Bernie Has Great Vision. He Is A Treasure. He Is Also A Terrible Organizer.

This Is A Lesson, And A Warning Sign, For The Future

Why You Might Want To Read This: we mistake hero worship of a Pied Piper and the thrill of rallies and protests, on the one hand, for long-term, permanent organizing, on the other hand. All of the elements are important in gaining power BUT require different skills.

Bernie Sanders has been out and about recently, drawing prodigious crowds around the country (Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, Colorado and California) decrying the descent into oligarchy. He’s flooding my inbox as well, multiple times a week, with well-crafted but, way too long missives (yes, I also suffer from this problem, as this post demonstrates), always with a fundraising pitch at the end for his general campaign operation.

There is no more consistent voice for the people in the U.S. Senate than Bernie Sanders. He’s a national treasure.

At the same time, he’s a terrible organizer of a movement.

Bernie’s rabble-rousing gives us all a chance to consider what counts as effective movement organizing versus rabble-rousing.

These are not contradictory ideas.

They are not the same.

A fair number of my readers know this but for the record, especially for the die-hards: Sanders’ team recruited me to be a national surrogate for his 2016 campaign, a role that began in the summer of 2015 when he was registering just a few points in national polls. From that time through the 2016 party convention, I traveled thousands of miles through a dozen states, which meant showing up in lots of smaller towns such as Elko, Nevada, population 20,000 or Marshalltown, Iowa, population 27,000 to spread the word in coffee shops or tiny campaign offices. Oh, how, I remember those drives well, especially one 500-plus mile Iowa drive to hit three places in one day (Deservedly, I was pulled over twice in Iowa but gotta say those state troopers are definitely Iowa-nice—no tickets!)

I also did a lot of TeeVee on behalf of the campaign, debating the Clintonites (trust me, there is no glory having to sit on a TV set and debate shallow, odious people like David Brock who are political tumors). I was also a two-time Sanders national convention delegate (in 2016 and 2020).

During that period, I saw Bernie speak at roughly 50-75 rallies, indoors and outdoors, in small halls and large arenas, in states from coast-to-coast. The crowds, especially younger people, were transfixed by Sanders.

His vision certainly resonated but I think the magnetic connection with so many people was principally because of a special quality he possesses that I explained in the introduction to “The Essential Bernie Sanders and his Vision for America” :

“Authenticity is hard to manufacture—and as we all know, politicians of all stripes spend many hours and millions of dollars to painfully, and often comically, try to say to voters, “I’m like you; I’m real.”

But authenticity is easy to explain. It’s a simple sense: “Here it is. Here is what I believe from deep inside. I don’t need to convene a think-a-thon of consultants and other sycophants to tell me what I should believe. This is me.”

That is the essence of Bernie Sanders. No bullshit. Unvarnished opinions and beliefs.” [emphasis added here]

We are lucky to have this person out there, rallying the troops, educating folks and bashing the feckless Democratic Party. His authenticity connects with people. How many people do you think would show up for a rally with Chuck Schumer as the top draw?

He doesn’t give an inch criticizing Democrats, which the party richly deserves. After the 2024 election, he had this to say:

"It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.

Today, while the very rich are doing phenomenally well, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and we have more income and wealth inequality than ever before. Unbelievably, real, inflation-accounted-for weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now than they were 50 years ago."

But, now, let’s talk some real truth: looking at the past almost decade since the launch of his first presidential campaign, Bernie has squandered the chance to build a growing movement. With an occasional assist from a few others, he’s mostly a one-man show, truthfully. A great one-man show.

His voice has not translated into a vast, expanding progressive movement if the measuring stick is winning elections. That’s indisputable if one surveys the results of elections at every level over the past ten years and, then, assessing how many people of a Bernie-type philosophy sit in places of power.

Why?

To be sure, you can’t discount the opposition, especially big-money flooding in to elect, or defeat, progressives; I’m thinking especially of the Clinton world Wall Street/corporate cash, which still permeates and corrupts every corner of the party, and the flood of AIPAC money that recently targeted progressive incumbents like Cori Bush.

But, that’s too easy an excuse that deflects from a serious discussion and accountability.

Some of this is Bernie’s personality. He's a loner by temperament and style, he is incapable of building close personal relationships with staff and deputies, and he has very minimal interpersonal skills that would be needed to create a vast network of organizational allies, among very different types of interests.

Organizing is a hard job.

It happens mostly in the spaces between the sugar-high of a rally or protest. Assembling a list that you can fundraise off of is NOT organizing that automatically translates into power.

