Bernie Sanders Needs a War Room
To win, the Sanders campaign must start agressively challenging the media’s negative framing of his candidacy
It is not news to anyone who followed Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 primary campaign that the corporate-owned media is relentless in its attacks against him. Yet surprisingly, his 2020 campaign does not seem to have developed a clear strategy for dealing with a biased media that is, some argue, the biggest threat to his campaign.
Sanders himself seems to think he can prevail by simply sticking to his message (about guaranteeing health care to all and other policies to help working people), which he believes “resonates with a significant majority” of Democratic voters. But I worry that the media is a step ahead of him here. It is precisely because his policies are popular that the most consistent and pernicious smear of him is not to directly attack his ideas, but rather his ability to implement them. This attack is aimed squarely at people who like what he has to say (i.e, most Democrats) and would probably vote for him — unless the media can convince them that he is a crusader, not a statesman; he is Ralph Nader, not FDR.
If enough potential supporters are convinced to not take his candidacy for president seriously, this false perception of Sanders as an ineffectual idealist— shaped not by facts but by the propaganda of a corporate-owned media — could very well cost him the nomination.
There are very few people in American history who have truly changed the conversation. I think one of the questions hovering over Bernie Sanders is whether someone who spent decades in that kind of lonely trench warfare is equipped to make the transition from being, not an activist, not a prophet, not a gadfly, but a leader.
— Anand Giridharadas, editor-at-large, TIME (“On the Trail With Bernie Sanders,” 6/6/2019)
Last fall, Bernie Sanders was re-elected to his third term as a United States senator. He has also been a four-term mayor and an eight-term member of the US House of Representatives. The idea that at this point in his career Sen. Sanders needs to make a “transition” to becoming an effective leader is absurd. Nevertheless, most political journalists persist in trying to convince us of just that, portraying him as basically a modern-day Don Quixote, tilting at windmills. Yes, he is very good at making inspiring speeches full of ambitious policy prescriptions, the conventional wisdom tells us, but what is needed in a serious candidate for president is someone can compromise and work effectively with others — the implication being, always, that Sanders is incapable of doing either.
Of course, being a forward-thinking iconoclast with strong progressive principles isn’t necessarily incompatible with an ability to work with the other side or even to compromise, on occasion, in order to advance an important policy goal. Sanders has repeatedly shown that he can do both.
Nevertheless, the idea of Sanders as a lonely ideologue off on his own, accomplishing nothing of importance, has become the conventional wisdom about Sanders because it is the image that major media outlets have been constructing since he became a serious contender for the 2016 Democratic nomination. No matter what the ostensible topic might be, the purpose of virtually every piece on Sanders that appears in the traditional media is to promote this dismissive narrative. The image of Sanders as a starry-eyed idealist who can’t realize his progressive policy dreams is ubiquitous, but not just because the media frames him this way. The framing succeeds because the campaign does not prioritize pushing back effectively and consistently on this canard in order to kill it off.
An example of this dynamic is a recent New York Times feature that looks at some of Sanders’ foreign policy views during the 1980s. The writers of the piece use his anti-interventionist activism while mayor of Burlington, Vermont, as evidence of the “combative ideological persona” that supposedly characterizes him as a politician, both then and today. This picture of Sanders evokes an image of a rabble-rousing socialist more interested in issuing proclamations criticizing Reagan’s foreign policy than in tending to municipal affairs in Burlington. While local residents complained about bulging sidewalks, Sanders, frustrated by opposition from the city aldermen (according to the article), “turned his attention abroad.”
Although the lack of historical context in the New York Times piece has been thoroughly critiqued, not much attention has been paid to misrepresentation of Sanders in the role of executive, a main theme of the article.
In reality, Sanders was an extremely hard-working mayor who was intensely interested in good-government initiatives, in his constituents, and in improving the city of Burlington. One of his first acts as mayor was to go door-to-door to talk to his constituents about their concerns. He implemented innovative policy solutions such as creating a nonprofit community land trust to provide affordable housing that today is “inarguably the most successful land trust in America,” according to Slate. He oversaw the revitalization of Burlington’s downtown and initiated a multi-use redevelopment project that resulted in the “spectacular” waterfront along Lake Champlain.
Even though the facts of the matter so clearly and directly contradict the framing, as usual (as so often happens with these stories), it took a member of the public to point it out.
