PART II OF THE SUMMER OF SANDERS began much as Part I had ended, with signs of growing support. On July 4, Bernie and Jane marched in two different Iowa parades, accompanied by over a hundred supporters. Having marched in innumerable small-town parades in Vermont, Bernie felt right at home shaking hands and posing for selfies.
Two days later, he held a 7,500-person rally in Portland, Maine. The reporting that day showed the scale of his support. John Wagner (Washington Post), MaryAlice Parks (ABC News), and Alex Seitz-Wald (NBC News) all wrote stories or social media posts that captured the seriousness of Bernie’s threat to the Clinton campaign. Parks tweeted, “My early guess is 8k screaming fans here for @BernieSanders in Portland. Hundreds more couldn’t get in.”
Wagner and Anne Gearan had recently penned an analysis piece that talked about the growing challenge that Bernie posed. In it, they fairly laid out the obstacles that Bernie faced, particularly the challenge of reaching minority voters and the prospect of being underfunded once the campaign moved to more expensive media markets. But it was clear from the story that many insiders were completely out of touch with what was going on in the real world.
In a Morning Joe interview quoted in the Wagner/Gearan piece, Senator Claire McCaskill expressed a view common inside the Beltway at the time: “Any other candidate that has the numbers that Hillary Clinton has right now would be, you know, talked about as absolutely untouchable, and all of a sudden, Oh, Bernie, Bernie, Bernie. It’s not unusual for someone who has an extreme message to have a following.”
She was an early and vitriolic opponent of Bernie’s. Unlike most of his other Senate colleagues who were supporting Clinton, McCaskill took the low road. Having been an early supporter of Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy, she was now working overtime to ingratiate herself to Clinton-world with red-baiting attacks.
The Clinton campaign for its part was determined to minimize Bernie. Wagner and Gearan noted that the Clinton policy was to not mention Bernie on the record and hope that her “progressive” policy rollout later in the summer would reassure the large number of Democrats and Democratically aligned independents that she was in sync with them.
The day after the Maine event, Bernie was back in Washington. We held two policy-related conference calls. One was on campaign finance reform, the other on marijuana policy.
Campaign finance reform was already a central issue in the campaign. Bernie was running with the support of small donors and had refused to authorize a super PAC. In every speech, he spoke about the need to overturn Citizens United.
But he wanted to go even further. Bernie is a strong proponent of public financing of elections. As he often said on the campaign trail, he wanted any person, regardless of personal wealth or ability to raise money, to be able to run for office. The point of the conference call was to get down in the weeds a bit about the best way to structure such a program. As part of that, Bernie wanted to get an overview of the various public-financing programs already operating in many states and localities, and others that were pending before Congress. One of the advisers on the call was Larry Lessig.
Larry Lessig is a Harvard professor who had been active in campaign finance reform, internet freedom, and a host of other efforts. Bernie asked him to be on the call because of his long-standing commitment and his knowledge of the subject matter.
Imagine our surprise when Lessig announced less than a month later that he was running against Bernie in the Democratic primary. His announcement came with a pledge that, if elected president, he would push Congress to pass his political and campaign finance legislation—and then resign. He pledged to run only if he raised $1 million by Labor Day, a goal he claims to have met. But after a smattering of media attention, his campaign folded in early November, with no impact on the race other than to relieve progressive, small donors of $1 million or more.
It’s not clear to this day what his goal really was. Campaign finance reform of the type Lessig advocated was a key component of Bernie’s campaign. Maybe it was ego—he wanted to be the messenger instead of just advising on the message. In the end, maybe he just wanted to raise $1 million online. Needless to say, he was not on any future calls about campaign finance reform.
The second call, on marijuana reform, ended up having a tremendous impact on the race and on the national discussion of marijuana policy and drug policy more generally. Bernie was increasingly focused on the need for reform of a broken criminal justice system that disproportionately penalizes communities of color. As he has pointed out, rates of marijuana use are similar across racial lines. But black users are far more likely to find themselves arrested. And with an arrest record comes difficulty getting a job, an education, and housing.
