|
FOCUS: Obama's Fateful Syrian Choice |
 |
|
Sunday, 20 September 2015 09:47 |
|
Parry writes: "There is an obvious course that President Barack Obama could follow if he wants to lessen the crises stemming from the Syrian war and other U.S. 'regime change' strategies of the past several decades, but it would require him to admit that recent interventions (including his own) have represented a strategic disaster."
Aleppo, Syria, on Thursday after what activists said was an aerial bomb attack by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad. (photo: Reuters)
Obama's Fateful Syrian Choice
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
20 September 15
President Obama faces a choice that could define his legacy and the future of the American Republic: He can either work with Russia’s President Putin to stabilize Syria or he can opt for a confrontation that could lead to an open-ended war with grave risks of escalation, writes Robert Parry.
 here is an obvious course that President Barack Obama could follow if he wants to lessen the crises stemming from the Syrian war and other U.S. “regime change” strategies of the past several decades, but it would require him to admit that recent interventions (including his own) have represented a strategic disaster.
Obama also would have to alter some longstanding alliances – including those with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel – and correct some of the false narratives that have been established during his administration, such as storylines accusing the Syrian government of using sarin gas on Aug. 21, 2013, and blaming the Russians for everything that’s gone wrong in Ukraine.
In retracting false allegations and releasing current U.S. intelligence assessments on those issues, the President would have to repudiate the trendy concept of “strategic communications,” an approach that mixes psychological operations, propaganda and P.R. into a “soft power” concoction to use against countries identified as U.S. foes.
“Stratcom” also serves to manage the perceptions of the American people, an assault on the fundamental democratic precept of an informed electorate. Instead of honestly informing the citizenry, the government systematically manipulates us. Obama would have to learn to trust the people with the truth.
Whether Obama recognizes how imperative it is that he make these course corrections, whether he has the political courage to take on entrenched foreign-policy lobbies (especially after the bruising battle over the Iran nuclear agreement), and whether he can overcome his own elitism toward the public are the big questions – and there are plenty of reasons to doubt that Obama will do what’s necessary. But his failure to act decisively could have devastating consequences for the United States and the world.
In a way, this late-in-his-presidency course correction should be obvious (or at least it would be if there weren’t so many layers of “strategic communications” to peel away). It would include embracing Russia’s willingness to help stabilize the political-military situation in Syria, rather than the Obama administration fuming about it and trying to obstruct it.
For instance, Obama could join with Russia in stabilizing Syria by making it clear to putative U.S. “allies” in the Mideast that they will face American wrath if they don’t do all that’s possible to cut off the terrorists of the Islamic State and Al Qaeda from money, weapons and recruits. That would mean facing down Turkey over its covert support for the Sunni extremists as well as confronting Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Persian Gulf sheikdoms over secret funding and arming of these jihadists.
If Obama made it clear that the United States would take stern action – such as inflicting severe financial punishments – against any country caught helping these terrorist groups, he could begin shutting down the jihadists’ support pipelines. He could also coordinate with the Russians and Iranians in cracking down on the Islamic State and Al Qaeda strongholds inside Syria.
On the political front, Obama could inform Syria’s Sunni “moderates” who have been living off American largesse that they must sit down with President Bashar al-Assad’s representatives and work out a power-sharing arrangement and make plans for democratic elections after a reasonable level of stability has been restored. Obama would have to ditch his mantra: “Assad must go!”
Given the severity of the crisis – as the refugee chaos now spreads into Europe – Obama doesn’t have the luxury anymore of pandering to the neocons and liberal interventionists. Instead of talking tough, he needs to act realistically.
Putin’s Clarity
In a sense, Russian President Vladimir Putin has clarified the situation for President Obama. With Russia stepping up its military support for Assad’s regime with the goal of defeating the Islamic State’s head-choppers and Al Qaeda’s terrorism plotters, Obama’s options have narrowed. He can either cooperate with the Russians in a joint campaign against the terrorists or he can risk World War III by taking direct action against Russian forces in pursuit of “regime change” in Damascus.
Though some of Official Washington’s neocons and liberal war hawks are eager for the latter – insisting that Putin must be taught a lesson about Russia’s subservience to American power – Obama’s sense of caution would be inclined toward the former.
The underlying problem, however, is that Official Washington’s foreign policy “elite” has lost any sense of reality. Almost across the board, these “important people” lined up behind President George W. Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, arguably the worst blunder in the history of U.S. foreign policy.
