Last month, with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders leading Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire primary polls and getting closer but still well behind in first-in-the-nation caucus state Iowa, I asked an old Clintonista how it could be that "a half-baked version of Tom Hayden" had a shot at beating the Clintons. Hey, he emailed back, Sanders has a good chance of winning both states. I asked if he really thought that. No, he admitted, he was just managing my expectations.
Well, manage these expectations.
Now Sanders is ahead in both states, and is much closer in national polls. His renown has spread so dramatically that James Bond star Daniel Craig, whom he's never met and is about to begin heavy promotion of Spectre, gave nearly $50,000 to a pro-Sanders super PAC (which Sanders disavows) and Sanders is on the cover of Time Magazine. "I never expected this to catch on so fast," Sanders marveled as he discussed Craig's surprise support in a network TV interview.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders says he is "stunned" that he is doing so well at this stage in the Democratic presidential race.
It's an extraordinary situation. Sanders was a '60s radical who made his way from New York City to tiny rural Vermont as part of the back-to-the-land kick, with an inconclusive sojourn at the University of Chicago in between. But compared to the brilliant, impactful Hayden -- who, not incidentally, is a big Sanders supporter now -- Sanders was a decidedly lesser, local light in his movement days.
I met him a few years back when curmudgeonly California Democratic Party chairman John Burton, who's made a point of not featuring Obama administration officials, had now U.S. Senator Sanders keynote the state Democratic convention. It was all intelligent and passionate stuff, with self-proclaimed socialist Sanders making his expected left-wing points on the increasingly inegalitarian financialized economy and the decidedly ill-starred post-9/11 conflicts. But I never got the impression I was with a potential President of the United States.
But something, to borrow a phrase from Stephen Stills, is happening here.
While Brit Craig, who is able to contribute to American campaigns as a permanent resident, was flashing his support for Sanders, the British Labour Party was turning overwhelmingly to its most left-wing candidate to lead the party, longtime hard left parliamentary backbencher Jeremy Corbyn. Call it part of the ongoing profound disappointment and anger many feel with former Prime Minister Tony Blair, a longtime ally of the Clintons, for his championing of the invasion of Iraq and acquiescence to the primacy of the investment class in the British economy. With the rise of Sanders, it seems that something much like that is taking place here as well.
I think socialism is becoming popular sooner than I expected. With technology inexorably solving scarcity as it eliminates good-paying jobs, a push for a more socialist approach has seemed to me to be inevitable. But it's happening faster than I thought, probably because the Obama recovery has been so uneven and, for most, rather hollow, disappointing many Democrats even more than his Afghan War escalation and amorphous secret global war on terror. I also think the voters are less acquiescent than I expected in general with regard to the usual political palaver, in small part accounting for the Donald Trump nonsense in the Republican Party.
The reality is that a lot of what Hillary Clinton has been doing this year as a candidate is good, better than before. Trying to link her candidacy not just with the history of being the first woman president -- which of course is largely about her -- but also with the legacy of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt is well considered. But folks, at least in hyper-sensitive Iowa and New Hampshire, where they take their role as early presidential arbiters oh-so-seriously, aren't buying it all that much.
Hillary has always tried to be inevitable, until earlier this year. She is really suffering from that very insipid memoir of her tenure as US secretary of state, which she followed up notoriously with a big buck-raking lecture tour. And then there is the ongoing controversy about her private e-mail system as secretary of state. No smoking gun has been found, and I doubt there is one, but the endless nature of it all keeps spurring underlying concerns about her authenticity.
There are major elements underlying the rise of Sanders.
Veteran Democratic pollster Paul Maslin, an old friend and colleague who did polling and strategy for another Vermonter, former Governor Howard Dean, who blazed like a comet across the firmament of Democratic presidential presidential politics in 2004, was kind enough to compare and contrast the two:
"Dean filled a void -- caused mainly by the party's sell-out and timidity on Iraq -- though it went well beyond that. But it was definitely a reaction to the four years of Bush and some hangover from the Clinton years. In the end, however, he was fairly easily shunted aside and coopted by the likes of Kerry and Edwards. The truth is he wasn't burning to be President.
"This is much more of a pure HRC dynamic in one sense. Everyone knows she is the big frontrunner and is supposed to win. And Sanders is exploiting both anger with the GOP congress and some of the disappointment with Obama. So in some ways Sanders has a deeper well to draw from though he is coming from a much more extreme place than Dean and is facing a more capable, perhaps, adversary in Hillary."
Now for more of the downside for Sanders.
Why is it that Tom Hayden himself isn't in this position to run for president? The short answer is that Hayden was too famous for his radicalism when he started out in electoral politics. While he liked to say that "the radicalism of the '60s is the common sense of the '70s," that was not exactly right. And Hayden certainly wasn't sneaking up on anyone.
The long answer is that Sanders benefits from not being nearly so visible as Hayden in the '60s and '70s radical movements. His radicalism is not so well known. And when Hayden sought public office, he didn't go away to a little state to do it, he did it in the biggest state of all.
I don't know if Sanders made as incendiary statements as Hayden did back in the day. (Though I suspect he made statements that won't fly today and bet the Republican opposition researchers already know about them.) If he did not, it's probably only because he didn't have the opportunity to do so, since he was not one of the national leaders of the movement.
Sanders also had the benefit of being able to fail repeatedly in a low-risk environment. Hayden, famous as he was, in California, married to Jane Fonda, had limited room for error. He couldn't afford to get six percent of the vote in statewide races as Sanders did before finally becoming mayor of tiny Burlington, Vermont, less than half the size of micro-people's republics in Santa Monica and Berkeley.