In addition, it struck Bernie as a waste of human dignity and scarce resources that the number of people in jail in the United States is greater than in any other country, including authoritarian countries like China—which has many times our population.
The pressing need to rethink all of this was confirmed when we later learned, in April 2016, that the disparate impact of the war on drugs started by Richard Nixon was intentional. The war on drugs was a conscious effort to give government officials the justification to harass and jail political opponents and members of the black community. An explosive article by Dan Baum in Harper’s magazine features top Nixon aide John Ehrlichman in a 1994 interview admitting that the Nixon administration’s war on drugs was really an attack on the black community and the antiwar movement:
At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
It’s shocking to read. But even more shocking is the devastation that the war on drugs has caused in communities both in the United States and abroad.
One impact that Ehrlichman may or may not have foreseen was the extent to which the war on drugs would be used not just to harass and jail black people in America but to rip away their ability to fight back politically through disenfranchisement. According to the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit involved in research and advocacy around criminal justice issues, some 6.1 million Americans have lost the vote due to felony convictions. Of those, over 35 percent are African Americans. In seven states, over 15 percent of voting-age African Americans are disenfranchised in this way. The following are the top seven states with the highest percentage of blacks of voting age disenfranchised by a felony conviction: Alabama (143,924; 15.11 percent); Florida (499,306; 21.35 percent); Kentucky (69,771; 26.15 percent); Mississippi (127,130; 15.86 percent); Tennessee (173,895, 21.27 percent); Virginia (271, 994; 21.9 percent), and Wyoming (966; 17.81 percent). But the percentages don’t tell it all. Both Georgia and Texas, while not making it into the top seven in terms of percentage, have disenfranchised over 140,000 African Americans.
This intersection between the war on drugs and felon disenfranchisement is a deadly combination when it comes to suppressing the ability of black communities to fight back politically. The impact of this disenfranchisement was powerful in the 2016 general election. Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by less than 113,000 votes in Florida. That’s a fraction of the disenfranchised black community in the Sunshine State. The war on drugs threatens not only the lives of individual people, their families, and their local communities, but also basic American notions of democratic rule. Bernie would later call for the restoration of all voting rights for felons.
On the July 7 call, however, the issue was how best to address the issue of marijuana and its regulation at the federal level. Despite our opponent’s narrative, Bernie was a successful long-term legislator, and the specifics of policy mattered to him. All the reforms to marijuana regulation were happening at the state level. Some two dozen states had approved the use of medical marijuana. And a handful, most notably Colorado, had approved recreational use. All of these policies violated federal law, because marijuana was listed as a Schedule I drug by the federal government. That meant it was classified as having no medical benefit and a strong likelihood of abuse. Marijuana is on the same schedule as heroin. Even cocaine is listed as a Schedule II drug—judged likely to be abused, but possessing value as medicine.
The Obama administration had chosen not to enforce federal law when it came to states that had decided to loosen restrictions on marijuana use. But individuals and businesses still run a huge risk, because a change in administration can quickly lead to a change in policy. While Bernie didn’t come to any final conclusions about the way forward, it was clear to me during the conversation that he was leaning toward a policy that would remove federal restrictions on marijuana (although retaining the right to regulate and tax it) and leave it to states and communities to decide whether to allow its use, under what circumstances, and other issues of taxation and regulation. This is consistent with the way alcohol is regulated. Bernie wanted to think over the exact parameters of his position. He and I spoke about it on a number of occasions. He gave it a lot of thought; a final policy announcement would ultimately come in the fall.
He appeared at a Democratic town hall meeting in Arlington, Virginia, on July 9. It was a packed house and Bernie was appearing with Virginia Eighth District congressman Don Beyer. (He happens to be my congressperson.) Longtime Democratic activist Sandra Klassen was moderator. She would lead our Virginia delegation at the convention.
There seemed to be a good number of Bernie supporters in the crowd. There was a disagreement between Bernie and Don Beyer on trade policy, but by and large things were going extremely well. At some point Bernie was asked about his vote for a 2006 gun liability bill. The exchange got a little testy, but it was not a huge part of that evening. It did, however, make it into the Washington Post coverage. Bernie detailed his long support for background checks and the assault weapons ban. Note to self at the time: We would need a shorter, more direct response in the future.
