As Nevada Democrats caucused (remember that, ancient history by now), Bernie Sanders declared neither the Republican or the Democratic Party establishments could stop him. Lately, as he focused his attack on his last rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, he makes it a point every time to say he is running against the political establishment.
Actually not Bernie, You are running to win the nomination of a major piece of the political establishment, the oldest established political party in the nation, the one with roots in the faction led by Thomas Jefferson that formalized itself as a political party during the time of Andrew Jackson – the Democratic Party.
In the now very unlikely event Sanders becomes the Democratic party nominee for president – in the more unlikely event of his election as president, how exactly does Bernie Sanders propose to govern and with whom?
How exactly does he propose to govern without the Democratic establishment? Because you see, what all this is about — this infernal two years of stupidity called the American presidential election campaign — is about governing.
Four years ago two New Hampshire Newspapers, the Concord Monitor and the Keane Sentinel published a piece I wrote in which I asked this question:
When you vote for president, how many people are you voting for? And then I answered the question with the observation that very much the most people would say they were voting for one person – and further observed that was entirely incorrect.
And that remains so today.
Why? Because when you vote for president you are not voting for one person. You are voting, by various sourced estimates, for 4,000 people the president will appoint across the executive branch of the federal government.
He will appoint them to staff the White House, his cabinet reaching down to the level of assistant secretary, and those he will name to run the entire A to Z gamut of federal agencies, boards, commissions and the like from the SEC and the FCC to the FDA and the CDC/Centers for Medicaid and Medicare — down to the most obscure government offices.
Of those 4,000 presidential appointees, sources say 1,250 or so will need to be confirmed by the United States Senate.
How do presidents find those people? They find them within the long-standing and ever sustaining, rejuvenating, experienced government and political cadres of their parties, the Democratic and Republican Parties because those are the only two parties that get to govern us.
Both major parties have cadres of candidates for those 4,000 positions. They are of course senators and House members, though no president should want to reach into the Senate because those seats are rare. But the 4,000 are also from academia, business, capitol hill staffs, governors and former governors, statehouses across the nation, policy organizations and think tanks, and more.
Whether you liked George W. Bush or George H.W. Bush or Ronald Reagan; whether you liked Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama, those men and their presidencies were able to draw on their respective parties’ trained, informed, educated, experienced cadres – their experts, their governments in waiting.
If you are a Democrat you didn’t like the people or their policies, programs, legislative agenda, foreign policy and management of government by Republican presidents and their choices to populate the executive branch or if you are a Republican you did not like some or all of them under Democratic presidents.
But – but at least you could understand that the people put into those positions by presidents of either party were, in the main, qualified, able and experienced, especially in the top 500 positions – the ones we read about day in and day out: The cabinet secretaries and their assistant and deputy secretaries, the CIA, the FBI, the NSC, the DNI, the prominent and not so prominent federal boards and commission. Current example? The CDC and its several parts.
Among the reasons the Trump administration is the worst thing to happen to the United States of America since Pearl Harbor is that by and large and for the most part — and really overwhelmingly the Republican cadres – that party’s human infrastructure of government-ready policymakers and managers — stayed out, estimating correctly the career-ending catastrophe this administration would be.
They knew what was coming. They wanted no part of it. They were right and so instead we have Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and their ilk.
The Republican Party’s personnel infrastructure did not know Donald Trump. He did not know them. He made it clear he didn’t care to know them.
He could, as he said, do it all alone or nearly so with his scrum of toadies, incompetents, screaming meemies like Steven Miller, other assorted henchmen, and lest we forget, his gangster family.
Shortly before Trump was elected Chris Christie, then governor of New Jersey was tasked with managing the transition. He put together the top of a government in waiting and more that goes into a sensible transition. Hillary Clinton similarly had a detailed transition in progress.
Trump threw out Christie and his transition planning because his nasty son-in-law has it in for Christy because Christy prosecuted Jared Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner, for setting up his own brother, Jared’s uncle, to be blackmailed with a videotape of the uncle with a hooker that Charles had sent to his sister-in-law. Nasty people.
And so Jared’s pique killed what slim chance there was for a reasonable transition. Instead we got this misshapen, malformed administration populated by misanthropes, gangsters, hangers-on, lobbyists, and a general assortment of know-nothings. For very much the most part, the Republican government in waiting stayed out.
Fast forward now to Bernie Sanders. He is not a Democrat. He has never helped the Democratic Party. When he runs for the Senate he files as a Democrat, thereby assuring no one will challenge him in Vermont. He wins on the Democratic Party line and immediately after being elected he resigns from the party.
He hurt the Democratic Party in 2016. He is hurting it again. He has extorted if for position in the House and Senate for more than 30 years. He seeks the Democratic nomination for president while making it clear he is not a Democrat and disdains the Democratic Party.
He has a fervent following and yes, it is young. Its masses believe he will erase their college debt, give them a new system of free universal medical care and more and that he can, as Donald Trump said, do it alone. He can’t of course.
Reading back into the New Deal, looking at how FDR’s Brain Trust and cabinet members like Harold Ickes and Francis Perkins assembled the legislation that became the hallmarks of the New Deal, especially and above all the Social Security Act of 1935, to this very day — to this very day — the single, most far-reaching socio-economic program ever enacted by the United States of America, we understand that it takes more than rhetoric.
It takes more than good intentions, even best intentions, to achieve broad social and economic progress and fairness. It takes political know-how and an experienced political cadre to get it done. It takes a party and its human infrastructure.
FDR above all understood that and constructed even from his time as governor of New York State what has become the ongoing, renewable and renewing generational infrastructure of political and policy architects and makers of the Democratic Party.
Bernie Sanders has been the foe of that Democratic infrastructure virtually his entire adult and political life. He does not come from or have access to what he calls the Democratic Party establishment that is, in reality, the foundation on which the Democratic Party constructs national governments when it is chosen to lead them in the White House.
Would that Democratic core of experienced policy, political and administrative people work for Sanders any more than the Republican version was willing to work for Trump?
It seems unlikely they would and, without them, Sanders could not govern and certainly without them he would absolutely not have the trust of the House and Senate if both come into Democratic Party control next January.
Do Sanders voters understand this? Do they know the right answer to the question, how many people are you voting for when you vote for president? Or as Trump declared, do they believe that Bernie and Bernie alone can do it?
He can’t. No one can.
In the American republic, in the systems to govern our republic that evolved from when Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton in their differences confirmed our division into what their boss, George Washington, called “factions”, we have seen presidencies incorporating the political parties come and go, rise and fall.
But always, until this presidency, presidents have looked to and been able to look to well-formed party infrastructures to populate their governments to carry out their policies and provide the polity of functional administrations.
Bernie Sanders makes it clear he is not a Democrat. Could he govern without the Democrats whose nomination he asks for but whose political party he disdains?
Not likely. Very unlikely. Highly unlikely.
Peeling the Onion 