Let’s look at three key moments to illustrate.

The 2016 Sanders campaign

In 2016, well before the national convention opened on July 25th in Philadelphia, Bernie had lost the delegate numbers game. Many of the 1,893 delegates the Sanders campaign had amassed were new to party politics. A fair number thought, as I learned in numerous conversations at the convention and in the many months later, that they would arrive at the national convention and, in Hollywood film fashion, seize the party’s presidential nomination by battling it out on the floor.

That’s not the way modern conventions work. The last Democratic presidential nominating convention that required multiple ballots was in 1952 when the Democratic National Convention required three rounds of voting to choose Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois; that was so long ago that, believe it or not, I wasn’t even alive (Note: prior to the 1970s, most convention delegates were chosen by party insiders, not via primaries or caucuses).

Similarly, there was not going to be a floor debate over the party platform; that doesn’t happen anymore, mostly—that debate, which was controlled by the Clinton campaign (which had a majority of the 187 platform delegate votes), had already taken place in Orlando, Florida two weeks earlier (yours truly was there).

Virtually every contested position that got the thumbs-up for the eventual party platform was a Clinton plank. Bernie could have decided to take certain planks to the convention but he decided not to to, partly to preserve his influence in the party. I thought that was a mistake in at least one instance: opposition to the Trans Pacific Partnership, the really odious so-called “free trade” agreement that corporate Democrats were pushing. I’m told by a person with intimate knowledge of what happened that Barack Obama personally called Bernie to ask him to back off, which Bernie did.

Here’s the more important point: party platforms are mostly irrelevant to anyone but diehards, most of whom I would wager can’t recall what’s written in the now-gathering electronic dust document. The “fight” over a platform is really a game to make the losers in a nomination battle feel better, and be able to go back to their peeps and pretend like there was a struggle over principles that made all the work worth it.

Bernie knew it was over. He had officially endorsed Clinton on July 12th. So, the rest of the convention was pageantry—and too much late-night meals and alcohol (not that I had any part in that).

But, the campaign blew it. It did little to prepare folks for the reality that, like it or not, he was not going to be the nominee. More important, the time and place of the convention was a golden opportunity to harness the energy of hundreds of Sanders delegates: this was a budding cadre that had spent plenty of time talking to voters in every corner of the country, had shelled out hard-earned money to travel to the convention (many had set-up Go Fund Me sites because they could not afford the expense) and, then, would return home to 50 states as future leaders, both as organizers and candidates.

Instead, the Sanders contingent was disorganized and, in some places, chaotic. There was only one large Sanders all-delegate meeting, mostly to hear a set of speeches, including from Sanders, given from the podium in a large meeting hall. There was no long-term organizing done.

What should have happened? if “political revolution” was the goal, as Bernie’s rhetoric always called for, the delegates should have been presented with a long-term, post-convention plan that stretched way beyond November 2016. Skilled organizers should have been on hand to sit with delegates, either by state or region, to put in place the steps needed over the next year.

Instead, people went home discouraged or angry.

I say this with great respect: Sanders needed to own that failure at the convention but he never has. And it’s just important to look back on that to understand why it went down that way—he talked the talk of “political revolution” but never made it a priority for his staff nor invested in the kind of operation to translate the energy of people into a long-term movement which would actually lead to a political revolution.

Post-2016 campaign.

Ok, so, people went home, without an overarching plan. There was, then, great fanfare in the launch of Our Revolution, the organization that was created, in theory, to seize the baton of the 2016 presidential campaign and be the organizing infrastructure for the future. Bernie even wrote a best-selling book titled, “Our Revolution”.

Today, Our Revolution is a shell. It simply does not have traction. It can’t point to many, if any, campaigns in which it was the central reason a candidate won. It can’t raise substantial money for candidates. It doesn’t offer any serious support other than the “brand” of an endorsement, which moves the needle, perhaps, for a handful of Bernie folks but not at the scale to win elections.

And, with great respect, it is withering because Sanders has made it so. All Bernie’s emails in the past few months come with an ask to donate to “Friends of Bernie Sanders”, not a broader movement. If he did, all the fundraising asks would be funneled to Our Revolution, not to his campaign efforts he chooses to endorse or efforts where he is the Pied Piper.

He can’t let go.