July 17 and 18 proved to be pivotal days in the early campaign that would have ramifications both substantively and in the media narrative until the end. Bernie was in Iowa on the eighteenth to attend the Iowa Hall of Fame (HOF) dinner. As in many other states, state Democratic parties hold annual fund-raising dinners at which they recognize some individual or group whose work they want to honor. During presidential election years in early voting states, these types of events take on additional importance, as they are an opportunity for presidential contenders to speak to large numbers of party faithful at one time. They are well attended, and the state parties can raise significant amounts of money.
Such events typically attract those who are most active in the party and those who can afford the admission. More pro-Clinton voters attended than working-class or younger voters who were more open to Bernie—not to mention the overwhelming number of Democratically aligned independents who flocked to his campaign. But a cool reception to Bernie at the Iowa HOF dinner so early in the campaign would have led to a lot of bad media stories about Democrats rejecting Bernie. Explaining that the audience was more likely to be more pro–Democratic establishment in rebuttal would have violated the cardinal rule of political messaging: If you are explaining, you are losing.
So the campaign bought a bunch of tables, and our Iowa team invited our own supporters to attend. While we would still be outnumbered in the room, at least this would guarantee that there would be some Bernie supporters present. To conserve resources, we bought tables farther from the stage—they were less expensive. Bernie did have one table up front, as did all the other candidates (there were still five at that point); he and Jane and special guests would sit there. The general practice in politics was to fill the rest of those seats at the candidate’s table with prominent endorsers or donors. Our campaign did it differently. To illustrate the crushing debt that so many college graduates are forced to bear, the guests at Bernie’s table were all Iowa students who collectively had student debt of over $1 million.
But what was most significant about the Iowa HOF dinner was that Bernie—whose political life began when he fought housing and educational discrimination in Chicago—had decided that he wanted to be much more vocal about police violence against African Americans.
He was personally moved by the all too frequent accounts of black Americans being beaten, shot, and killed. He correctly observed that this was not a new problem but one that was being brought out in the open by the proliferation of cell-phone cameras. And he purposely decided to debut this increased focus about the scourge of violence against African Americans in front of a largely white Iowa audience. As those who followed the campaign know, Bernie was never one to “tailor” his message to his audience. Upper-income voters heard the same discussion of wealth and income inequality as did attendees at union rallies. Audiences in more conservative red states heard about the need to protect a woman’s right to choose or the need for equality for the LGBTQ community. And rallies that were in some cases overwhelmingly white (although not as white as the Clinton campaign and the media liked to portray) were going to hear about the violence being meted out against the African American community by state actors. Period. That’s just Bernie.
During the Iowa HOF dinner, he brought the crowd to its feet when he said,
And like everybody in this room I want to see an America where when young black men walk down the street they will not be harassed by police officers; they will not be killed; they will not be shot.
He praised President Obama for his recent trip to a federal prison to highlight the fact that America’s criminal justice system disproportionately penalizes black men. He closed with one of his most popular taglines: “We need to invest in jobs and education, not jails and incarceration!” The crowd responded with chants of “Bernie, Bernie!”
After the event, a number of people of color in the room came up to Bernie to thank him for raising the issue of police violence—especially in that forum. He felt good about the impact of this increased emphasis, not so much politically but morally. To him, it helped empower those in Iowa and elsewhere who were trying to raise the alarm bells about this issue to people who were not directly affected by it.
Unfortunately, as we were to learn, no one who was attending the political convention Netroots Nation the next day seemed to have watched Bernie’s Iowa Hall of Fame speech. (Nor, for that matter, did Hillary Clinton. Unlike all the other candidates in attendance, she chose to leave the room when the other candidates were speaking.) They also had not seen Bernie’s June 28 interview with George Stephanopoulos, largely about the economic challenges faced by communities of color.