Reader “Cat” of upstate New York wrote in a May 17 online comment:
Although Sanders did have a consuming interest in foreign policy, it is misleading to suggest his international activities were a response to the Board of Aldermen in their opposition to his administration and proposals. The city government had long been an entrenched, indifferent, right-leaning crony crowd that had allowed the city’s infrastructure and housing to fall into ruin. They were so hostile to Sanders that they refused even to approve the hiring of his secretary. Their frustration with Sanders’ political activism is no measure of what is appropriate in city government….
The article also somewhat insinuates Sanders neglected his duties as mayor, which is emphatically not the case. The sidewalks complained of by the constituent had fallen into disrepair under previous mayors. In fact, under Sanders the city was vastly improved, and several times listed among the nation’s “most livable city” indexes.
Another commenter pointed out that the New York Times itself ran a much more fair, even positive, article in 2015 on Sanders’ tenure as mayor, titled — ironically, given the more recent piece — “As Mayor, Bernie Sanders Was More Pragmatist Than Socialist.” According to the writer of this earlier piece: “He tended to talk globally but act locally… Although he often shouted about foreign affairs, Mr. Sanders was consumed with running the city.” This 2015 article includes the fact that during his administration, Burlington began appearing on lists of the best places in the US to live, as well as that he was featured in a 1987 US News & World Report cover story on the 20 best mayors in the nation.
A still earlier feature in the New York Times Magazine in 2007 quotes a Sanders friend and University of Vermont professor who recalled that while mayor, Sanders had a listed home phone number which his constituents availed themselves of literally around the clock: “Someone would call at 3 a.m. and say, ‘Hey Bernie, someone just threw a brick through my window, what should I do?’ He was as hands on as anyone…. Does he have an off-mode? Not really.”
Do these accounts portray a mayor distracted from his mayoral duties by a misplaced focus on foreign policy? Again, these are pieces on Sanders from the New York Times’ own archives. Did the writers of the more recent piece not have access to them?
It is fairly obvious that this is a bad faith effort to depict Sanders as a gadfly and a radical, and it is one that is easily dismantled by simply pointing to the facts, including those previously reported in the New York Times. Yet, because the Sanders campaign does not use his record to refute these stories, this false framing of Sanders persists.
While Biden has a string of laws he helped pass as a member of the US Senate… Sanders cannot claim any major legislative achievements.
— Jack Torry, Washington Bureau Reporter for The Columbus Dispatch (5/25/2019)
One of the most persistent myths about Sanders is the often-repeated claim that he has achieved nothing in a nearly 30-year congressional career. Some variation on this theme is seen or heard daily on Twitter and on online forums. What is remarkable about the counter-factual statement above, however, is that it appeared in a newspaper, and not in an opinion column; rather it is from a news article written by a reporter in the paper’s Washington DC Bureau. It does not appear that Sanders or anyone on his campaign ever asked for a correction of this statement.
To make such an astounding assertion requires not only ignoring Sanders’ important legislative achievements on veterans’ issues and health care, but also his exceptional record of getting his amendments passed, often with bipartisan support. Remarking on Sanders’ system of passing legislation, his longtime colleague (in both the House and Senate) Sen. Sherrod Brown explained, “He called them ‘tripartate amendments’ because we’d have him and he’d get a Republican, he’d get a Democrat, and he’d pass things. He’s good at building coalitions.”
Sanders’ legislative triumphs include an amendment to the Dodd-Frank legislation that led to an audit of the Federal Reserve’s actions during the financial crisis, and a provision inserted into the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or “FISA,” that prohibits any funding for FISA from being used for an application for an order requiring the production of library circulation records, library patron records, library patron Internet records, or bookseller sales records.
Nearly all of Sanders’ amendments have advanced causes important to progressives and improved the lives of ordinary people. They include legislation to significantly increase federal funding for Meals on Wheels programs and for Senior Nutrition Programs; to increase funding for the Small Business Administration’s Women’s Business Center Program; to provide over $60 million for low-income weatherization assistance grants and energy conservation programs (paid for by reducing funds for the Petroleum Strategic Reserve and fossil fuel research and development accordingly); and to prohibit the importation into the US of goods made with indentured child labor.
Throughout his career in Congress, Sanders has worked tirelessly on key issues which he is passionate about. These include veterans issues, health care, and climate change. He has important legislative achievements in each of these areas. In addition to securing millions of dollars in funding in energy efficiency programs through various amendments, he and Sen. Robert Menendez secured a major new source of funding for clean-energy funding in the 2009 stimulus package, called the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant Program. One of the federal government’s major initiatives to combat climate change, the program has provided billions in funding to local governments across the country.
