Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont, an independent who calls himself a socialist, in Washington last week.
WASHINGTON — When President Obama cut a deal with Congressional
Republicans in December 2010 to extend tax cuts for the wealthy, Senator
Bernard Sanders, the brusque Vermont independent who calls himself a socialist, decided it was time for a protest.
He had a cup of coffee and a bowl of oatmeal in a Senate cafeteria, marched into the chamber and began talking.
He talked for so long — railing for 8 hours 37 minutes about economic
justice, the decline of the middle class and “reckless, uncontrollable”
corporate greed — that his legs cramped. So many people watched online
that the Senate video server crashed.
Today the issue of tax cuts for the wealthy is once again front and
center in Washington, as part of the debate over how to reduce the
federal deficit. And Mr. Sanders is once again talking, carving out a
place for himself as the antithesis of the Tea Party and becoming a thorn in the side to some Democrats and Mr. Obama, who he fears will cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits as part of a deficit reduction deal.
A number of Congressional Democrats agree with Mr. Sanders that “no deal
is better than a bad deal,” but he may be the most vocal.
He is emboldened by his recent re-election with more than 70 percent of
the vote — “Seventy-one percent, but who’s counting?” Mr. Sanders said —
and he appears to be making a little headway. Mr. Sanders has been
pressing Mr. Obama to take Social Security off the negotiating table,
and the White House now says changes to the retirement program should be
considered on a “separate track” from a deficit deal.
“I think maybe he has learned something,” Mr. Sanders, 71, said of the
president, who is 20 years his junior. “After four years he has gotten
the clue that you can’t negotiate with yourself, you can’t come up with a
modest agreement and hope the Republicans say, ‘That’s fair, you’re
O.K., we’ll accept that.’ He’s reached out his hand, and they’ve cut him
off at the wrist.”
The Senate is a polite place, so Republicans have little to say about
their colleague from Vermont with the thick Brooklyn accent. (He
acquired it growing up in Flatbush.) After four years of accusing Mr.
Obama of practicing “European-style socialism,” they are hardly enamored
of a man who actually embraces European-style socialism, and who
carries a brass key chain from the presidential campaign of Eugene V.
Debs, who ran in the early 1900s as the Socialist Party candidate.
“Bernie?” Senator John Cornyn, the Texas Republican, said with a raised eyebrow and a sly smile. “He’s one of a kind.”
Vermont Republicans are a bit more pointed. Richard Tarrant, a
businessman who ran against Mr. Sanders in 2006 and was trounced, agrees
with him that taxes should rise for the rich. But he sees his former
opponent as a populist “advocating class warfare” and raising “false
hope” about programs that are unsustainable.
Mr. Sanders, who has a habit of answering questions with questions, says
it is Republicans who are engaging in class warfare.
“Do we really say we’re going to balance the budget on making major cuts
in disability benefits for veterans who have lost their arms and legs
defending America, while we continue to give tax breaks to
billionaires?” he thundered, without pausing for breath. “Is that what
the American people want? They surely do not, and only within a Beltway
surrounded by Wall Street and big-money interests could anyone think
that is vaguely sensible.”
Mr. Sanders, who on Wednesday was appointed chairman of the Veterans
Affairs Committee, has 28 of the Senate’s 51 Democrats with him on
keeping Social Security out of the deficit talks; all signed a letter
that he and the Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid, sent to the
president. In the House, 104 Democrats — more than half of the caucus —
signed a similar appeal. And 13 Senate Democrats, plus Mr. Sanders,
signed a second letter demanding that entitlement programs be spared
“harmful cuts.”
To Mr. Sanders, “harmful cuts” means any cuts in benefits. He says that
entitlement spending should be trimmed only by wringing out
inefficiencies. Many budget experts say that is unlikely to produce as
much savings as the president and Republicans want. But Senator Tom
Harkin, the Iowa Democrat, believes that Mr. Sanders has some silent
support.
“I think Senator Sanders represents the majority of our caucus,” Mr.
Harkin said. “Not all of it, but the majority. They may not be saying it
in the same way that Sanders says it, not as aggressively as Senator
Sanders. But I think that’s where they are.”
With his gruff exterior and utter lack of interest in the false
pleasantries of politics, Mr. Sanders, a onetime college radical who led
a sit-in in 1962 at the University of Chicago to protest discriminatory
housing policies, is an unlikely figure to have gained admittance to
the Senate, often called the world’s most exclusive club.
Before becoming successful in politics, he knocked around from job to
job — carpenter, tax clerk, freelance writer. He took his first trip to
Vermont in the mid-1960s after picking up a tourist brochure at
Rockefeller Center. He and his wife at the time bought 85 acres of
woodlands for $2,500 and began spending long summers in a “sugar cabin” —
a shack where maple syrup is made — without electricity or indoor
plumbing. In 1968, they moved permanently.
In 1971, he ran for the Senate in a special election on an antiwar
platform and got 2 percent of the vote. Ten years later, he squeaked
past a six-term Democratic incumbent to become the mayor of Burlington,
winning by 10 votes. In a small state like Vermont (population 626,000),
Mr. Sanders has proved to be a master of retail politics. This year, he
held dozens of town meetings and won without running a single
television advertisement.
“Bernie engages everyone,” said Garrison Nelson, a political scientist
at the University of Vermont. “He walks the streets of Burlington alone,
without an entourage. People will come up to him and say, ‘You lousy
communist S.O.B.,’ and he’ll say: ‘What do you mean? Clarify
yourself.’ ”
If Mr. Sanders could have his way, the United States would be like
Finland or Sweden, where the government guarantees child care and health
care. His philosophy flows from his Brooklyn boyhood; he grew up the
son of a paint salesman in a home, he said, where “money was always a
source of friction.”
The family lived in a one-bedroom apartment; the young Mr. Sanders slept
in the living room with his older brother. His mother, who died at 46,
dreamed of owning a “private house.” His father, a Polish immigrant,
reminded him of Willy Loman, the hard-working character in “Death of a
Salesman,” who is fired after 34 years with the same company.
The play offers a lesson that the senator says is too often forgotten in
Washington, “of people who have money not understanding what it’s like
not to have money.” Mr. Sanders intends to make people understand, and
if he thinks it is necessary to stand on the Senate floor for another 8
hours 37 minutes, he just might do it.
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