* * *
Despite the limited campaign time Bernie had because of his commitment to attend the Senate during 2015, he agreed to attend the annual Netroots Nation convention being held that year in Phoenix, Arizona. Netroots Nation is an annual conference of progressive activists and thinkers with a strong connection to those working in the online space. Started in 2006, it features panel discussions, workshops, and presentations by progressive leaders inside and outside government. It is also an opportunity for people working for progressive change to see one another, exchange ideas, and network.
For Bernie, attending meant leaving Iowa when he was already there. And it meant going to Arizona, a state that was voting much later in the process, when we had ground to make up in the first four contests—in some cases a lot of ground. Bernie decided to go for two reasons. The first was that the focus of Netroots Nation that year was on immigration reform. The Netroots site said: “For Netroots Nation 2015, we’re choosing to … make immigration a central issue to the progressive agenda.”
We’ve also got a lot to discuss from a policy perspective. It’s time to start talking about how militarizing our police forces and borders is problematic, how trade agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA [the Central America Free Trade Agreement] have created the economic conditions for the migration from Central America, and how this issue ultimately comes down to family.
As the son of an immigrant from a non-English-speaking country who grew up in an ethnic neighborhood, Bernie had and has a tremendous amount of empathy for immigrants and the devastating effects of US immigration policy in dividing up families.
The agreed-upon format was that Bernie would give a short version of his stump speech, which always started with a discussion of economic inequality—a problem that he knew affected middle-class and working families across all races. Then there would be a moderated interview and question-and-answer period on the issue of immigration. He prepped a lot for the immigration portion of the program. It would be a great opportunity for him to expand on the themes he had talked about in his NALEO appearance the month before. He was prepared to talk not just about immigration generally but also about the corporate profiteering by the private prison and detention center industry and issues facing specific immigrant communities. Among these issues was violence and abuse faced by undocumented transgender detainees.
Bernie planned to hold a large rally afterward in Phoenix and two the next day in Texas. The media, in its ongoing efforts to discount and dismiss Bernie’s success, was now suggesting that he could only draw crowds in blue, Frost Belt states, which carried with it the implication that only white progressives were coming out. To the media, 10,000 people in Madison was now what any vaguely liberal pol could draw. A diverse city like Phoenix, in a red-leaning state like Arizona, was a perfect location to demonstrate the falseness of that narrative.
A side benefit to going to Phoenix became obvious as the date of our planned rally neared. The weekend before us, Donald Trump held a rally at the same Phoenix convention center. Trump boasted of his 4,000-plus crowd at that rally. Bernie and all the rest of us wanted to best him in that regard. We obviously had as priority one beating Hillary Clinton in the primary process, but that did not mean that we wanted a right-wing authoritarian like Trump to have any standing in American politics. If our rally had the unintended consequence of knocking some air out of his balloon, so much the better.
Our 7:00 a.m. first leg to Phoenix—from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to Minneapolis—had us all up at 5:00. The Iowa HOF event the night before had gone late. Bernie hadn’t started speaking until about 9:30 p.m. And it’s fair to say that no one in our traveling party got to bed until well after midnight. We would all hit Phoenix pretty low on gas, and Bernie was scheduled to speak at Netroots only forty-five minutes after we touched down.
Tim Tagaris of Revolution Messaging picked us up from the airport and drove us to Netroots. We arrived and were escorted backstage. The scene was chaotic. From the stage area, we heard incessant shouting. Backstage was separated from the main stage by a translucent white screen through which we could see shadows. There were multiple people on stage. I quickly called over one of our staffers, who had been dispatched earlier in the day to the event, to figure out what was going on.
He told us that a group of Black Lives Matter protesters had interrupted Governor Martin O’Malley’s presentation, and that a representative of the protesters, Tia Oso, had come onstage. From our vantage point, we could see that the crowd was very “hot.” We learned later that Governor O’Malley made an explosive situation even worse when he said, in a flustered attempt to respond to the protesters, “Black Lives Matter, White Lives Matter, All Lives Matter.” To the protesters, it demonstrated that O’Malley fundamentally misunderstood the Black Lives Matter movement.
