BERNIE SET HIS FORMAL announcement of the campaign for May 26 in Burlington, Vermont. It would be followed by events in New Hampshire, Iowa, Minneapolis, Denver, and Madison.
First, we had to find a venue and someone to organize the event. It became clear to me that we were at the point in the campaign where we needed experienced advance people to help us. Advance people are the ones who scout out sights, help with the physical design of the event, ensure that all the infrastructure is there for both candidate and press, manage crowds and the press during the event, arrange ground travel between events, and generally ensure that while the candidate is on the road the trains run on time and without incident.
Once you have a traveling press corps, the advance teams make sure that there are adequate hotel rooms for the campaign party and the press. They find the restaurants where everyone will eat. They are also the lead interface with the Secret Service concerning events and event security. They are indispensable to the campaign’s successful operation—especially in a campaign like ours, which would rely on a large number of huge rallies.
The integration of the professional advance staff caused a bit of culture shock at the beginning. Bernie had been doing large numbers of events in Vermont for decades. They were generally well attended but done in a low-key way. They were organic; Bernie liked it that way. As the number of campaign rallies and attendance at those rallies exploded in the coming months, the number of advance people necessarily grew a lot. Managing a rally for thousands or tens of thousands of people with all the national media in attendance is not the same as managing a two-hundred-person event in Burlington. And with all these advance people necessarily came more bureaucracy and less nimbleness in the schedule. The bigger ship was much harder to turn.
Person for person, our advance people outperformed any other. Their personal dedication and sacrifice made it possible to do many rallies that would have required two or three times more people in any other campaign. But back in the simpler days of May 2015, we were just looking for an advance person or two to help us pull off a successful Burlington kickoff. Through some contacts in Obama-world, we were introduced to Jean-Michel Picher. He would become one of our most trusted advance “leads” on the campaign. He had extensive experience, including on the Kerry presidential campaign.
In terms of the venue, if the weather was nice, outside would be the best. But committing to an outside venue was risky. For those not familiar with the vagaries of Vermont’s weather, let me just say this: Where I grew up, in northern Vermont, people planted their gardens on Memorial Day weekend and then prayed we didn’t get any frost.
We set a date: May 26. Our first choice of venue was the Burlington waterfront. The waterfront is not just physically beautiful but an important symbol of Bernie’s successful tenure as a people-oriented mayor. During his mayoral tenure, he had fought against a waterfront redevelopment proposal that would have put high-end condominiums right on Lake Champlain’s shore. The final project instead created a people-oriented waterfront that the entire community now enjoys.
We had some intense discussions about the risk of being outside after consulting some weather forecasts. Bernie made the call to go with the waterfront. Jean-Michel set about arranging for an elevated stage and a large press riser—an elevated platform or series of platforms built at the same height as the stage. The media sets up their equipment on these risers so they get a straight-on camera shot of the candidate and are not blocked by the crowd. While Jean-Michel got to work, the rest of us prayed for good weather. He also fought for, and finally got approval for, a tent-enclosed media filing center. All the members of the media who could file their stories from the relative comfort of the media tent instead of leaning over the hood of a car can thank Jean-Michel.
As it turned out, May 26 was a spectacular day. Bernie spent the early part of the day with Tad Devine polishing his speech. Like virtually every speech he would give in the campaign, Bernie drafted it himself and delivered it from a stack of handwritten sheets of paper. As the crowd began to assemble, it became evident that we were going to get a great turnout. In total, some 5,000 people made their way to the Burlington waterfront. The city has a population of slightly over 40,000; the county, 160,000. By comparison, Hillary Clinton’s June 13 official kickoff event in New York City drew about the same number of people. New York City has a population of some 8.5 million people.
As the hour drew near we got frequent reports about the turnout and prepared to drive there. Bernie and Jane rode with me in a rented Jeep Cherokee. We came down the hill to the waterfront from a side street and tried to park inconspicuously behind the stage. The program began and a series of supporters began their speeches.
It was a warm day, and all of us in the car were a bit nervous. We idled for a short while with the air conditioner on. It was Jane who pointed out the environmental impact of sitting in an idling car. Her point was well taken, so we got out. Once people caught sight of Bernie, there was an audible buzz through the crowd.