Sanders’ major achievements on veterans’ issues and health care in particular are worth dwelling on in some detail, as they still are not well understood by the public (or, apparently, by political reporters).
Sanders was Chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee — a post he sought due to his interest in veterans issues — when the Veterans Affairs Department scandal exploded on his watch. Sen. Jack Reed called Sanders “extremely energetic” in responding to the crisis. After holding a series of hearings, Sanders played a central role in negotiating passage of a major bipartisan bill. According to Reed, “[W]hen we had the scandal at the VA, he was incredibly effective, engaged in getting the legislation passed, in getting it funded. Frankly, without him, I don’t think we would have gotten it done because there was a lot of name-calling but there wasn’t a lot of constructive, ‘OK, here’s the resources. …’ And he did it. … And it was a great testament to his skill as a legislator.”
Contrary to the media’s attempts to paint Sanders as a rigid ideologue engaged in “lonely trench warfare,” Sanders has been working effectively with his ideological opponents since he first held elected office. The 2015 New York Times article cited above explains that after his election as mayor of Burlington, Sanders surprised many, given his anti-establishment rhetoric, by working with the business community while he oversaw the revitalization of downtown. During his eight years as mayor, “in many cases, Mr. Sanders aligned himself with Republicans to get things done.” The New York Times Magazine feature, written just after Sanders’ election to the US Senate, looks back at his career in the House and describes him as “adept at working with people with whom he otherwise disagreed sharply” on certain issues. This has been his approach throughout his political career.
To pass the VA bill, Sanders needed to work with negotiating partners who were his political and ideological opposites: first with Sen. John McCain in the Senate, then with Rep. Jeff Miller in the House (chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee). The success story of these negotiations was published as a case study in the Brookings Institution’s series, “Profiles in Negotiations.”
As explained in the white paper, the Miller-Sanders negotiations faced “special challenges,” with Miller, who represented a deeply red district in the Bible Belt of the Florida panhandle, being one of the most conservative members of the House at the time. Yet Sanders reportedly had no problem establishing a rapport with Miller: “The first meeting of their negotiation was in the Senate dining room, and despite the gulf between them, it went smoothly. There were no awkward pauses. In fact, jokes flew across the breakfast table.”
The ideological differences between the two did make reaching a compromise difficult. At a certain point, negotiations reportedly nearly broke down over the issue of funding. The Veterans Affairs Department told Congress it needed a big budget increase to improve its health care services to veterans, yet the initial House proposal offered zero money.
However, after weeks of negotiations, the VA reform bill included $5 billion to pay for increased internal VA staffing and facility upgrades, as well as $1.5 billion to lease major medical facilities in 18 states and Puerto Rico. The final legislation passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in the House and Senate, and was signed into law by President Obama in August of 2014.
And in a twist ending no one would have predicted at the start of negotiations, at a press conference at the end of the summer, “Miller called Sanders his good friend,” according to the Brookings case study, and the small-government conservative even made a statement defending the bill’s new VA spending: “When asked if conservatives would support a bill with such a hefty price tag, Miller replied, ‘Taking care of our veterans is not an inexpensive proposition and our members understand this.’”
It is important to note that Sanders’ efforts to enact the bipartisan veterans bill, a signature reform of the VA, is not Sanders’ only work on behalf of veterans. In recognition of his work on veterans issues, numerous veterans groups have honored Sanders with awards, including the Veterans of Foreign Wars, which awarded Sanders its prestigious Congressional Award in 2015. At the time, the VFW issued the following statement:
The VFW Congressional Award has been presented annually since 1964 to one sitting member of the House or Senate for significant legislative contributions on behalf of those who have worn the uniform. This award is extremely important to us, because it recognizes that our military, our veterans, and our families, past and present, have a champion in our corner on Capitol Hill.
Also in 2015, Veterans for Bernie Sanders was formed, the first national grassroots association of military veterans ever to organize on behalf of a Presidential candidate.
Another longtime policy focus of Sanders’ has been expanding the number of federally qualified health centers, more commonly called “community health centers” or CHCs. Originally called neighborhood health centers, these federally funded primary care clinics were a central feature of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty in the 1960s, created to provide high quality basic health care services to underserved urban and rural communities.