Black Lives Matter seeks to end the systemic discounting of black lives. While the slogan is “Black Lives Matter,” its meaning is really that Black Lives Matter, Too! “All lives matter” may be a truism, but it misses the fundamental point of the movement: that systemic racism as expressed through state actions like police violence and mass incarceration and in the economic and social sphere demonstrate that black lives are not valued as highly as others and in some cases appear not to be valued at all. Given that, the protesters at Netroots were not pleased with Governor O’Malley’s comment (for which he apologized later that day).
Even more than our campaign, the O’Malley camp was operating on a shoestring budget. (We had maybe a dozen headquarters staff at the time covering management, scheduling, advance, political, fund-raising, digital, communications, policy, and every other function.) Unlike the Clinton operation, with its legions of headquarters staff, O’Malley’s campaign and ours relied on very few people covering work that would ordinarily be done by many. The event had been billed as focused on immigration, so candidate and staff prep time would necessarily have been targeted to the details of immigration-related topics. That said, there are several issues that do overlap—for example, the need to abolish private prisons and immigration detention facilities.
The question facing us at that moment was whether, given the situation, we should just leave or go in and face what would likely be a difficult confrontation. Our concern was not really facing unhappy people or demonstrators. Bernie had a long political career and had faced unsympathetic audiences before. And he had been arrested in a demonstration against racial discrimination (the video would later be unearthed). Rather, the concern was that, under the hyperscrutiny of media coverage in a presidential race, our opponents would weave a false narrative after a difficult encounter.
A decision had to be made. Our staffer on the ground told us that he had been given assurances that Bernie was not going to be protested—that O’Malley had been the subject of the protest because of his policing policies during his tenure as mayor of Baltimore. It made sense. O’Malley had adopted a “zero-tolerance” policing policy that, according to the Washington Post, resulted in tens of thousands of arrests for littering and loitering. That same story notes that, in 2005 alone, Baltimore police made over 108,000 arrests. Granted, some of those people got arrested multiple times; even so, that 108,000 figure is equivalent to one-sixth of Baltimore’s population at the time.
Bernie made the call. He would go in. He was intent on increasing the focus on the need for police and criminal justice reform and the disproportionate impact of economic inequity on young people, particularly young people of color. His presence at Netroots certainly accomplished that goal, but not in the way any of us expected. Unfortunately, either the intelligence was wrong or the protesters were so angry that whatever assurances may have been given could not be lived up to. Either way, Bernie’s Netroots Nation appearance did not turn out as planned.
He took the stage intending to carry out the format of the program. He would give short remarks and then engage in a policy discussion about immigration with moderator Jose Antonio Vargas. A few of us stood on the floor next to the stage in the crowd. There were many Bernie supporters in the room, including a group up front with cardboard signs that featured him in a Robin Hood hat. He got a standing ovation as he came on stage.
Beginning as he always did, he talked about grotesque levels of wealth, and about income inequality. The protesters quickly began shouting at him. Many of the chants were unintelligible, but most seemed to be focused on the issue of violence against black Americans. Bernie responded to them as reported by the New York Times: “Black lives, of course, matter. I spent 50 years of my life fighting for civil rights and dignity, but if you don’t want me to be here, that’s O.K. I don’t want to out-scream people.” I thought that wasn’t bad on four hours of sleep. The demonstrators didn’t seem to share my appraisal.
Bernie also spoke about research showing that youth unemployment and underemployment among high school graduates in the African American community was approximately 50 percent. His view is that economic abandonment of communities contributes to other ills, and that lifting communities economically tends to improve them in other ways as well.
Of course, improving people’s economic lives is not the only thing that needs to be done. It doesn’t automatically address other manifestations of systemic racial discrimination, like police violence; and Bernie never said it would. Actions have to be taken on multiple fronts concurrently. (This would be one of the false narratives that the Clinton campaign would try to use against Bernie later in the campaign—that he believed addressing income and wealth inequality would solve every other problem facing the country. He never held that view, but it was a convenient way to delegitimize his lifelong fight for economic fairness and to excuse Bill and Hillary Clinton’s long-term coziness with economic elites. Regardless, Bernie’s discussion of the plight of African American youth didn’t seem to resonate at that moment.)