But virtually no one was held accountable. Indeed, the neocons and their liberal interventionist sidekicks strengthened their grip on the major think tanks, the op-ed pages and the political parties. Instead of dialing back on the “regime change” model, they dialed up more “regime change” schemes.
Although historically the U.S. government – like many other imperial powers – has engaged in coups and other meddling to oust troublesome foreign leaders, the current chapter on “regime change” strategies can be dated back to the late 1970s and early 1980s with what most American pundits rate a success: the destruction of a secular regime in Afghanistan that was allied with the Soviet Union.
Starting modestly with President Jimmy Carter’s administration and expanding rapidly under President Ronald Reagan, the CIA mounted its most ambitious “covert” operation ever – funding, recruiting and arming Islamic extremists to wage a brutal, even barbaric, war in Afghanistan.
Ultimately, the operation “succeeded” by forcing a humiliating withdrawal of Soviet troops and driving the Moscow-backed leader Najibullah from power, but the cost turned out to be extraordinary, creating conditions that gave rise to both the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
In 1996, the Taliban took Kabul, captured Najibullah (whose tortured and castrated body was hung from a light pole), and imposed a fundamentalist form of Islam that denied basic rights to women. The Taliban also gave refuge to Saudi extremist Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda band enabling them to plot terror attacks against the West, including the 9/11 assaults on New York and Washington.
In response, President George W. Bush ordered an invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in late 2001 followed by another invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 (though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11). Those “regime changes” began a cascade of chaos that reached into the Obama administration and to the present.
As Iraq came under the control of its Shiite majority allied with Shiite-ruled Iran, disenfranchised Sunnis organized into increasingly vicious rebel movements, such as “Al Qaeda in Iraq.” To avert a U.S. military defeat, Bush undertook a scheme of buying off Sunni leaders with vast sums of cash to get them to stop killing U.S. soldiers – called the “Sunni Awakening” – while Bush negotiated a complete withdrawal of U.S. troops.
The payoffs succeeded in buying Bush a “decent interval” for a U.S. pullout that would not look like an outright American defeat, but the huge payments also created a war chest for some of these Sunni leaders to reorganize militarily after the Shiite-led regime of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki refused to make significant economic and political concessions.
Obama’s Misjudgment
Obama had opposed the Iraq War, but he made the fateful choice after winning the 2008 election to retain many of Bush’s national security advisers, such as Defense Secretary Robert Gates and General David Petraeus, and to hire hawkish Democrats, such as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and National Security Council aide Samantha Power.
Obama’s pro-war advisers guided him into a pointless “surge” in Afghanistan in 2009 and a “regime change” war in Libya in 2011 as well as a propaganda campaign to justify another “regime change” in Syria, where U.S. Sunni-led regional “allies” – Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Persian Gulf sheikdoms – took the lead in a war to oust President Assad, an Alawite, an offshoot of Shiite Islam. Syria was allied with Iran and Russia.
At the same time, the Sunni rebel group, “Al Qaeda in Iraq,” expanded its operations into Syria and rebranded itself the Islamic State before splitting off from Al Qaeda’s central command. Al Qaeda turned to a mix of foreign and Syrian jihadists called Nusra Front, which along with the Islamic State became the most powerful terrorist organization fighting to oust Assad.
When Assad’s military struck back against the rebels, the West – especially its mainstream media and “humanitarian war” advocates – took the side of the rebels who were deemed “moderates” although Islamic extremists dominated almost from the start.
Though Obama joined in the chorus “Assad must go,” the President recognized that the notion of recruiting, training and arming a “moderate” rebel force was what he called a “fantasy,” but he played along with the demands from the hawks, including Secretary of State Clinton, to “do something.”
That clamor rose to a fever pitch in late August 2013 after a mysterious sarin gas attack killed hundreds of Syrian civilians in a Damascus suburb. The State Department, then led by Secretary of State John Kerry, rushed to a judgment blaming the atrocity on Assad’s forces and threatening U.S. military retaliation for crossing Obama’s “red line” against using chemical weapons.
But the U.S. intelligence community had doubts about the actual perpetrators with significant evidence pointing to a “false flag” provocation carried out by Islamic extremists. At the last minute, President Obama called off the planned airstrikes and worked out a deal with President Putin to get Assad to surrender Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal even as Assad continued to deny a role in the sarin attack.
