4 The New York Review
An Outside Chance
Fintan O’Toole
Declarations of intent to run for the
US presidency have a special kind of
cartography. Everything is oriented
toward Washington, as it was toward
Jerusalem in the old maps. But the
optics should place the candidate at a
spiritual distance from the capital: in
a boyhood home in Kansas (Dwight
Eisenhower), in a snowstorm in Min-
nesota (Amy Klobuchar), or in one’s
own tower in New York City (Donald
Trump). Yet on April 30, 2015, an im-
probable candidate for the Democratic
nomination made his announcement
from an open patch of ground just a few
dozen yards from the Capitol building,
whose imposing classical portico partly
framed the TV footage of his press con-
ference. The patch is actually known
as the Senate Swamp or, as the official
press gallery website has it, the Swamp
Site. It gives a local habitation and a
name to the Washington swamp that,
in the rhetoric Trump adapted from
Ronald Reagan, must be drained. It is
surely the last place an outsider hoping
to lead an insurgency against the estab-
lishment would choose to begin his rev-
olution. But it is where Bernie Sanders,
in a moment that continues to resonate
in American politics, first affirmed his
ambitions. Those ambitions now seem
unlikely ever to be fulfilled, but in pur-
suing them Sanders has radically altered
the meaning of inside and outside.
According to Shattered: Inside Hill-
ary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign by
Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, in
planning his announcement Sanders
had sought to identify himself even
more emphatically as a Beltway insider.
He considered having the launch inside
the Capitol itself and, when told that this
was not permitted, tried to get (but was
refused) a room in the headquarters
of the Democratic National Commit-
tee—an especially cheeky request,
coming as it did from a man who, asked
at that press conference if he were
now a Democrat, replied, “No, I’m an
Independent.”
These are minor details, but they
do tell us two important things about
Sanders. One is that, unlike almost
any other viable candidate for the US
presidency in recent decades, he has no
need to perform outsiderness. His 1997
political memoir is called Outsider in
the House, a title rather optimistically
updated for a new edition in 2019 to
Outsider in the White House. For once,
the claim is not phony. In 1991, after
San ders had become the first mem-
ber of the House of Representatives
in more than forty years not affiliated
with either major party, the powerful
Massachusetts Democrat Joe Moakley
told the Associated Press that “he is out
there wailing on his own. He screams
and hollers, but he is all alone.” Bill
Richardson, another influential Demo-
cratic congressman, said that Sanders’s
status as an independent made him
“kind of a homeless waif.” The wailing
waif does not need to convince anyone
that he is not a cozy member of the
Washington elite.
If anything, he needs to prove the
opposite. The other message of the
choice of location for that momentous
announcement of his presidential run
in 2015 is that Sanders is on the in-
side, that for all his talk of revolution
and resistance, he is not alien to the
American political system. It’s not just
that San ders is immensely interested in
power—how to get it and how to use it.
It is that he understands that in order
to achieve power at the highest level, he
must be seen to belong. Sanders’s polit-
ical odyssey is a very long and gradual
attempt to convince the American peo-
ple that he and his ideas are not outland-
ish. In the late 1970s—when he was at
a low ebb, having divorced his college
sweetheart, been crushed in four suc-
cessive elections, and been evicted from
his home in Burlington, Vermont—he
shared a room with a fellow activist,
Richard Sugarman. Sugarman told
Tim Murphy of Mother Jones in 2015,
“I’d say, ‘Bernard, maybe the first thing
you should say is “Good morning” or
something.’ But he’d say, ‘We’re. Not.
Crazy.’”
Sanders has never, as Ronald Rea-
gan did in his famous ads in 1984, said
a cheery good morning to America.
He has been saying, over and over,
We’re. Not. Crazy. Or, as he puts it
more flatly in Outsider in the White
House, “The ideas I was espousing
were not ‘far out’ or ‘fringe.’ Frankly,
they were ‘mainstream.’” In an era
when “mainstream” is a favored term
of political abuse, Sanders may be the
last major politician to want—indeedto need—to embrace it. Even assum-
ing that Sanders will not get to put his
mainstream credentials to the ultimate
test in November, the fate of the Trump
presidency may still depend on how
“far out” Sanders’s supporters feel by
then.If Sanders were not a self- described
socialist, this task would be easy
enough. For the paradox of this self-
styled revolutionary is that he is also
a shining exemplar of that great para-
gon of American conservatism, the
self- made man. Sanders, not Trump, is
the outstanding political entrepreneur
of our time. Unlike Trump, he was not
born to great wealth and he did not have
the advantage of national TV celebrity
as a launching pad for a thrust toward
the presidency. Sanders likes to quote
Martin Luther King Jr.: “This country
has socialism for the rich, rugged indi-
vidualism for the poor.” But he himself
is the epitome of rugged individualism
in the political sphere. If votes were
banknotes, Sanders could be the hero
of a Horatio Alger story, the poor boy
living in obscurity whose hard work,
determination, and dauntlessness in
the face of setbacks transforms his rags
to riches.
When, after a second unsuccessful
run for the Vermont governorship in
1976, Sanders decided to retire from
politics and leave the small Liberty
Union Party on whose ticket he hadrun, he set up his own micro- company,
what he calls in Outsider in the White
House a reasonably successful “small
business in educational filmstrips” that
he wrote, produced, and personally
sold to colleges. If there were a movie
of this period in Sanders’s life, it might
be called Birth of a Salesman—one
can imagine him going from college to
college, trying to persuade busy admin-
istrators by force of charm and convic-
tion that they really needed to buy his
homemade film on the life of the great
American socialist Eugene Debs.
Bernie the small businessman is not
an image that comes easily to mind, but
it fits well with his history as a doughty
self- starter. And while San ders prom-
ises a major expansion of federal
spending, he has always identified with
the small business owner’s desire to be
miserly with money. “Bernie,” writes
his longtime campaign manager, Jeff
Weaver, in How Bernie Won: Inside the
Revolution That’s Taking Back Our
Country—and Where We Go from
Here, “is a frugal manager by nature.
He is always convinced that the work
being done by any ten people could
really be done by five.” In his own
memoir, Sanders boasts of this frugal-
ity during his eight years as mayor of
Burlington: “It was absolutely neces-
sary to show that we could run a tight-
fisted, cost- effective administration.”
Likewise, and perhaps because he
is seventy- eight years old, it is hard to
think of Sanders through that otherBernie Sanders; drawing by Anders Nilsen