2020 Campaign

I thought it was a mistake for Sanders to run again because I thought he had reached a ceiling in support among voters for two reasons. First, I didn’t think, at the time, he could expand his numbers inside the rules of the Democratic Party primary. There is a faction out there that has always agitated for Bernie to run as an independent, a label which has been his affiliation for each of his Congressional campaigns. But, despite the rhetoric, it’s really, really hard to build an independent, winning presidential campaign in this country because of the Electoral College and money (a post, perhaps, for another time).

Second, Bernie is truly great on the hustings, as the thousands of committed die-hards will attest to. But, he’s got one gear, one note, and getting to a majority requires, now and again, a certain type of emotional intelligence to touch your audience in a variety of ways *without* ceding an inch of principle.

There was a better play, which I quietly argued to allies: take all that pent up energy from 2016, use his list to raise $100 million, step back from being the center of attention (which is the natural outcome of being THE CANDIDATE) and elect 1,000 progressives to local offices by putting in place scores of skilled, permanent local organizers—and there is a just a dearth out there of skilled permanent organizers today partly because we haven’t created a pathway for people to make a living in between campaigns.

But, he ran. And, inexplicably, he hired a quintessential D.C. Beltway non-profit operative hustler, Faiz Shakir, to be the 2020 Sanders campaign manager. He had neither the chops to run a national campaign (as far as I know he hadn’t ever run even a city council campaign) nor, more important, motivation to build any sort of permanent, growing progressive base.

Worse, Shakir blew it badly, eroding the Bernie base even further. I mean, epic badly.

Facts: In the 2016 presidential primary season, Bernie won 22 contests and amassed 1,893 delegates, running against the establishment’s overwhelming choice; it was effectively a head-to-head contest.

By contrast, in 2020, you could argue the competition was more divided and easier to pick off: Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Michael Bloomberg (and his bottomless wallet which got him very little traction), Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and, yes, Tulsi Gabbard (a nutcase, she is the one with the less than one percent you will see in any contest).

Yet, the 2020 Bernie campaign, with Shakir as campaign manager, was abysmal: winning a meager 9 contests including Vermont (duh), Democrats Abroad (wow, that’s impressive…) and that key powerhouse, swing constituency, everyone is dying to have…Northern Marianas Islands. Shakir alienated vast numbers of people in every state who had been part of the 2016 effort.

And Bernie lost. And we know what that eventually led to in the 2020 general election.

Shakir, then, comically, decided to run recently for chair of the national Democratic Party. I suppose his campaign slogan was: if you loved how badly I did in 2020, boy, can I do the same for the DNC. He knew—or maybe he’s so bad at this he had no clue—that he had no shot.

It was all about the Benjamins and power—raise his profile with donors who will shell out money for some new organization because most donors have zero clue, no clue, what “organizing” means and there is virtually no penalty for failure in the non-profit-ee, D.C. world.

Fittingly, he got two votes in the DNC election—one vote was his own. I mean, that’s pretty funny.

So, to wrap: we just need to be very clear-eyed. Bernie should keep doing his “oligarchy” road tour. That’s all good.

But, he is not skilled enough to, then, turn the adoring crowds into permanent change.

The last very longgggg email from him declares: “And that is why we are now hiring organizers all across the country to help build that movement.” It’s fitting that the call to organize is stuck on the very end, almost as an after-thought.

Based on the track record, what is the confidence level that this isn’t just putting good (small donor) money after bad?

As a last point: these failures aren’t just about one man.

This is a broader problem within the terrain generally described as “progressive”, which is pretty hard to define since the self-identification of “progressive” has become so broad it’s almost lost meaning. I recently observed that anyone can embrace the “progressive” mantle—the “progressive” label became a thing back in the 1980s so actual socialists/communists/left-wingers could avoid being red-baited, especially in the labor movement. Heck, you can vote for the Iraq War, get paid $200,000 by Goldman Sachs to give multiple speeches extolling the wonder of the “free market” and be for the death penalty and, without irony, call yourself a progressive—as Hillary Clinton does.

But, for the moment, if we use “progressive” in a somewhat amorphous way, the progressive “movement” is a cacophony of thousands and thousands of organizations. Each organization thinks it has The Answer. The organizations that survive, even if they barely hobble along, have a singular skill: each has figured out how to unlock the vault of foundations or individual funders. Everyone is competing for a finite amount of money from foundations and rich donors.

And withering on the vine. In fact, what is needed right now is a massive consolidation of organizations, not breeding new ones. The chances of that happening are somewhat less than me getting a multi-year, multi-million dollar contract to pitch for the New York Yankees.

More to discuss on real organizing down the road…