When Hayden ran for the U.S. Senate, it was a big deal. And it was a big deal when he got a big primary vote in 1976, leading in the view of some to the crippling of incumbent Senator John Tunney, who went on to lose to Republican university president S.I. Hayakawa.
Though Sanders had a more risk-free environment in Vermont, Hayden's struggles may yet prefigure long-term trouble for Sanders.
Because you know he said and wrote some radical things that may be hard to explain away.
Hayden certainly did. In fact, it nearly prevented him from winning elective office at all.
Hayden, a terrific writer, had gotten to know Jerry Brown early on, penning an excellent late 1974 Rolling Stone profile of the young California governor called "The Mystic and the Machine". A few years later, Hayden became a high-profile and useful part of the Brown administration, promoting renewable energy and energy conservation policies as chairman of SolarCal.
So Hayden had a mainstream record to run on when he sought a seat in the California Assembly in 1982. But the going proved to be extremely tough, even in one of the most liberal districts in the state on the West Side of Los Angeles.
After a relatively narrow win in the Democratic primary -- despite being very well-financed by Fonda and a good fundraising base developed for his statewide Campaign for Economic Democracy organization -- Hayden received what might be described as a full visitation of the ghost of Christmas past. Voters were suddenly paying a lot of attention to billboards which sprung up all over the West Side emblazoned with incendiary Hayden quotes.
Things like ... "If blood is going to flow, let it flow all over this city - Tom Hayden." "Property is theft - Tom Hayden." ... Like that. Maybe out of context, or not entirely accurate, they were nonetheless impossible to miss. It was so wild that it was funny. But it was also devastating, as it pointed to a not unlikely conclusion in which Hayden ended up seeming too much the illegitimate anti-American extremist even for a liberal Democratic district.
The late media maven Sidney Galanty prepared an excellent humanizing 60-second TV ad (which would air throughout the LA media market) in which Hayden talked about why he wasn't "the same angry young man I used to be." But there was an ominous silence from many name Democrats.
In little-known Bill Hawkins, Hayden faced a very dangerous Republican opponent, a cipher, a man with no record to run against, one who espoused rather liberal views in tune with the district.
Something special needed to be done.
Despite some past statements I would not have made, I knew that Hayden and Fonda, with whom I did not always agree, were not only not traitors, they were patriots. Patriots, that is, who in the white hot heat of the Vietnam War protests had done incredibly incautious things. I also knew that Hayden and Fonda had been among the most spied-upon of American citizens. (Dick Cheney began his Sith Lord duties, as Gerald Ford's deputy White House chief of staff 40 years ago, trying to shut down a New York Times story revealing that the CIA had violated its charter by spying on the anti-war movement here in America.)
So it only seemed fair that Hayden should at last get some spycraft working on his behalf.
Sitting in a rather morose meeting at Hayden's Santa Monica headquarters, surrounded by works from Fonda's blue-chip Pop Art collection, I had an idea. I would get Hayden's opponent on tape espousing policies directly contrary to what his campaign said his positions were. Posing as a Republican contributor, I was able to do just that.
When the Hayden campaign finally revealed that Hawkins was simply lying about his positions -- I had gone on to do opposition research for L.A. Mayor Tom Bradley's near-miss (read: blown) campaign for governor -- the Republican's campaign was shocked and staggered.
Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda discussed their plans to travel here in the US and throughout Europe to expose Nixon's bombing of Hanoi and other Vietnam War moves in the early 1970s. Bernie Sanders was nowhere near as high-profile as that.
In normal circumstances, the race would have ended then and there. But, and here's the ominous point for Sanders and his enthusiasts, these were not normal circumstances. The campaign was not yet over. While Hawkins never recovered from the shock of revelation, Hayden still had to run flat out to convince enough voters that he was not too extreme to serve in public office.
With help from his new campaign chairman, revered former Governor Pat Brown -- who said: "I'll take Tom Hayden over those phonies any day" -- and some others, Hayden won by nine points in a district that normally went Democratic by a couple of times that. He spent what was then by far a national record amount for a state legislative race, $1.75 million. Hayden's opposition spent more than that, mostly in independent expenditures.
In subsequent elections, Hayden won by much more, though he had to win a squeaker over an incumbent to move to the Senate after his Assembly district was gutted in reapportionment. During 10 years in the state Assembly and eight years in the Senate before term limits caught up with him, Hayden proved a great champion of the clean energy path and other worthy things. But statewide office proved beyond his reach.
Now, with regard to Sanders, there just might not be someone able to get whomever the Republican presidential nominee turns out to be to admit that he's really Darth Vader. And there's no widely-revered Pat Brown type figure on the national scene to reassure swing voters that Sanders is really a neat-o fellow despite all this crazy stuff you're hearing about him.
It's just four-and-a-half months before the voting starts in Iowa and New Hampshire, with Nevada and South Carolina rounding out the early spate of contests. Yet there is still plenty of time for many things to happen.
For example, we'll soon see if Vice President Joe Biden enters the race. My guess is no. Biden staying out helps Hillary, making it easier for her to retain more of the vote that is pleased with the Obama years.
But the fact that she's behind in Iowa and New Hampshire as the fall before the voting begins has to be alarming for the Clintons. No Democrat who has not won Iowa or New Hampshire has gone on to victory. Not that it can't be done, but that's not the sort of first a candidate heading to the White House is looking to garner.
There's clearly a growing rejection of the notion of accepting bland political mush, of settling for a politics which acquiesces in if it does not accelerate the further empowerment of the 0.1 percent and a future of unaccountable war stretching beyond the foreseeable horizon.
I suspect the Clintons, once joined at the hip to Tony Blair and all too cognizant of his woes, know this. They might even be willing to do something about it. But is their credibility elastic enough to bounce back?
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