Still, the U.S. conventional wisdom held fast that Assad had crossed Obama’s “red line” and – amid more bellicose talk in Washington – Obama authorized more schemes for training “moderate” rebels. These sporadic efforts by the CIA to create a “moderate” rebel force failed miserably, with some of the early trainees sharing their weapons and skills with Nusra and the Islamic State, which in 2014 carried its fight back into Iraq, seizing major cities, such as Mosul and Ramadi, and threatening Baghdad.
As the Islamic State racked up stunning victories in Iraq and Syria – along with releasing shocking videos showing the decapitation of civilian hostages – the neocons and liberal war hawks put on another push for a U.S. military intervention to achieve “regime change” in Syria. But Obama agreed to only attack Islamic State terrorists and to spend $500 million to train another force of “moderate” Syrian rebels.
Like previous efforts, the new training mission proved an embarrassing failure, producing only about 50 fighters who then were quickly killed or captured by Al Qaeda’s Nusra and other jihadist groups, leaving only “four or five” trainees from the program, according to Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, head of the U.S. Central Command which has responsibility for the Middle East.
The Current Crisis
The failure of the training program – combined with the destabilizing flow of Mideast refugees into Europe from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and other countries affected by the regional chaos due to “regime changes” – has brought new calls across Official Washington for, you guessed it, a U.S.-imposed “regime change” in Syria. The argument goes that “Assad must go” before a solution can be found.
But the greater likelihood is that if the U.S. and its NATO allies join in destroying Assad’s military, the result would be Sunni jihadist forces filling the vacuum with the black flag of terrorism fluttering over the ancient city of Damascus.
That could mean the Islamic State chopping off the heads of Christians, Alawites, Shiites and other “heretics” while Al Qaeda has a new headquarters for plotting terror strikes on the West. Millions of Syrians, now protected by Assad’s government, would join the exodus to Europe.
Then, the option for Obama or his successor would be to mount a major invasion and occupation of Syria, a costly and bloody enterprise that would mean the final transformation of the American Republic into an imperial state of permanent war.
Instead, Obama now has the option to cooperate with Putin to stabilize the Syrian regime and pressure erstwhile U.S. “allies” to cut off Al Qaeda and the Islamic State from money, guns and recruits. Though that might seem like clearly the best of the bad remaining options, it faces extraordinary obstacles from Official Washington.
Already there are howls of protests from the neocons and liberal interventionists who won’t give up their agenda of more “regime change” and their belief that American military power can dictate the outcome of every foreign conflict.
So, whether Obama can muster the courage to face down these bellicose voices and start leveling with the American people about the nuanced realities of the world is the big question ahead.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.
 |
|
Big Tech Has Become Way Too Powerful |
|
|
Sunday, 20 September 2015 08:01 |
|
Reich writes: "Conservatives and liberals interminably debate the merits of 'the free market' versus 'the government.' Which one you trust more delineates the main ideological divide in America."
Robert Reich. (photo: Richard Morgenstein)
Big Tech Has Become Way Too Powerful
By Robert Reich, New York Times
20 September 15
 onservatives and liberals interminably debate the merits of “the free market” versus “the government.” Which one you trust more delineates the main ideological divide in America.
In reality, they aren’t two separate things. There can’t be a market without government. Legislators, agency heads and judges decide the rules of the game. And, over time, they change the rules. The important question, too rarely discussed, is who has the most influence over these decisions and in that way wins the game.
Two centuries ago slaves were among the nation’s most valuable assets, and after the Civil War, perhaps land was. Then factories, machines, railroads and oil transformed America. By the 1920s most working Americans were employees, and the most contested property issue was their freedom to organize into unions.
READ MORE
|
|
|
Our High-Priced Mercenaries in Syria |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=32128"><span class="small">Robin Wright, The New Yorker</span></a>
|
|
Sunday, 20 September 2015 07:57 |
|
"The U.S. campaign to create a new ground force to fight the Islamic State appears to be a flop. The program, designed to train some fifteen thousand Syrians in the course of three years-at a cost of five hundred million dollars-has only a handful of fighters in Syria. 'We're talking four or five,' General Lloyd J. Austin III told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday."