These centers provide crucial primary and preventive health care to patients of all ages in areas that need them most. They are not-for-profit organizations that have “essentially solved the problem of primary care” in underserved areas, Bernie Sanders told a skeptical NYT columnist in 2009. “Politicians are in the business of making big claims,” wrote the columnist. After visiting a clinic in Vermont, however, he conceded: “In this case, the senator’s claim seems to be very much on the money.”
In his column about the community health center he visited in Vermont, it’s clear that Bob Herbert was impressed by what he found: “The center at Plainfield is modern and well equipped, spotlessly clean, quiet and efficient. Patients that I spoke with marveled at the friendliness of doctors and staffers and said they never felt intimidated.” Despite the fact that no one is ever turned away, regardless of income, “Appointments are easily made, and if it is necessary to see a physician on the same day, or within 24 hours, that is usually not a problem.”
And as Herbert discovered, CHCs provide these services at substantially lower than average cost than comparable services in the larger, for-profit health care system: “What is impressive is how much sense the centers make. They are nonprofit and receive federal support, but they don’t require a ton of taxpayer dollars. By focusing intently on primary care and preventative services, they save tremendous amounts of money.”
In addition, each health center is organized around the needs of the local community. They are federally funded, but run by local boards comprised of patients and residents. From The Intercept:
In rural North Carolina, ACA-backed health centers now provide dental and nutrition services, while in San Francisco, the clinics provide translation services and outreach for immigrant families. In other areas, they provide mental health counseling, low-cost prescription drugs, and serve as the primary care doctors for entire counties. They have also served as a platform for innovation, introducing electronic medical record systems and paving the way with new methods for tracking those most susceptible for heart disease and diabetes.
Community health centers are in fact so successful at providing crucial preventative health care to their local communities, and are such a cost-effective investment, that even Republicans support them. Paul Ryan, among other Republicans, privately wrote letters of support for increased funding for CHCs under the Affordable Care Act, as reported in The Nation, even while publicly campaigning against “government-run” health care.
Contrary to claims that Sanders has had little impact while in Congress, no single politician has done more to expand their reach across the nation than Bernie Sanders. He has repeatedly won increased funding for CHCs, including a 2001 amendment to H.R. 3338 — an emergency Department of Defense appropriations bill to respond to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, signed by George W. Bush — that appropriated an additional $100 million for these centers. (When proposing the amendment, Sanders gave a floor speech tying “addressing the issue of public health infrastructure” to readiness in dealing with “God forbid,” a major biological, chemical or nuclear terrorist attack.)
But by far the biggest expansion of community health centers occurred via the dramatically increased funding for the clinics included in the Affordable Care Act, for which Sanders lobbied hard. Reporter Lee Fang gives a detailed account of Sanders’ maneuverings at the time that resulted in $11 billion in new funding for federally qualified health centers being included in the final ACA legislation package.
As a direct result of Sen. Sanders’ efforts, along with Rep. Clyburn’s in the House, the patient reach of these health centers doubled. Today there are over 1300 community health centers across the nation serving 28 million people, providing primary care, dental care, prescription drug services and mental health assistance to all visitors, whether insured or uninsured, regardless of income.
As there can be no denying the importance of this expansion, Sanders’ detractors have tried to rob him of the credit for it. In perhaps the most grossly unfair part of an extremely slanted article, Politico strongly implied that not only did Sanders not play any significant role, but that he and his 2016 campaign were falsely inflating the role he played in the historic expansion of community health centers for political gain. According to the account of events given in the piece, Sanders merely made “a suggestion” to Harry Reid about community health centers. The fact that in 2016 Sanders was talking about his central role in helping expand CHCs is explained as being an example of how the senator, when it comes to being an “inside player” in Congress, is “often less consequential in others’ retelling of events than his own version.”
The central part Sanders played in the hard-fought battle for the increased health center funding is a well-documented fact. It was reported by Lee Fang in the Intercept piece linked above; it was recognized by then-vice president of the National Association of Community Health Centers, Daniel Hawkins, who told Fang, “There was no one who played a more important role than Senator Sanders;” it’s been stated in numerous fact-checking articles on Sanders’ role during passage of the ACA, including this one by The Washington Post and this one by Talking Points Memo. Sanders’ role is also detailed by John McDonough, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, in his book, Inside National Health Reform. McDonough was Senior Advisor on National Health Reform for the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions between 2008–2010, and was deeply involved in the legislative process leading to passage of the ACA. On p. 204 of his book he writes, “The new funding for CHCs and the NHSC [National Health Service Corps] was not easily obtained, and it occurred because of the determined advocacy of House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT).”
