Feel the Bern

Many of you who have been victims of Facebook's facilitation of my political proselytizing are now keenly aware of my support for the candidacy of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for president.

What follows are a few thoughts I shared with another FB poster, someone I don't know and have never met and likely never will.

To offer context, much of it is rooted in comparison with Hillary Rodham Clinton.

My correspondent thinks Hillary has a more refined understanding of foreign policy issues than anyone else in the race.

It is possible to have the most refined understanding and still be wrong.  I think my understanding of the Levant (an almost forgotten term resurrected by John Kerry) is more "refined" than that of most Americans, and I thought the invasion of Iraq might actually accomplish something useful.  I thought the long-term outcome could be a stable democracy in Iraq that would help the entire region move forward toward peace and security.

I was, I now believe, flat wrong.

I'm not sure we know what Hillary thought about it over the last dozen years, or even what she truly believes now.

Sanders, on the other hand, thought it was a mistake even when Iraq was still called Mesopotamia, and he has (wisely) seen no reason to change his mind.

I like a man who chooses positions on issues wisely.  Is he a foreign policy geek?  Perhaps not.  Can he be trusted to make sound foreign policy decisions, faced with an array of complex options?  I believe so.

Then I was reminded of the undeniable advantage of the experience of having served as secretary of state when a foreign policy crisis arises.  So here we are at the campaign commercial about the 3 AM phone call again, only then (2008) Hillary's experience didn't yet include service as a member of the cabinet.

There were plenty of people who thought the peanut farmer from Georgia would be clueless about foreign policy, and many people still blame him for some of the mess that developed in Iran with the overthrow of the Shah.  But that was only the first draft of history, and he is now getting credit for the lack of US involvement in war during those years, so perspective is an ever-changing thing.

My partner in this discourse then wondered "what this wonderfully principled man (Sanders) would be able to accomplish with a Congress full of loons."

I like a man who can be described as "wonderfully principled," I think he can get elected if people will step out of their echo chambers, or take their fingers out of their ears and stop saying "LA-LA-LA-LA" and just listen, and I think a Congress full of loons can be bent to the will of a president who gets the people behind him.

Were you listening when Sanders reminded us that the Walton (Walmart) family has more wealth than the "bottom" 140 million Americans?  What about when he talked about how it is unconscionable that the average American college graduate has to work many years to be free of the burden of educational debt? (So, don't go to college?  Not everyone is cut out to be a plumber or an electrician.)  Were you plugging your ears, because you have a job with health insurance as a benefit - although you have to pick up the lance and the shield to get them to pay for stuff - when Bernie called us out as the only First World nation without universal access to health care and a rational mechanism for funding it?

Perhaps inevitable is the skepticism about whether Sanders could accomplish much of anything as president, given the dominance of the Republican obstructionists in Congress.  Seriously, have you been paying attention to the monkey-wrench-in-the-works approach of the House Freedom Caucus, that group of 40-odd far-right congressmen prepared to shut down government to prevent continued funding for Planned Parenthood, settling instead for the resignation of John Boehner as speaker?

Well, the same question could be asked about any Democrat, although one might imagine Hillary learned something from Bill's experience in working with Newt Gingrich.  But this is not 1994.  It's far worse.  And my correspondent noted that the current occupant of the Oval Office campaigned on a theme of change and has been stymied more often than not.

That is a fair point.  But Obama disappointed me by putting his oratorical skills on the shelf after he won the election in '08 instead of using them to shape public opinion and get the people to turn the flames up high under the derrieres of Members of Congress.

No, instead he chose to try to work with a Congress that is controlled by the wealthy, the powerful, and the multinational corporations.

Obama knew when he took office that pursuing his agenda would take a revolution.  Sanders knows that, too.  Barack didn't follow through.  I'm convinced Bernie would.

Realizing that the perspective of the "opposing" argument must seem awfully gloomy, my debate partner then simply admitted inability to share my optimism. I was ready with a reply to that:

You can share my optimism.  I have plenty, and would be more than happy to spare some for you. You may have some difficulty sharing my vision, but when I look at Bernie, I see a man with integrity, high principle, and the courage of his convictions.  I see a man who is willing to be the TR of the third millennium, to launch peals of thunder from the bully pulpit and stir the masses to demand reform, to bring low the high and mighty who use their wealth and power for nothing but the accumulation of more wealth and power.

It is time to use the federal government for something important and worthwhile: to rebuild the middle class and to bring many of the poor up into that middle class.

Today's corporate robber barons don't even have the redeeming virtues of Rockefeller or Mellon or Carnegie, who realized they had an obligation to use a substantial chunk of their amassed wealth for philanthropy, building institutes and universities and endowing museums, even if it may have been partly to get their names all over them.

No, now it is all about wholly unrestrained greed, accumulating wealth for its own sake.  It is inviting revolution.  That revolution needs a leader.

HRC might be a good president.  She will never lead a revolution.

Bernie Sanders, that Brooklyn-born independent thinker from Vermont, is the man for the times.