After a few attempts to move the program along, the moderator ended it ahead of schedule. Given the press coverage of the event, it looked like the winner of that morning’s news cycle was Hillary Clinton, who had wisely, it seemed, chosen not to show up at all. Having been coldly received at Netroots in 2008, she had apparently learned her lesson. But that was just the immediate read. Secretary Clinton’s inability to connect with young voters of color would ultimately be one of the factors in her loss to Donald Trump in the general election.
In the end, Bernie, whose political life had begun when he was dragged away by Chicago police after he and other protesters chained themselves together at a construction site of a substandard school for black students, understood that the protest was not about him. Rather, the event provided a platform for the protesters to bring attention to what was and is unquestionably one of the critical issues facing us as a country. That nuance was not appreciated in the national news coverage, however. And it never was. Anytime a Black Lives Matter action took place at a Bernie event, it was further evidence that black people hated Bernie.
Bernie wanted to give voice to those young protesters and their cause, because they were right about the issues they raised. He wanted the young people of color who were fighting in the streets for their communities and their families to be part of the broader “political revolution” he so often spoke about. But we also wanted to have that happen in a way that did not damage the campaign and lift up the Clinton campaign.
It would prove to be difficult to navigate at times, in part because of the lack of clear organizational lines within the movement. We also disagreed with some people in the movement over tactics. Our campaign, for instance, would never agree that disrupting or “shutting down” our campaign events was a strategic positive. The discussions that ended up happening between Bernie, the campaign, and so many dedicated Black Lives Matter activists across the country in both formal and informal meetings proved, in my personal view, to be some of the most substantive and meaningful of the entire primary season.
As an aside, the Netroots event spawned one of the best Twitter hashtags of the campaign, #BernieSoBlack. It was started by Roderick Morrow. Rod and his wife, Karen, run a podcast/blog called The Black Guy Who Tips. He posted #BernieSoBlack as a joke and it took off.
There were those who took it way too seriously, including some of the younger folks in our own campaign who just missed the point of it, as did some of the tweeters. But those who got the real spirit of what Rod said he was trying to accomplish (in a July 20, 2015, Vox interview) and who wrote tweets in line with that spirit, should all apply to be satire and parody writers. A bunch of us were howling with laughter. There were some genius tweets.
Rod’s Vox interview was extremely insightful, especially his thoughts on how the campaign had to speak more directly and with greater specificity about race. He felt that we were working on doing that, and in fact we were. There was a sincere interest on Bernie’s part and the campaign’s part to communicate more effectively on issues of race. It’s never fun to see your team lampooned, even if skillfully by some of the tweets, but Rod’s Vox interview had an impact on me and, by extension, the campaign and its messaging.
We all left Netroots demoralized—and dreading the spin that would come out of it. Over lunch at a local restaurant, Bernie asked about various slogans that the demonstrators had shouted. He wanted to understand what the specific things they were concerned about. We discussed “Say Her Name” and Sandra Bland. Because Sandra Bland received so much attention during the campaign and in the media, many are familiar with her and her tragic death. But for those who are not: She was a black woman from Chicago who had traveled to take a job with a college in Texas. She was stopped for failing to signal a lane change on July 10, 2015. As dashcam video released on July 21 reveals, an officer dragged her violently from her car and arrested her. Three days later, she was found dead in her jail cell. The officer was later fired for perjury in connection with the case, and a wrongful death suit brought by her family was settled for some $1.9 million.
The death of Sandra Bland brought further attention to police violence and highlighted the fact that it was not limited to men. Bernie wanted the names of black victims of police brutality added to his stump speech. He would say the names of individuals so that they could be remembered as real persons deserving of human dignity, not just statistics.
That afternoon, Bernie authorized a tweet to be sent on the subject. The first version was not drafted as tightly as it might have been. It said “I will #SayHerName. Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray and too many others.” With a few punctuation changes, it would have been fine, but as written, it looked like we did not understand that “SayHerName” was focused on black women. So the campaign pulled it down and put out a second tweet: “Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray and too many others.”
