Bernie Sanders’s Long Run

BY JILL LEPORE

Bernie Sanders formally announced that he was running for President on May 26, 2015, in a stern thirty-five-minute speech he delivered in Burlington, Vermont, on the green-gray shores of Lake Champlain. But, really, his campaign began nearly five years earlier, on the floor of the Senate, on December 10, 2010, when Sanders spoke—without eating, or sitting down, or taking a bathroom break—for eight and a half hours. The “filiBernie,” people called it—“the most Twittered event in the world on that day,” Sanders wrote later–though it wasn’t, technically, a filibuster, since it wasn’t holding up any vote. “You can call it a very long speech,” the Senator suggested. Or: you could call it a manifesto.

“When I walked on to the floor, I had no idea how long I would stay there,” Sanders explained. At the time, he was sixty-nine. The longest speech he’d ever given, he said, was an hour. He wondered, “Would I last three hours, five hours, twenty hours?” He didn’t have a speech written out, though he had pages, scraps, and notes, and he knew what he wanted to say. He had only one rule: No “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” (“I wasn’t going to read from the phone book or sing songs.”) He figured he’d just riff off bits and pieces of old speeches until he dropped. The idea seems to have been to talk for as long as it would take for people to hear what he had to say. And that, more or less, is his plan for this election, too.

How long will he last? Sanders, who used to be a long-distance runner, has always said that he intends to run a very long campaign. Up until now, the press hasn’t taken that, or him, seriously. “Who Is Bernie Sanders?” CNN asked, in a video posted to its site in April. Who cares? Was the answer of a lot of pundits in May, and into June. Sanders, though, has been drawing huge crowds. And in polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, he’s steadily gaining ground against Hillary Clinton. It’s all very Aesop’s Fables. (You can easily kill two or three torpid summer afternoons trying to pick animals for a parable about Clinton and Sanders. The Armadillo and the Hornet?)

Sanders was born in Brooklyn in 1941. In the nineteen-sixties, at the University of Chicago, he became a civil-rights and antiwar activist. He led sit-ins against segregated housing on campus; he worked for S.N.C.C.; he went to the March on Washington. He graduated with a degree in political science in 1964, the year that Ronald Reagan gave a speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater, called “A Time for Choosing,” that was aired on television the week before Election Day. The choice, Reagan said, was between the Johnson Administration, which Reagan called “socialist” (because of the War on Poverty), and Goldwater, representing the Founding Fathers, who, as Reagan imagined it, knew that “outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy.” Among Reagan’s speechwriters, “A Time for Choosing” became known as “The Speech,” since every speech Reagan gave was essentially a version of it. (For more on The Speech, see Robert Schlesinger’s “White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters.”) In 2011, when Bernie Sanders had the transcript of his quasi-filibuster published as a book, he titled that book “The Speech.”

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