Here's a question people wouldn't bother to ask about an underdog candidate unless they thought that underdog actually had a chance of winning:
"How could Bernie Sanders get anything accomplished with Republicans holding Congress?"
Recently on "Face the Nation," John Dickerson quoted Bill Shaheen, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen's husband (and co-chair of Hillary Clinton's 2008 New Hampshire campaign), who said of Sanders and Clinton, "We all want the same things. But the question, in the final analysis, is who's going to be the person who is going to deliver it for you." Dickerson challenged Sanders to explain "how you can take your ideas and make them reality in a political system."
Sanders addressed Dickerson's question first by discussing how his campaign would be traveling all across the country - even to the deepest red states - to build a movement. Dickerson responded:
Senator, that sounds exactly like what we heard from Sen. Barack Obama: Build a movement, change Washington. You don't think that it worked in that case. Why would it work for you?
Sanders was chomping at the bit to answer. He fired back:
Let me be clear. I think that in 2008, Barack Obama ran one of the great campaigns in the history of the United States - an extraordinary campaign. Here is the mistake that Barack Obama made - and I am a friend of Barack Obama's, have a lot of respect for him, although we disagree on a number of issues. What he did after the election is, what he said to the millions of people who were so excited about his campaign, he said, Hey, thank you very much for electing me - I'll take it from here. I'll sit down with John Boehner, I will sit down with Mitch McConnell, I'll sit down with Republicans, and I'm gonna negotiate some fair compromises. The truth is, Republicans never wanted to negotiate, all they wanted to do was obstruct.
What I have said, throughout this campaign, electing Bernie Sanders as president is not enough, not gonna do it. We need a mass grassroots movement that looks the Republicans in the eye and says if you don't vote to demand that your wealthy people start paying their fair share of taxes, if you don't vote for jobs and raising the minimum wage and expanding Social Security, we know what's going on; we're involved, we're organized, and you are outta here if you don't do the right thing. That is the only way we can take on the billionaire class.
About a month earlier,
Katie Couric had asked much the same question and Sanders had answered in much the same way. He invoked images of how ordinary people can ultimately have more power than a president:
My view is that the only we can bring about an agenda that works for working families is if millions of people are actively involved in the political process. If a million young people march on Washington [and say] to the Republican leadership, we know what’s going on, and you better vote to deal with student debt. You better vote to make public universities and colleges tuition free, that’s when it will happen.
We’re already seeing that with the minimum wage. Do you know why the minimum wage is going up around the country? Because workers are going out into the street, so we need a political revolution, in my view, where people begin to stand up and fight and take on the big money interests.
So the real question is not "Can Bernie deliver?"
The real question is: Can we deliver? Can we, millions of us from different backgrounds and with different perspectives - march together in pursuit of common goals? Can we make our Government enact humane, progressive policies - like so many other countries have? Can we do the heavy lifting to elect politicians who will pursue these policies, and boot out those who won't? Can we the people - ordinary people - have more influence over our Government than Wall Street and billionaires do?
Consider again what Bill Shaheen said: "We all want the same things. But the question, in the final analysis, is who's going to be the person who is going to deliver it for you."
What many of us actually want are very progressive policies which will never happen if we think that our work ends on Election Day and that the President will just snap his or her fingers and "deliver it" to us.
I realize many Democrats honestly believe that very progressive policies - like single-payer health care and tuition-free higher education - are not politically feasible in America. Yet they are clearly achievable in other countries. Like Sen. Sanders, I believe we can achieve these policies in America too. If we make the effort to fight for them.