A U.S.-coalition aircraft attack in Syria. (photo: Veli Gurgah/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
Our High-Priced Mercenaries in Syria
By Robin Wright, The New Yorker
20 September 15
he U.S. campaign to create a new ground force to fight the Islamic State appears to be a flop. The program, designed to train some fifteen thousand Syrians in the course of three years—at a cost of five hundred million dollars—has only a handful of fighters in Syria. “We’re talking four or five,” General Lloyd J. Austin III told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday. Austin heads Central Command, which runs U.S. military operations in the Middle East and South Asia, a position made famous by former General David Petraeus. Austin conceded that the rebel program is “off to a slow start.”
“That’s a joke,” Kelly Ayotte, the New Hampshire Republican, responded.
“This certainly isn’t ‘Charlie Wilson’s War,’ ” Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, told me after he testified, at a separate hearing, for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Wilson was the Texas congressman who helped to mobilize covert funds to arm and train more than a hundred thousand Afghan rebels to successfully oppose the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. (Tom Hanks portrayed Wilson in the 2007 movie.)
Exactly a year ago, President Obama announced a new “comprehensive and sustained” strategy to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State, which became known as Operation Inherent Resolve. In Syria, the operation centered on a train-and-equip program for rebels in a “New Syrian Force” to fight on the ground, complemented by American air strikes on ISIS weaponry, facilities, and leaders, and by a social-media campaign to counter ISIS propaganda.
A U.S.-led coalition has now carried out more than twenty-five hundred air strikes on Syria, according to Central Command data, and another four thousand in Iraq. But U.S. officials acknowledge that air power cannot alone destroy ISIS. The cost of all U.S. military operations against the Islamic State—in both countries—has reached about four billion dollars, or more than ten million dollars a day, the Pentagon said last month. The New Syrian Force, meanwhile, barely exists—and has done nothing.
“So we’re counting on our fingers and toes at this point—when we had envisioned fifty-four hundred by the end of the year,” Senator Claire McCaskill, the Missouri Democrat, said, referring to the rebel fighters. She seemed astounded. “It’s time for a new plan.”*
The Pentagon claims some success in halting the pace of the blitz that took the world by surprise in June, 2014. ISIS has since been forced into defensive combat. Central Command now hopes to “capitalize on lessons learned” about how to deploy its new rebel allies, Austin told the committee.
But both Democrats and Republicans expressed distress about the U.S. program. “I’ve been a member of the committee for nearly thirty years, and I’ve never heard testimony like this—never,” John McCain said. “Basically, General, what you’re telling us is that everything’s fine, as we see hundreds of thousands of refugees leave and flood Europe, as we’re seeing now two hundred and fifty thousand Syrians slaughtered.”
In the past year, McCain noted, the Islamic State has also expanded globally, with operations or alliances in Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Egypt, Nigeria, and Somalia. “One year into this campaign, it seems impossible to assert that ISIL is losing and that we are winning,” he said.
The hearing took place amid reports that a whistle-blower within Central Command filed a formal complaint this summer charging senior officers with skewing intelligence data to portray false progress. The Islamic State still holds roughly a third of both Syria and Iraq. Last week, General Martin Dempsey, the retiring Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged that the war against the Islamic State is “tactically stalemated,” with no dramatic gains on either side.
The rebel training program has been troubled from the start. Recruiting has been hard, as has vetting for past political and family connections. U.S. plans have been clumsy. The recruits, who trained in Turkey, were not always reliable or fully committed. A number of them left without completing the course. In July, shortly after returning to Syria, many of the program’s fifty-four graduates were killed or captured by an offshoot of Al Qaeda. Others simply fled, leaving only the handful in the fight. Another class that is currently training has just more than a hundred new recruits, the Pentagon policy chief Christine Wormuth told the Senate hearing.
The failure reflects a pervasive flaw in U.S. efforts across the Middle East and South Asia—many involving U.S. Central Command—to create friendly forces to fight its causes on the ground. For many Syrians, the U.S.-trained rebels are perceived as little more than guns-for-hire, Robert Ford, the former U.S. Ambassador to Syria, told me. “American mercenaries, that’s what I’d call them. They’re trained by Americans. They’re paid by Americans. They’re supposed to fight for American goals—which are out of synch with local priorities.”
The mandate of Operation Inherent Resolve is to confront the Islamic State, but the Syrian opposition wants, first and foremost, to oust President Bashar al-Assad, whose forces are far deadlier. In the first six months of this year, they killed more than six times the numbers of Syrians killed by the Islamic State, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, a monitoring group based in Britain.