By the next day, when Bernie appeared at events in Dallas and Houston, the names of black Americans—including Sandra Bland—who had died at the hands of police or while in custody became a permanent part of the speech he delivered across America for the next year.
And that night, at the Phoenix rally, Bernie rewrote his remarks—by hand, of course, as he always did—to include more explicit references to the need for criminal justice reform, and to address racism: “When a police officer breaks the law, that officer must be held accountable. Let us be clear, while we have overcome a lot of racism, we still have a long way to go.”
Before the rally, we attended a Latino Victory Fund event. Bernie was warmly received. It was a good mood-changer after the stressful events earlier in the day.
That evening’s Phoenix rally was held in a 123,000-square-foot space that accommodated 10,000 and could be expanded to hold 12,000. The campaign had had to move to this space from two previously booked locations because of the flood of responses we had received. The Washington Post reported that the convention center put actual attendance at over 11,000 people. That made Phoenix the largest Bernie rally to date, beating the previous 10,000-person record in Madison, Wisconsin. The crowd in Phoenix was much more diverse than many we had seen in other areas, with a large Latino presence. Bernie had shown that he could draw large crowds outside blue, Frost Belt states.
Importantly, in the red state of Arizona, Bernie’s attendance blew away the crowd size of Donald Trump’s rally held the weekend before. The Phoenix New Times reported that Trump’s event was held in a room that accommodated 4,200. Some 7,000 more people showed up to see Bernie than had come out for Trump. Donald Trump likes to boast that he always draws the biggest crowds, but saying you draw the biggest crowds doesn’t make it true, whether it’s a political rally in Phoenix, Arizona, or Inauguration Day 2017.
The next day we headed to Dallas and Houston. At each rally Bernie was introduced by a local Communications Workers of America leader—in Dallas, Joe Montemayor, and in Houston, Claude Cummings. The afternoon Dallas event drew some 8,000 people. Bernie spoke about the need to take on Republican control of Texas, where childhood poverty exceeded 25 percent. This was and is a core Bernie Sanders theme. The national Democratic Party cannot concede all the red states to the Republicans. Voters in red states are hurting because of Republican policies. Throwing off the yoke of Republican rule in what are in some cases the nation’s poorest states must be a priority for the Democratic Party. It’s not enough to invest money during election years in battleground states alone. Long-term investments in rebuilding anti-Republican forces must happen even in states that vote solidly for the GOP.
Over 5,000 people packed the University of Houston’s Hofheinz Pavilion. As in Dallas, Bernie stressed that the Democratic Party cannot be a successful national party without competing in all fifty states. And he also spoke about criminal justice reform, and specifically about Sandra Bland, whose death had occurred about an hour north of Houston. As reported in the Texas Tribune, this part of the speech received the loudest response from the Houston crowd.
It was clear when I got back to Washington that we needed to open a dialogue with Black Lives Matter. They were raising the right issues—issues that Bernie was already committed to. But we faced a practical difficulty. Black Lives Matter is a movement, not an organization. There is no traditional hierarchy, no political office, no executive director. I reached out to one of the initiators of the movement, Patrisse Cullors. The two of us would have a number of conversations over the following weeks, but we were not able to lock down a meeting, even a private one, between the senator and top voices in the movement—which is something Bernie wanted to happen. But we would keep trying.
On July 21, the authorities released the dashcam video of Sandra Bland’s violent and unnecessary arrest. I watched it and drafted a statement, emailing it to Bernie. He called a few minutes later, having watched the video. “This is outrageous,” he said. “And I’ve read your draft statement. It’s not strong enough. Let me rework it and get it back to you.” He was noticeably upset by the video.
As reported in Salon, he wrote:
This video of the arrest of Sandra Bland shows totally outrageous police behavior. No one should be yanked from her car, thrown to the ground, assaulted and arrested for a minor traffic stop. The result is that three days later she is dead in her jail cell. This video highlights once again why we need real police reform. People should not die for a minor traffic infraction. This type of police abuse has become an all-too-common occurrence for people of color and it must stop.
