WASHINGTON -- On an early summer day in 2014, I got a call from Mike Briggs, Sen. Bernie Sanders’ press secretary. Briggs had been a reporter in an earlier life, and I had known him for years: a sincere, quiet guy with a military haircut and an earnest, uncomplicated admiration for his boss.
He told me that Bernie wanted me to come in to talk about the state of politics and the Democratic Party, and his agenda of reform.
I had known Bernie for years, too, and had spent a lot of time in Vermont covering the presidential campaign of another rebel from the Green Mountain State, Howard Dean.
I’ve been on this beat for a long time, and I immediately thought I knew why Briggs was calling: Bernie was going to run.
A couple of days later I found myself in Bernie’s spartan Senate offices. Not for him the trophy cases, wall plaques or fancy artisanal artifacts of home-state art and culture.
It felt more like the offices of the chief of a public library, all books and bland walls.
But the bookishness belied the intensity of the small team in those offices: a young, bright and surprisingly spit-and-polish crew, of which Briggs was by far the oldest.
Sanders’ greeting to me would be called “curt” and “gruff” if it came from any other senator, but that's just the way Bernie is. No time for monkey business; no time for the Big Schmooze. No time for frivolity. Not a minute to waste.
He was 72 at the time, but then as now, he radiated a leathery nervous energy that made him seem impervious to the normal aging process. He seemed indestructible.
It was instantly clear in the interview not only that he was thinking of running, but that he had pretty much decided to do so.
“I think what we need is a new politics -- a different type of politics than Hillary [Clinton]’s," Sanders said at the time. "A politics that is much more grassroots-oriented, much more having to do with strong coalition-building and grassroots activism than I think Hillary has demonstrated over the years.”
I wrote in my subsequent piece that he should not be lightly dismissed. He was anyway, of course, at least when he first announced his candidacy. But he certainly isn’t now.
That 2014 story was one of the first, if not the first, to take Bernie seriously, Tad Devine, Sanders’ media adviser, told me Saturday in Des Moines.
“We noticed it,” he said.
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