94 | Rolling Stone | August 2019
NATIONAL AFFAIRS[Cont. from 47]can we maybe have a million dollars in the budget
for all this?’ ”
Heads are nodding all over the place.
“They say, ‘I can get you a cookie.’ ”
This elicits a few yeahs from the crowd.
Christ, I think. This woman is going to win the
nomination.
Trump, she says, can’t be beaten by conven tional
thinking. “[He is] not just a politician,” she says.
“This man is a phenomenon.... The only way we are
going to defeat a phenomenon at the polls in 2020 is
by creating a phenomenon.”
She stumbles a bit in Q&A, especially when a
woman asks what she would do about the credit-
score system. Williamson frowns, seeming genu inely
perplexed. She clearly doesn’t know what having bad
credit is like, and promises to look into it, in the tone
of voice of a person who promises gamely to try a jel-
lied-eel appetizer.
Still, she gets a rousing ovation at the end of her
speech. After, she takes a few minutes to talk.
“The political establishment has the veneer of a
deep conversation,” she says. “They think their polit-
ical dialogue is so sophisticated. But it’s not sophisti-
cated. It’s very unsophisticated.”
That lack of sophistication, she says, is what made
Trump possible. Young people, in particular, have no
more patience for the phoniness. “I see it especial-
ly in people who were born this century,” she says.
“They’re tired of the nonsense.”
Williamson belongs to a category of candidate you
might call the Ignored. They’re candidates blown off
by national political wizards who don’t believe, or
don’t want to believe, they can win. How anyone can
think this way after 2016 is mind-boggling.
The list includes Williamson, entrepreneur and
Universal Basic Income proponent Andrew Yang,
Hawaii congresswoman and regime-change oppo-
nent Tulsi Gabbard, and, most conspicuously, Ber-
nie Sanders.
It’s unseemly, the degree to which the press is
rooting for Sanders to get his socialist tuchis out of
the race. This is an actual headline from Politico
after the first set of debates: HARRIS, WARREN TIE FOR
THIRD IN NEW POLL, BUT BIDEN STILL LEADS.
The Washington Post/ABC poll showed Biden drop-
ping to 25 percent nationally, with Harris and Warren
jousting for third at nine percent. Where’s Waldo?
The missing data point is that Sanders doubled both
Harris and Warren in said poll at 18 percent. He also
has the highest number of unique donors, and is the
leading fundraiser overall in the race.
That doesn’t mean Sanders is going to win. He’s
the only candidate with a more or less insoluble
base of voters, but unlike Warren, who seems really
to want this, Bernie has sometimes seemed dispirit-
ed. Still, the undeniable truth is that the Democratic
race is about Sanders. Most of the candidates either
support Medicare for All or try to sound like they do.
They also tend to support a $15 minimum wage and
call for wealth taxes, a Green New Deal, antitrust ac-
tions, and some rejection of corporate donors. Even
Joe Biden, he of the lengthy career deep-throating
credit-card-industry bucks, has parroted Sanders’
anti-corporate themes, noting that the Constitution
reads “ ‘We the People,’ not ‘We the Donors.’ ”
There is an irony in the fact that Sanders has be-
come the bête noire of Clintonian politics, given that
Sanders represents the culmination of Bill’s 1992 elec-
toral formula: “Change versus more of the same.”catchphrase was used not only by
Obama, but also by two other Massachusetts Dems
Warren resembles: 1992 presidential contender Paul
Tsongas, and Dukakis. The Duke’s 1988 message of
“new economic patriotism” included proposals for
universal health coverage, a higher minimum wage,
scholarships for students committed to teaching ca-
reers, etc.
Politicians often sound great. They may sound like
they understand issues up and down. They may even
have passed laws that ostensibly address problems.
But for a lot of Americans, speeches never catch up
with reality. Legislation designed to prevent pollu-
tion, contractor corruption, sexual assault, preda-
tory lending, and countless other abuses may earn
approving headlines — but create few results on the
ground. This gap between reality and political proc-
lamation is what opened the door for Trump in 2016.
“I work at Walmart, along with 1.5 million other
people,” Morgan Baethke says. “Those employees
are used to the idea that if the Walton family says X
will happen, X happens. If a businessman says X will
happen, X will happen.” He pauses. “But if a senator
says it, who knows?”C
EDAR RAPIDS, IOWA, a Sunday morning, just
after services at the Unity Center, an alter-
native church that preaches a “practical ap-
proach to Christianity.” It’s a place you might expect
to buy healing salts or take hypnotism lessons. The
crowd is younger and more female than at most cam-
paign stops.
