The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [62]
At the meeting, the subject of the Head Start program had come up. Ted Kennedy, who runs the committee, had proposed a modest increase. Sanders wanted more—so he went and had a word with Kennedy after the meeting.
“The end result is that we got a 6 percent increase, instead of a 4 percent increase,” he said. “Over a three-year period, that’s five hundred million dollars more. What I’m finding out is it’s just a different world. Not saying it’s better, it’s just different. If you want something, you just go talk to someone in the hall. It’s all behind the scenes. Not like the House at all.”
He tried to sound like it was a good thing, and it might very well have been, in terms of getting more money for a worthy-enough program. But the subtext of this story was Sanders expressing amazement that he could get $500 million just by talking to someone. As any human being would, he looked blown away by the reality of his situation. I left his office that day feeling like the conversation had turned weird at the end.
About a month and a half later, Sanders sent out invitations to a small group of progressive journalists for a breakfast at his Dirksen office. For those who hadn’t had a chance to talk to him since his election, he wanted to reintroduce himself and remake a case he often made to reporters, appealing for the media’s help in breaking the power monopoly in Washington. There were about ten of us there, and the list included a couple of friends of mine, including David Sirota and a former Sanders aide named Joel Barkin. We had pastries and coffee and after a few minutes of chatting sat down around a coffee table, with the senator planted in a central location on a couch. He immediately launched into a speech about trying to move the Congress in the direction of the public, handing out fliers with poll numbers to bolster his case. He told the same story about the HELP Committee meeting, Kennedy, and the $500 million. This went on for about a half hour, but when he opened up the discussion to questions, the reporters mostly blew off the senator’s presentation in favor of questions about the war. Sanders looked miffed at first, then bit his lip and tried to meet the reporters halfway.
At the time, the Senate was in the midst of a controversial vote over the Iraq supplemental budget; they were about to pass a version of the bill that included a timeline for scheduled withdrawal. It was well known that Bush was going to veto the bill and that the Democrats in the Senate would then be back to square one. The question on the reporters’ minds was what was going to happen after the veto. Would the Democrats compromise and take the timeline out? What would Sanders do in that case?
The odd thing about this scene was that the reporters’ consternation about the war was a mirror image of the public frustration over economic issues Sanders had given his speech about. The Senate was indeed far behind the public on the war; the public wanted the war ended now, no questions asked, while in the Senate the war was a political Gordian knot, impossible to take on directly. Sanders had called these reporters in to press them to pressure the Senate to be bolder and less politically calculating on health care, income disparity, and campaign finance reform, but ultimately he ended up defending the body’s gradualist approach on the war. Before he knew it, the onetime idealist outsider was defending the “realities” of senatorial procedure.
Sirota, God bless him, kept haranguing Sanders to use the power of the filibuster to bully Harry Reid into keeping the timeline in. After all, apart from being able to get $500 million with an offhand conversation, each senator