“In Syria specifically, there’s no convergence on who the enemy is,” Fred Hof, a former State Department Syria specialist in the Obama Administration, told me. “There’s a general tendency to come up with ideas that may sound good in an inter-agency meeting, that check every box, and that scratch everybody’s itch, but then have no bearing to what’s going on on the ground.” Hof left the government out of frustration in 2012 and is now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “As a rule, you can’t create a foreign army to carry out your own mission,” he said.
The Bush Administration faced a similar problem when it tried to create the Free Iraqi Forces before its 2003 invasion. Congress allocated ninety-five million dollars for a training program by U.S. troops at Camp Freedom, in Hungary. The Iraqi opposition, led by Ahmed Chalabi, pledged to recruit thousands of exiles. In the end, it mustered about ninety-five men. Some U.S. officials nicknamed it the “million-dollar-a-man army,” and acknowledged that it would probably be insignificant in the war against Saddam Hussein. In one class of twenty-one recruits, many had paunches and gray hairs in their mustaches; the average age was forty-two.
The United States failed on a much bigger scale in rebuilding the Iraqi military after Saddam’s ouster. In 2004, Petraeus boasted of U.S. progress in recreating the Iraqi Army from scratch to confront extremists. “Iraqi leaders are stepping forward, leading their country and their security forces courageously in the face of an enemy that has shown a willingness to do anything to disrupt the establishment of the new Iraq,” he wrote in the Washington Post. But that army disintegrated overnight after the Islamic State invaded, in 2014.
“We witnessed the collapse of the Iraqi security forces, in which the United States invested twenty-five billion dollars over an eight-to-ten-year period,” Katulis said. Billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. military equipment was abandoned on the battlefield and became instrumental to subsequent ISIS military gains. “Now we’re back to square one,” Katulis added. “And the same thing has happened with the Afghan Army, and rebuilding it in fits and starts.” (Similar programs, to train the Vietnamese military, in the seventies, and the Lebanese Army, in the eighties, also failed. The United States was forced to hurriedly withdraw its forces from both countries.) “Much of our debate on the Middle East, about what tools will be effective, has failed,” Katulis said. “We have not produced sustainable solutions.”
All this comes at a time when Syria’s future borders, and viability, are at stake. Under the pressure of its multifaceted war, the country, widely considered to be the strategic center of the Middle East, has all but disintegrated. Eighty per cent of Syrians now live in poverty. Life expectancy has plummeted by twenty years. Unemployment is nearly sixty per cent. Syria’s economic infrastructure and institutions have been “obliterated,” the Syrian Center for Policy Research reported earlier this year.
The humanitarian crisis is the gravest since the Second World War. Seven million Syrians have been displaced from their homes and their sources of income inside the country, according to the United Nations. More than four million refugees have fled Syria altogether, straining resources in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq. And now, with some three hundred and fifty thousand refugees fleeing to the West, the Syrian crisis has become Europe’s crisis, too.
|
|
The Gospel of Bernie |
|
|
Saturday, 19 September 2015 13:19 |
|
Frizell writes: "I am not a theologian. I am not an expert on the Bible,” Sanders told the crowd of 13,000 at Liberty. “I am just a United States Senator from the small state of Vermont.” With that caveat, Sanders painted scenes of a progressive utopia: free higher education, health care for all, bolstered wages and chastened billionaires."
Bernie Sanders. (photo: Marius Bugge)
The Gospel of Bernie
By Sam Frizell, TIME
19 September 15
 as it Opposite Day at Liberty University? Here was Bernie Sanders, who spent his 20s preaching sexual liberation and social revolution, taking the stage to speak to a student body of fresh-faced Christian conservatives at the school founded by televangelist Jerry Falwell. Liberty students pay a $25 fine for “attendance at a dance” and $50 for “visiting alone” off campus with a member of the opposite sex. At 74, Sanders was an old man among young people, a self-described “democratic socialist” in the boiler room of the Christian right. And you could argue that his presence was the opposite of clever. After all, why was this overachieving underdog of the Democratic Party–the breakout star of a season that was supposed to be all about Hillary–stumping for votes in a place where he had virtually no chance of finding them?
Why does a missionary venture out among the heathen? Bernard Sanders, a paint seller’s son from Flatbush, an early-’60s campus radical, a rumpled transplant to progressive Vermont who worked his way gradually up a small ladder in a small state to become the unlikely embodiment of a very large yearning–leads with his heart and his sermons. He seeks conversions, not just votes.