Marianne Williamson, the self-help author made
famous by Oprah Winfrey, is speaking to about 50
people. “When we get bad news, when we learn that
something really terrible is going on, so many super-
ficial concerns drop away. And we become very intel-
ligent,” she says, glaring and pausing for emphasis.
Williamson is a small, almost ethereal figure with
silver-streaked hair and intense eyes that 19th-cen-
tury authors would have described as being “like
coals.” Her superficial eccentricities and occasional
incautious statements (she once said “there’s a skep-
ticism which is actually healthy” on the issue of vac-
cines) have caused reporters to chortle at her run.
But her speech is not a lifeless collection of policy
positions. It’s an interesting, tightly written diagno-
sis of the American problem. Precisely because socio-
economic stresses have pushed them into heightened
awareness, she says, the American public sees what
she calls “a transition from democracy to aristocra-
cy,” and the corporate sector’s “insatiable appetite”
for money that dominates American life.
Williamson is not a traditional orator, with a voice
that fills the room. You can barely hear her without a
microphone. But she grabs crowds. Nobody is check-
ing sports scores or Twitter. They’re in.
Williamson goes on to say that most Americans are
aware that their government is now little more than
a handmaiden to sociopathic forces. She describes a
two-party system that, at its worst, operates in per-
fect harmony with the darkest impulses of corpo-
rate capitalism, and at best — presumably she refers
more to Democrats here — sounds like institutional-
ized beggary.
“ ‘Pretty please, can I maybe have a hundred-thou-
sand-dollar grant here?’ ” she says. “ ‘Pretty please,Decades later, this is no longer just a marketing
formulation. About 20 of the candidates exist some-
where on the spectrum of traditional Demo cratic pol-
itics, with Klobuchar, Mayor Pete, and Biden on one
side, and Warren on the more progressive end. Sand-
ers is the revolutionary. His election would mean
a complete overhaul of the Democratic Party, forc-
ing everyone who ever worked for a Clinton to look
toward the private sector. That’s what a vote for
“change” would mean in 2020.A
MES, IOWA, A HOUSE PARTY. Reporters love
this tradition, standing in the home of a real-
life actual ordinary person.
House parties for me bat about .250. A major dan-
ger is ending up sardined in a room with insufficient
air conditioning and no during-speech egress. This is
the case at the gathering for Robert “Beto” O’Rourke.
After his dicey debate performance, O’Rourke was
called to the carpet by his biggest donors, includ-
ing Louis Susman, the former investment banker
and Obama bundler. Susman reportedly ordered
O’Rourke to unfuck himself before the next debates.
It’s bad enough when the money people are
bossing around the candidates. It’s worse when
one of those backers actually tells the story to the
media; Susman went so far as to be quoted saying of
O’Rourke, “The needed improvements are purely
stylistic.”
After O’Rourke became a social media meme for
his gringo Spanish, and got walloped in the debate
on his pet issue, immigration, the campaign’s solu-
tion was to send him to Ciudad Juárez, across the Rio
Grande, for an emergency session of Looking as Con-
cerned as Julián Castro. Now the poor guy is back in
Iowa reporting on his adventures and delivering a
speech entirely about the crisis. He describes the bor-
der scene in horrific, Boschian detail, down to the
“little kiddos” who are “pooping in their pants” and
on the floor where they will sleep and eat.
Most are listening intently, but there’s some winc-
ing in the heat. There’s no way to avoid wondering
how this would play in a general-election setting. One
can already hear what Trump would say about his
emergency Juárez trip: If it was Susman’s idea, why
isn’t Susman running?
Four years ago, the rank inadequacy of the Lind-
sey Grahams and Scott Walkers and Jeb Bushes who
tumbled into the pastures of Iowa made great sport
for snickering campaign journalists, myself includ-
ed. We dubbed the field of governors, senators, and
congressgoons who couldn’t beat a game-show host
the “Clown Car,” and laughed at what many of us
thought was the long-overdue collapse of the Repub-
lican Party. The joke turned out to be on us.
The GOP error was epic in scale. The Republicans
sent twice the usual number of suspects into the buzz
saw of a Throw the Bums Out movement they never
understood, creating the comic pretext for the Clown
Car: twice the canned quips, twice the empty prom-
ises, double the rage, frustration, and eye rolls.
Nobody will want to hear this, but Democrats are
repeating the error. The sense of déjà vu is palpable.
It might and should still work out, according to the
polls. But a double catastrophe seems a lot less im-
possible than it did even a year ago. Lose to Donald
Trump once, shame on the voters. Lose to him twice?
It’s glue-factory time for the Democratic Party, and
another black eye for America, which is fast turning
its electoral system into a slapstick reality show.