He took the stage to the roar of his fellow Vermonters and delivered what became the foundation of his now-famous stump speech. It was shorter than the ever-expanding version he used throughout the campaign, but it laid out in concrete terms what much of the race would be about: In a nutshell, America is facing a crisis. Wealth and income are being concentrated at the top, while working people and middle-income people are seeing their standard of living decline. This dramatic and increasing wealth and income inequality is held in place by a corrupt system of campaign finance. Over time, the speech would expand to include, for instance, articulating some of the ways in which people of color are particularly disadvantaged by this system, but at this first event, Bernie spoke to the commonality of the problem facing people in every zip code in America. America is economically and politically controlled by a few at the expense of the rest.
The response was electric and celebratory. There were many people there who had been with Bernie from my earliest days with him, and many from even earlier. One thing was clear. Whatever happened in this campaign, Vermonters had Bernie’s back.
He stepped down the side of the stage and began shaking hands with the crowd, from whom he was separated by a thin piece of rope. He walked around the front of the stage while others of us worked to keep the crowd from surging forward. We finally made our way to the car. But the crowed mobbed us. I could not drive the car without hitting someone.
Jean-Michel had proposed using “bike rack” as a crowd control measure. Bike rack is a rigid steel fencing system that would become a staple at our later rallies and a requirement once the Secret Service started protecting Bernie. Jean-Michel lost that fight on May 26, but his wisdom in suggesting it became apparent as the car was immobilized by the crowd.
Thankfully, the Burlington police came to our aid and created a small space in front of us. We inched forward at a snail’s pace. The police moved forward in front of us to keep an opening, but as we passed, the crowd would quickly close up again. After an extremely slow crawl for what seemed like forever, we were out of the crowd and headed away from what we all knew was an extremely successful kickoff. The question that loomed large, however, was how Bernie would be received by voters outside Vermont. We got our answer very quickly—extremely well!
It should come as no surprise that while we were focused on the successful kickoff on a bright, clear May day, there were forces at work who were determined to rain on Bernie’s parade. On May 26, the Clinton campaign announced the endorsement of a number of Vermont politicians, including the mayor of Burlington and the governor of Vermont, Peter Shumlin. Shumlin’s endorsement of Clinton was a particularly tasteless move. He was wildly unpopular in Vermont and had been since before his last election in 2014 (Vermont’s governors serve a two-year term). During the 2014 governor’s race, Bernie had campaigned across Vermont for Shumlin. In the end, he limped to victory with about a 1.25 percent margin. Without Bernie, he would have lost. And everyone including Shumlin knew it.
When we learned some days before the May 26 kickoff that Shumlin was about to endorse Clinton, Jane called him to ask that, as a courtesy, he at least delay the announcement to the following week. I had heard that Shumlin claimed that he could not, because he had personally been responsible for securing Robby Mook’s job as Clinton’s campaign manager, and so he owed the Clintons. (Mook had worked for Shumlin when Shumlin was in the state senate.) It was a flimsy excuse and based on what I know, untrue to boot.
When Bernie helped secure Shumlin’s win in 2014, Shumlin was an advocate for a single-payer health system in Vermont—long a principal policy goal of Bernie’s. In December 2014, in a betrayal of those who supported him, Shumlin publicly abandoned the effort. Often, in the presidential race, the Clinton campaign would point to Shumlin’s unwillingness to create a single-payer plan in Vermont as evidence that the program was impractical. But single payer was not impractical. Shumlin just didn’t have the political capital or courage to push it through. Despite Shumlin’s disloyalty to Bernie in endorsing Hillary Clinton on Bernie’s announcement day, Bernie never threw him under the bus when asked why single payer didn’t succeed even in Vermont. On the few occasions when I was asked about it by the media, I was not so generous.
Bernie immediately and astutely understood why Shumlin had turned on him. In a telephone conversation shortly after, Bernie said to me, “You know what this means?” Answering his own question, he said, “He’s obviously not running for reelection.” Bernie was right. On June 8, Shumlin announced that he would not seek reelection. His attempt to curry favor with the Clinton organization, no doubt to secure an administration position, would come to naught.
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Particularly in the four earliest states—Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina—there is a tradition of significant in-person voter contact with the candidate and an intensive field campaign. That means staff and volunteers reaching out to voters one-on-one at their doors, on their phone, and at any place where three people are gathered together for any purpose. If our campaign was going to survive the early contests, we needed to create the organization that could carry out this intensive voter contact. Thankfully, Bernie wanted exactly this type of grassroots effort. Problem number one could be summed up in one question: Who the hell did we know in Iowa?
Iowa was the first contest in the presidential nominating process, so it made sense to start there. Folks in Iowa whom Bernie and Phil had met during earlier exploratory meetings referred us to Pete D’Alessandro. A political director for former Iowa governor Chet Culver, Pete is the most unassuming person in the world. But his down-to-earth demeanor hides a truly skilled political professional.