If that strikes you as insufficiently calculating, you are starting to understand Bernie’s momentum. And to understand the Sanders surge is to understand the spirit of 2016. Look around at the candidates who are stumbling and fumbling toward the first balloting less than five months away. Republican Jeb Bush of the White House Bushes learned to count delegates when most kids were still counting fireflies. Democrat Hillary Clinton is part of a family that once commissioned a poll to choose a family vacation that would endear them to voters. So far, calculation is getting them nowhere. The surging candidates–rampant Donald Trump, novice Ben Carson and retro Bernie Sanders–represent the opposite. Slickness is out, conviction is in.
“I am not a theologian. I am not an expert on the Bible,” Sanders told the crowd of 13,000 at Liberty. “I am just a United States Senator from the small state of Vermont.” With that caveat, Sanders painted scenes of a progressive utopia: free higher education, health care for all, bolstered wages and chastened billionaires. The audience in Virginia received him politely, though their biggest wave of applause went to the student who asked why his compassion for the weak did not extend to unborn babies. Sanders’ real audience–the roughly 1 in 4 Democratic-primary voters who have lifted him into contention against former Secretary of State Clinton–could only love him more than ever. He was defending the faith. Daniel, as they might put it at Liberty U., in the lion’s den.
With each twist and wrinkle of this election season, which is as wide-open and unscripted as any presidential cycle in living memory, we see more clearly that these are special times in American politics, baffling times, times to challenge categories and scramble expectations. The Internet has killed the kingmakers. Freshness beats incumbency, while the perception of sincerity beats all. There is no room for focus groups in the elevator to the top of the polls; America wants its candidates straight up and packing a kick. This is how a squinty-eyed New Yorker goes from shooting his cuffs and hawking condos to the head of the GOP pack. It’s how Bernie Sanders can join the Democratic Party in April and by August be battling for first place in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Without a single TV ad–or a single congressional endorsement–Sanders has exposed the weakness of the party’s Clintonian establishment while at the same time spotlighting its hunger for an ideological savior. Polls now indicate that if the nominating contests were held tomorrow, Sanders would edge out Clinton in Iowa and beat her in New Hampshire by 10 points. Nationally, he has cut Clinton’s lead from an impregnable 46 points to a crumbling 21 points in just two months.
But even those metrics don’t convey the extent of the Sanders phenomenon. At Clinton events, campaign staffers section off floor space before her speeches to make her crowds look densely packed. Sanders needs no barriers. His audiences are authentically huge–28,000 in Oregon, 11,000 in Arizona, 7,500 in Maine. His volunteer army, meanwhile, though mostly self-organized online, numbers more than 182,000 people spread out from rural Alaska to the Florida Keys, people who have asked the campaign how to improvise events, knock on doors and spread the gospel from campus quad to living room to farmer’s market.
Win or lose, Sanders seeks to transform his party and redeem American politics through an epic battle against some of the wealthiest powers in human history. “A lot of people have given up on the political process, and I want to get them involved in it,” he tells TIME. “In this fight we are going to take on the greed of the billionaire class. And they are very, very powerful, and they’re going to fight back furiously. The only way to succeed is when millions of people stand up and decide to engage.”
This is not just a campaign, says Sanders. It is a “movement,” a “revolution.” He is not only after delegates; he plans to “raise the political consciousness.” Contrast this with the message Clinton conveyed during a meeting this summer with a group of activists. Consummate political engineer, virtuoso of the knobs and dials of public opinion, Clinton said, “Look, I don’t believe you change hearts. I believe you change laws, you change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate.” David Axelrod, the onetime guru to Barack Obama, brutally mocked the plodding story line. “Hillary: Live With It,” tweeted Axelrod, “is no rallying cry.”
Sanders is all rallying cry. When the Wall Street Journal attempted to tally the cost of his agenda–trillions in new government spending on health care, 90% tax rates on the superwealthy, free public college, a Scandinavian-style safety net–his defenders criticized the effort. It’s time, Sanders says, for billionaires storing their cash in the Cayman Islands to pay up. He is tapping into a recurring desire among Democrats for an outsider to purify the party. “Carter, Clinton and Obama all ran against the party,” Simon Rosenberg, Democratic strategist and veteran of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, observed of the last three Democrats to reach the Oval Office. “We don’t do coronations. It’s not our thing.”
