching for a new approach and being tested, but it’s a moment Sanders hasn’t quite prepared for. His team wants him to go on offense, and he has test-driven harsher comparisons against Clinton. But the pressure to attack is irritating to a man who wants to talk about his issues, not his opponent.

“Bernie Sanders is struggling because he's doing much better than he thought he'd ever be doing. Now, he's got to know how to convert that into a successful run for the nomination,” says Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion. “He's not made that clear how he's going to try and evolve that plan. I don't think he necessarily has a second chapter of the campaign written because he wasn't sure he'd get there. But he's there now …”

It’s not that Sanders doesn’t have a sense of himself as big-time national player, or that he thinks the Clinton steamroller is destined to crush his beat-up-but-purring Volvo of a candidacy. This is a guy who much prefers when staffers and reporters call him “Senator,” rather than “Bernie.” Moreover, his rise has reinforced his faith in himself as the most capable champion of progressive economic causes.

But with ego comes a resistance to change. Eight months into the campaign, Sanders still balks at having to apply pancake makeup to his less-than-model complexion before shooting footage for campaign ads. He is driven mad by what he considers the trivial obsessions of the media, like whether he kisses babies on the trail. He loses patience during the “play acting” of debate prep as Clinton methodically poll-tests her themes and devours reams of opposition research. And he resists basic campaign practices, like hiring pollsters, because of his belief in the raw power of his speeches, which he still writes himself — hammering away at his spongy old PC keyboard in his Burlington office.

He recently relented on the pollster, bringing on Ben Tulchin, an alum of Howard Dean's 2004 campaign, after immense pressure from his top operatives. An aide appealed to his legendary son-of-a-paint-salesman frugality: Spending millions on ads, they told him, was a waste of money without testing their effectiveness.

Sanders’ visceral discomfort with prime time reared its head from the start — before his first kickoff rally in Burlington last May, when his top strategist showed up at his home with a large film crew to shoot interviews with Sanders for a Web video. The entire scene turned him anxious and dyspeptic.

“He didn't like when I showed up with a bigger crew than he'd seen in his life before,” recalled Tad Devine, the veteran Democratic strategist tasked with transforming Sanders’ DIY effort into a serious national campaign like the one he helped run for John Kerry in 2004.

“He doesn’t like being filmed. He doesn’t like makeup,” Devine added. “He doesn't want to have the gaffer lighting, the grip, the teleprompter operator, the best boy — he doesn't understand why we need all these people standing around doing all this stuff. He thinks it's not necessary.”

Sanders resisted putting in the hours to prepare for the first debate — and some of the planned lines he concocted backfired. The sound bite of the night: “The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails,” was an expression of his feelings (and showed he was above slappyface politics), but it gave Clinton an early parole from her email scandal that has helped fuel her subsequent rebound in the polls.

“Bernie has strong feelings about what he wants to say, and he is not afraid to say it,” Devine said. “If we’re going to succeed, it’s because it’s him.”

On the Tuesday before the second Democratic debate, Sanders’ aides were eager to shuttle the candidate to Vermont, where they could buttonhole him for a full day of the debate prep he hates, fat white binders of briefing papers ready, and his longtime Senate chief of staff, Michaeleen Crowell, ready to reprise the role of Clinton. He appeared to be holding out as long as possible again, delaying a planned late afternoon flight to his home state until 10 p.m., in no rush to leave behind what he considers his real work.

That morning, Sanders was doing something he enjoyed much, much more — standing in the rain outside the mist-shrouded Capitol, a union member holding an umbrella over him, the only elected official who turned out to picket with U.S. government contract workers striking for a $15 minimum wage. “This is my preparation,” he said when asked whether he was planning to prepare more for the second Democratic showdown. “This is the kind of debate prep that inspires me and makes me a stronger candidate.”

What Sanders loves most is delivering a good speech — just like his childhood hero Eugene Debs — and he will speechify to any audience, whether it’s a devoted mass of 10,000 or a solitary rain-soaked reporter who just wants an anodyne quote about debate prep. To say that he’s a control freak when it comes to words is an understatement: He rewrites virtually everything that’s presented to him by staff — and they are required to vet nearly everything with him.

Even the people who love Sanders say he’s naturally cranky — but it’s a crankiness rooted in impatience rather than any deep-seated rage. That he’s fueled by political grievance rather than personal vitriol is a big part of his outsider appeal — but it also makes it hard for him to throw a punch without being accused of hypocrisy. Plus he just doesn’t like to do it.

“He has to figure out how he can make this into a contrast so it's actually a choice, not a referendum. He's been very reluctant to do that,” says veteran Democratic strategist Bill Carrick, who isn’t backing a candidate yet. "I don't know what the reluctance is, maybe he's never been in this situation before. He was a little more aggressive in Iowa and South Carolina, but it was ever so slight. … The question is, how is he going to grow?”

Devine has been pressuring a reluctant Sanders to get tougher. He was initially reluctant, but has warmed to the fight: Sanders thinks Clinton crossed a line by implicitly accusing him of making a sexist remark when he said that “all the shouting in the world” would not fix the country’s systemic problem with gun violence.

Sanders is ticked off when reporters accuse him of going negative, but he has moved up comparisons to Clinton on issues, such as the Defense of Marriage Act, the TPP trade deal, her vote on the Iraq war and her slowness to state her opposition to the Keystone Pipeline to the back end of his regular stump speech.

That resentment continues to rise as the stakes grow. Sanders’ team took to calling Correct the Record — the rapid response group that coordinates with the Clinton campaign and has been called out for peddling opposition research on Sanders — “Distort the Record.” The feeling is mutual — one Clinton ally said Sanders was “fading” because people “woke up and realized he was a socialist.”

Yet the biggest mistake is to assume that Sanders — facing a reenergized and confident Clinton Saturday night — is focused on his opponent more than his own message or mission.

"I can’t walk down a hallway in the nation’s capital without people begging me to beat up on Hillary Clinton, attack Hillary Clinton. Tell me why she’s the worst person in the world,” he wailed to Rachel Maddow last week during a presidential forum on MSNBC. “I resisted, I resisted, and I resisted. I think unlike our Republican friends there, who think that politics is about attacking each other in incredibly stupid and destructive ways, I think what we are trying to do is have a sensible debate on the important issues facing America.”

That’s not rote, it’s Sanders’ actual game plan — and he plans to win or lose on his own terms. The campaign is no lark, but not a single staffer or Sanders operative offered anything other than a realistic assessment of Sanders’ chances as an underdog insurgent — a marked contrast to Barack Obama’s out-gunned team that confidently predicted victory in early 2007 when their candidate trailed Clinton by 40 points.

What also sets Sanders apart — and perhaps sets him back — is his own obvious astonishment about how fast he’s come so far. That his campaign was becoming bigger than him, attracting Taylor Swift-sized crowds, began to truly set in for Sanders a few weeks into his run, when he arrived in Minneapolis for a rally that was expected to top out at 1,000. More than three times that number filled the hall with more in an overflow room.

“What’s going on?” Sanders demanded from an aide when his car was stuck in traffic outside the venue.

“I asked if there was an accident,” Sanders said, calling Devine from the car to express his disbelief. “Phil [Fiermonte, the campaign field director] says to me, ‘They’re all here to see you."