We hired Pete as our campaign coordinator in May. Campaign coordinator was the title we gave the initial organizer in many states until we had a more formal hierarchy established there. Pete set out to help us find a campaign manager for Iowa. As in so many other places, it turned out that many of the most experienced people were either already involved in the Clinton campaign or were hesitant to be associated with a campaign against Hillary Clinton. It was tough to blame anyone. We were 50 points down in the polling, and the Clintons had a reputation for having a long memory for those who crossed them.
It turned out that while we were looking for someone to run Iowa, someone was looking to connect with us to do just that. Enter Robert Becker. Robert Becker had run Iowa for Bill Richardson in 2008. But his real claim to fame was his foreign work. He was part of a group of American and Egyptian democracy workers who were arrested in a crackdown by Egyptian authorities. When the American government arranged for the Americans in the group to be released from jail long enough for a jet to spirit them all out of the country, Becker had stayed behind because he didn’t want to leave his Egyptian counterparts to their fate.
His interest in the campaign came to me from a couple of sources, including Mark Longabaugh and Pete D’Alessandro. Mark arranged for me to meet Becker at the DML office. The DML offices were at that time in a Georgetown building originally built as the Iraqi embassy. It was now occupied by a number of tenants. It has the distinction of having the most difficult-to-use front-gate visitor intercom of any building I have ever been to. Despite visiting many times, I generally had to resort to calling the office on my cell phone to get somebody to ring me in.
Waiting to get through the security door was a tall guy wearing all black, with close-cropped hair. It was Becker. He always prefers to go by his last name. And everyone obliges. The one person I know who does not call him Becker is Bernie. Bernie calls him Robert. In Iowa, I once told Bernie that he prefers to go by Becker. Bernie said to me, “Isn’t Becker his last name?” “Yes,” I said. Bernie looked at me and replied, “Well, I’m not going to call him that.”
That first meeting in the DML building went well. Becker understood the unnecessarily arcane caucus process in Iowa. He knew the geography and how to run the type of intensive voter-contact operation that we needed to win there. I left the meeting mostly convinced that we should bring him on. Knowing what I know now, I should have hired him immediately. But I hesitated.
My doubts centered on whether Becker would be a good fit in a rural state like Iowa. (How wrong I was.) In the end, any doubts I had were overcome by this simple fact: If he could stand up to the Egyptian authorities, he wasn’t going to be intimidated by the Clinton campaign. That meant a lot. We needed people who were going to be all-in and not worried about their next job in politics or retribution from Clinton-world.
We had our Iowa manager. Becker headed out to Iowa shortly thereafter and began assembling the rest of the team. I had already been to Iowa, and Pete and I had rented a small space in a suburban Des Moines office building. The Clinton campaign was also housed in that complex.
Becker decided that the space was too small for the type of intensive field effort we would need in Iowa. He found a large space in a shopping center in a less well-off part of town. It was run-down but cavernous. That would become Bernie Central in the Hawkeye State.
One down, over fifty to go. Phil and I turned our attention to New Hampshire. Our candidate for manager there could not have been more different from Becker. Kurt Ehrenberg had been brought on as campaign coordinator in New Hampshire to get the ball rolling. But we were still looking for a long-term campaign manager. Kurt had been the Run Warren Run staffer in New Hampshire. We quickly decided that the qualified choice for New Hampshire was Julia Barnes, executive director of the Vermont Democratic Party. Julia had substantial experience in New Hampshire politics. She was extremely organized and understood the Granite State. She struck us as a forceful leader, which Phil Fiermonte and I both liked.
We knew that the campaign could devolve into trench warfare, and we wanted people like Becker and Julia, who would hold the line against the inevitable assaults by the Clinton campaign and their establishment allies. Phil and I met with Julia. Our initial conversation went well, but she was a tough negotiator in the terms of her employment. We were not in the strongest negotiating position—the clock was ticking. Julia seemed to be an excellent choice, and we didn’t have a lot of (or frankly any) equally qualified alternatives. The truth is there probably wasn’t a more qualified candidate.
We offered her the job shortly after, and for personal reasons she decided against it. We were back to square one. Losing Julia was a big setback. Time was running out, and we had to win New Hampshire for Bernie to be a viable candidate for president. Lose New Hampshire and it would be over. We were starting to look for another candidate when Julia called back and said she had reconsidered. We met one more time and hammered out her contract. Having the first two managers in place—and top-flight picks at that—was a tremendous relief. Maybe we’d get this plane in the air after all.