What better way to convey his purity than to take his message to Liberty U., where abortion is murder and gay marriage apostasy. “We are living,” Sanders told the students, “in a nation and in a world which worships not love of brothers and sisters, not love of the poor and the sick, but worships the acquisition of money and great wealth. I do not believe that is the country we should be living in.”
For Phil Boyd, the revolution began in August, when the 24-year-old manager at Barnes & Noble started marching door to door in his town of Clayton, N.J., seeking Sanders recruits. Within weeks, he decided to drive six hours to New Hampshire to hear the firebrand in person.
Sanders delivers stump speeches that are equal parts economics and jeremiad. His numbers have an apocalyptic feel: the 15 wealthiest people in America saw their net worth grow $170 billion in the past two years; 99% of all new income today goes to the wealthiest 1%. Meanwhile, the earth trembles in the face of global warming–“more drought, more floods, more extreme weather disturbances, rising sea levels,” Sanders preaches. “It means more acidification of the ocean with calamitous impact on mammal life.”
What Boyd really wanted, though, came after the fire and brimstone. “Yes, I am here,” Sanders told the crowd in his gravelly Brooklyn accent. “I want to win the Democratic nomination. But I need something more than that–I need your support the day after the election.” Like many others who are rallying to Sanders, Boyd was seeking more than a candidate. He wanted a cause for the long haul. “We have to keep our foot on the pedal, whether it’s Bernie or anybody else who wins,” Boyd said.
Truth be told, many Sanders supporters would have preferred a fresher standard bearer to expose the injustice of income inequality and rail against the buying of elections. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts comes to mind. But Berniemania is about more than just the candidate, and more than one election. “The end goal is to build a political movement that pushes beyond whatever the campaign is or does,” says Corbin Trent, a 35-year-old who sold his food-truck business in Tennessee and now travels the state on behalf of the movement.
Such stories of abandoning careers and setting aside studies to join the Sanders brigades are common. Stephanie Rountree, a 17-year-old high school senior in Baltimore, spends upwards of 20 hours a week analyzing data and helping train volunteers. In Concord, N.H., palliative-care doctor Bob Friedlander left medicine to volunteer full time, rallying health care workers. Alayna Josz, a manicurist in nearby New London, N.H., paints red, white and blue Bernie slogans on her customers’ nails. “He says the things I always wanted to hear, that I knew were true,” Josz, 27, gushes. “All day long, I find myself thinking about Bernie and this revolution.”
The challenge Sanders faces is to build a campaign that can harness this energy effectively. His paid staff is growing rapidly, from four to nearly 40 in New Hampshire in just a month’s time. In Iowa, Sanders is quickly catching up to Clinton, with 54 paid staff to her 78 organizers. He’s set his sights on hiring in the Super Tuesday states.
He has volunteers eager to be involved in 47 states from Alabama to Michigan, where the campaign has no staff and no offices. In a largely unproven experiment, two staffers at the Burlington, Vt., headquarters are using conference calls, Internet chats, organizing parties and digital seminars to train hundreds of Sanders enthusiasts–who in turn are supposed to train other volunteers in rippling circles of self-sufficiency.
The results so far have been unpredictable. Over 100,000 people have said on Facebook that they would attend an “Enough Is Enough” rally on the Washington Mall to support Sanders. But the campaign hasn’t sanctioned the event. In San Antonio, 50 Sanders acolytes picketed a prominent Clinton backer–which came as a surprise to Sanders when he read about it in the newspaper the next day. “Sometime, I’m sure we’ll get in trouble because one of these groups will say something we’ll have to disavow,” Sanders tells TIME.
We’ve seen this movie before: a grassroots darling surges to early stardom only to lose to a better-organized moderate. In 2003, the Sanders role was played by progressive Democrat Howard Dean, another Vermonter, who attracted huge crowds and an avid Internet fan base but failed to win a single nominating contest. Republican Ron Paul in 2011 drew partisans so sincere that many quit their jobs to volunteer for him, but he was just a blip in the Republican primary race.
“The whole notion of self-organizing is a pipe dream,” says Marshall Ganz, a Harvard-based adviser to both the Dean and Obama campaigns. “One of the great values of the Internet is it’s a way to share information, but it’s not a substitute for relational structure and accountability.”