The claim that Sanders is claiming credit he doesn’t deserve for the increased funding for community health centers is a fabricated smear, plain and simple. The original version of the Politico piece is still available online; it does not appear to have ever been updated with a response or correction from the campaign.
“Speed Kills.”
— Sign in Democratic candidate Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign office
In the post-Clinton, post-Obama era, it is hard to appreciate the insurgent nature of Bill Clinton’s campaign for the Democratic nomination in 1992. After repeated national losses by Democrats and 12 consecutive years of Republican rule in the White House, “liberal” was a snide epithet and there seemed little chance that any Democratic challenger to a Republican incumbent would be taken seriously. As John Kroger later recalled in a 2016 talk about Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, “the Democratic Party had sort of driven off into a ditch of irrelevancy in national politics.”
Kroger (who in 2016 was the president of Reed College in Portland, Oregon) was hired in 1991 at the age of 25 to be the Deputy Policy Director of Clinton’s presidential campaign. His talk, “The War Room Revisited” is a fascinating look back from the standpoint of the 2016 election, when the Clintons were powerful icons of the political establishment. He recalled that when Bill Clinton’s campaign began its “rinky-dink” operation for the Democratic nomination in late 1991, it had no money and Clinton was polling at less than 2% name recognition.
Running against President Bush, who had an “astronomical” approval rating, Kroger credits the campaign’s long-shot victory in large part to two things: that the Democratic primary was a “primary of ideas” in which Clinton prevailed due to his superior policies; and to the staff’s communications center, dubbed the “war room,” which was necessary to fight the relentless attacks on the upstart campaign.
The purpose of the war room was to respond “instantaneously” to negative stories in the media — to which end one of the young staffers put up a poster in the office with the slogan “Speed Kills,” borrowed from an anti-drug ad campaign of the era’s War on Drugs. The idea, according to Kroger, was, “If you could respond very quickly to a story with the facts, you could kill the story.”
The Sanders’ campaign must adopt a similar strategy if it wants to prevail in the Democratic primary. It is somewhat alarming that the campaign doesn’t seem to understand the threat that the major media poses to it — so far, the campaign’s media strategy seems to be to ignore the attacks and go around the corporate media, bringing its message directly to the people itself.
This tactic has been very successful in helping the campaign build a grassroots army of volunteers to help turn out the millions of nonvoters — including younger voters — who sat out the last presidential election. However, while undoubtedly a smart strategy for the general election, it seems less likely to be successful in the primary, in which only the most politically engaged will vote.
To win the Democratic nomination, Sanders needs to turn out young people, to be sure — but he also needs the support of a significant segment of the older Democratic electorate, who make up the bulk of primary voters.
As is often pointed out, a key difference between older and younger voters is that the former rely much more heavily on cable news and other traditional media for their information. As I have shown, these sources of news are working hard to push a misleading narrative of the most anti-establishment candidate in the race. Sanders needs to push back just as hard against this negative framing in order to win over some of these older voters.
Of course, as Kroger points out, the media has changed since 1992; at the time, newspapers still were people’s primary news source, and there was not the 24-hour cable news cycle as it exists today. It is simply not possible to respond “instantaneously” to every attack on Sanders that appears in the media. But that doesn’t mean that the Sanders campaign should simply ignore these stories either. Newspapers are still influential, especially among older voters. They also to a large extent establish the factual record that TV pundits on cable news shows endlessly discuss. Sanders’ campaign should not let false assertions such as the one printed in The Columbus Dispatch stand.
But this is only half of an effective strategy. According to Kroger, responding quickly to media attacks with the facts was crucial, but was only one of the two main purposes of the war room. The other, less well known tactic the staff prioritized was to try to get out ahead of negative stories. This included identifying “problems” in advance and, when possible, having the campaign’s response included in the initial story.
In contrast, when it comes to the corporate media, Sanders’ attitude seems to be to expect to be “embattled,” and to view the constant attacks merely as evidence that he is the anti-establishment candidate. Perhaps this is why the Sanders campaign does not seize the opportunities presented to it to actively shape the framing of its candidate. But like it or not, the mainstream press outlets are still a powerful force when it comes to national political campaigns. When it comes to Wall Street, it is a sign of political courage to “welcome their hatred.” But this is not a winning strategy when it comes to the corporate media, because it lets the smears and false framing go unchallenged.