Sanders is undeterred. There must be a way to make it work, he muses on a warm afternoon shortly after Labor Day as he slouches on a sofa in his Capitol Hill office. A poster-board cutout of a happy Holstein stands sentinel and pastoral scenes from the Green Mountain State line the walls as Sanders talks about the power of the presidency.
It’s all about the movement, Sanders admonishes in the deep bass voice that he reserves for one-on-ones. What President Obama didn’t understand when he took office is that you have to keep your movement alive. “Barack Obama ran one of the great campaigns in American history. The biggest mistake he made is that the day after the election, in so many words, he said, ‘Thank you very much, but I will take it from here,'” Sanders says.
Then he paints one of his word pictures. Imagine President Sanders facing a vote in Congress on free college tuition paid for by a tax hike on the wealthy. He’d have to persuade Speaker of the House John Boehner to help him pass the bill. That’s where his army of activists comes in. “How do I convince John? Is my personality that much better than Barack Obama’s?” Sanders says. “The answer is to say, ‘Hey, John, take a look out your window. Because there are a million young people there that are in support of the legislation. They are voting. They know what’s going on. If you refuse to make college affordable, they’re going to vote your people out of office.’ That’s the offer you can’t refuse.”
This kind of insurgent idealism has driven Sanders all his life. His education began at home, in a 3½-room apartment in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood, which stamped his character as well as his accent. His father, the paint salesman, was a Polish immigrant and high school dropout, and the family lived paycheck to paycheck. Teenage Bernie studied Karl Marx and Greek democracy with his older brother, who brought him to neighborhood Democratic Party meetings. When his mother died unexpectedly, Sanders fled New York for the University of Chicago, where he threw himself into activism. By his 23rd birthday, Sanders had worked for a packinghouse union, joined Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington, signed up with the university socialists and been arrested at a civil rights demonstration. He was a sloppy student but an ardent radical of the sweater-and-slacks, nonviolent early-1960s variety.
In his second year at college, Sanders made national news. One frigid Tuesday in January 1962, the 20-year-old stood on the steps of the administration building and railed in the wind against the college’s housing-segregation policy. “We feel it is an intolerable situation when Negro and white students of the university cannot live together in university-owned apartments,” the bespectacled Sanders told a few dozen classmates. Then he led them into the building in protest and camped the night outside the president’s office. It was the University of Chicago’s first civil rights sit-in, and a first taste of victory for Sanders.
From there he made his way to Burlington, Vt., where he staged unsuccessful bids as a socialist candidate for governor and Senator in the 1970s. His winning campaign for mayor of Burlington in 1981 was a notable counterpoint to Ronald Reagan’s conservative uprising, and it launched Sanders on an upward trajectory that took him to Congress in 1991 and the Senate in 2007.
Now, as most of his Kennedy-era comrades have faded from the scene, Sanders has become ubiquitous in Democratic politics–to the irritation of the front-running Clinton. At a recent event in Iowa, for example, a student fired his name at Clinton like a spitball. “Hi, I really wanted to ask about your political views for Bernie Sanders?” a young man clumsily asked at his earliest opportunity. “My political views?” Clinton parried. Then she dodged–a bad habit to have this year. “I don’t have any issue whatsoever in having a really good, strong contest for the Democratic nomination,” she said.
Clinton’s aides say they prepared for a strong challenger and they’re not changing course. The insurgent has been unable to break through with African-American voters, who could prove decisive in the later primaries. “Sanders may be rocking her with white progressives,” says Joe Trippi, a veteran Democratic strategist. “His problem is whether he can break Clinton’s domination of minorities. It’s a huge hurdle if it can’t be solved.” Clinton is still far ahead in nationwide polls, leading Sanders by around 20 percentage points. And her minions have begun to attack, sending out fact sheets that draw comparisons between Sanders and former Venezuelan ruler Hugo Chávez. “That is the kind of politics that I’m trying to change,” Sanders says of team Clinton’s attack.
Characteristically, Sanders professes to be uninterested in such details. “This campaign is about begging you to fight for your kids and your parents, to fight for your planet, fight for the future of your country,” he says. There is no calculation in that answer. Let the other candidates worry about the horse race; Bernie Sanders is worried about forever. It is the opposite of everything we’ve come to expect from the political process–and this year, being an opposite is the secret to success.
|
|
Robin Redbreast in a cage, Puts all Heaven in a Rage,” wrote William Blake. “Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall,” wrote 