In the case of The New York Times story about Sanders’ years as mayor in the 1980s, for example, the writers state that Sanders declined to be interviewed for the initial article. Later, after the (negative) story appeared, Sanders reached out to the reporters. His subsequent interview was included in subsequent, online versions of the article, and he offered a very effective explanation of his opposition to Reagan’s foreign policy (showing how skillful Sanders is at parrying such attacks). As a result, that attempted mischaracterization by the writers (trying to imply that Sanders was beingunpatriotic and even Anti-American in his opposition to the US-backed Contras) failed. However — and again, the interview took place after the original, negative article had already been published — he did not respond at all to the misleading portrayal of a mayor unconcerned with local affairs. This was a missed opportunity to both kill a false narrative and to acquaint an older, skeptical demographic with his successes as an executive.
In another missed opportunity to use the corporate media to its advantage, CNN’s Chris Cuomo asked Rep. Ro Khanna, one of four national co-chairs of the Sanders campaign, the following question (after quoting some remarks from Sanders about things Biden has supported, such as NAFTA, which Sanders opposed): “If he [Sanders] were to get in, what proof do we have that he could make deals, instead of just making demands? Because he’s often against things that wind up getting bipartisan support.”
Literally the only example Khanna gave in response to this question was Sanders’ recent bipartisan bill to end U.S. involvement in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen that Khanna co-sponsored in the House (a significant achievement, to be sure).
Cuomo then asked as a follow-up, “All those years in the Senate. What else can you point to?”
Even given this second chance, the only other accomplishments Khanna could come up with were Sanders’ success in pressuring Amazon to increase its workers’ wages, and the fact that he has passed “numerous amendments.”
These are not terrible responses, but they are disappointing. Here was another opportunity for the campaign to use the corporate media to actively challenge a false narrative about Sanders, and to reframe the candidate using facts about his record in Congress. (I actually am a fan of Rep. Khanna, one of a handful of true progressives in Congress. My point here is that the campaign should ensure that all Sanders surrogates are well-prepared to refute predictable talking points.)
Wouldn’t pointing to the bipartisan veterans bill negotiations — so impressive they held up as “an example for future dealmakers” in the Brookings Institution case study — be an effective response to a question such as Cuomo’s about whether Sanders “knows how to make deals?” Given that community health centers are now “the largest and most successful primary care system in America,” isn’t Sanders’ role in their expansion relevant to the current debate over which primary candidate is the one who can successfully bring health care to Americans? (And as Sanders himself has written in The Hill, CHCs now enjoy strong bipartisan support; the most recent bill to reauthorize the CHC funding program for five years was introduced by a Democrat and a Republican.)
It’s true that the campaign excels at producing its own media, including a podcast hosted by Sanders’ press secretary Briahna Joy Gray, “Hear The Bern.” More recently, the campaign launched its own channel on Twitch. But what audience is being reached through such means? This seems like a great way to keep Sanders supporters engaged and energized, but it is not going to be effective at winning over the hearts and minds of people (especially older people) currently being propagandized by cable television and the major newspapers.
The campaign needs to harness the talents of its excellent media team to counter the false framing of Sanders. One of the reasons that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez caught fire was the campaign ad that the production team Means of Production created with her that went viral. Now that this team has been recruited by the Sanders campaign, why not have them produce a video about community health centers? From their origins during the Civil Rights movement, to the first neighborhood health centers established during the War on Poverty in Mississippi and Boston, to the clinics today serving diverse communities from migrant farm workers in rural areas to urban neighborhoods in Detroit, the history of CHCs is an inspiring progressive policy success story. Along with Bernie’s historic role in their expansion, the topic could make a compelling, and very timely, short film.
These stories — about Sanders’ years as mayor of Burlington; about how he came through for veterans; about his championing of community health centers — need to be told. Because the one thing I can’t emphasize enough is to what extent the facts are on Bernie’s side. No matter how good you may think he is, I can assure you, he’s better. Even as a supporter who thought I knew his record, as I did research for this essay I was by turns impressed and frustrated learning about Sanders’ extensive list of impressive accomplishments. It is disappointing that the media does not portray him more fairly. But the more you learn about the mountain of ammunition his campaign has at hand, the more frustrating it is that Sanders and his staff so often choose to hold their fire in responding to the attacks. If the campaign isn’t more assertive in reframing the public’s perception of their candidate, they risk losing this political fight.