In December, when a grand jury refused to indict, Bernie released a statement: “There’s no doubt in my mind that she, like too many African Americans who die in police custody, would be alive today if she were a white woman. We need to reform a very broken criminal justice system.”
In early August, Bernie planned to do a West Coast tour. Starting on the eighth, he would attend a Social Security rally, followed by an event of his own. Then he would hold rallies in Portland and Seattle. As it turned out, two young women who identified with the Black Lives Matter movement planned to shut down the Social Security rally. And they did. As they took over the stage, Bernie stepped away and let them have the microphone. He stood by respectfully for a bit and then waded out into the crowd who had come to see him.
Donald Trump would later attack Bernie at a press conference. As reported by CNN, Trump said, “That will never happen with me. I don’t know if I’ll do the fighting myself or if other people will, but that was a disgrace. I felt badly for him. But it showed that he’s weak.” In fact, Trump did incite his supporters to attack protesters at his rallies on more than one occasion. Trump, of course, has never understood leadership or respect for others, so his comments were not surprising. So much about him was and is a mask for what appears to be deep insecurity and low self-esteem.
No one on the campaign was happy about the shutdown. In more recent times, Bernie has rightly been praised for the respect he showed to the protesters and the issues they raised. But in the twenty-four-hour news cycle of a presidential campaign it was a problem. It fed the Clinton campaign’s false racial narrative. Plus, we had a large and expensive rally that evening and more in the coming days that had to be protected.
While two women of color had taken the stage in Seattle, two other women of color had stepped up to help. The first was Symone Sanders. Coincidently, Symone had been hired days before as the campaign’s press secretary. She had worked at Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch and had been an activist for juvenile justice. Symone was scheduled to arrive in Seattle that same day in time for Bernie’s evening rally. She opened the rally for Bernie that night. We were getting reports from various quarters that other protests were possible. So as part of her presentation, Symone instructed the crowd that in the event of a protest everyone chant, “We stand together!”
She was a natural in front of a crowd of some 20,000. Bernie would later call me, very impressed. “Jeff, can you believe that a young person just gets up in front of 20,000 people and delivers like that?”
The other woman was Teressa Raiford, lead organizer of Don’t Shoot Portland. Our advance staff on the ground had come into contact with Teressa in Portland. I spoke with her by phone. She supported Bernie and did not want to see his Portland event shut down. We talked a couple of times that day about rumors of protests. Later that day she led a demonstration in remembrance of the killing of Michael Brown, and she was arrested. (She was acquitted unanimously by a jury in April 2016.) I called Bernie and updated him.
“Make sure they know we are watching to make sure she is okay,” Bernie said to me about the police. The campaign contacted the local police to inquire about Teressa. Word started to spread that she had been arrested because she was connected with a planned protest of Bernie’s Portland rally. Of course, it was untrue. I knew that in fact the opposite was true.
In the end, there was no attempted shutdown of the Portland rally. After the event, Bernie, Jane, and Symone Sanders met with Black Lives Matter activists to discuss their concerns. The next day, Teressa was released from jail. She called me because she was getting criticized on social media and in phone messages over the false rumors that she was involved in a protest of Bernie.
I thanked her again and assured her that I would take care of things. I sent our social media team a text to be distributed far and wide:
A special thanks to Teressa Raiford Mazique of Portland who reached out to the campaign in solidarity and friendship. Her help in Portland is greatly appreciated. As she said, “We stand together.” And she’s right. All of us fighting for justice must stand together if we are going to win for all communities. We are all relieved that she is safe.
I called Teressa back a few hours later. She said that the social media post we’d placed had ended all the criticism. I asked her to let me know if she had any more problems in that regard. As I had said to the social media staffer in my email, I wanted to be sure that people who stood with us knew that we would stand by them.
One of the most promising events of the summer was Bernie’s appearance at the Iowa State Fair in mid-August. It started inauspiciously, when I put the wrong address in my GPS and we ended up in a residential neighborhood. Thankfully, we didn’t end up too far away.
When we finally arrived, there was an instant crowd around Bernie. It was hard even to walk around. Our first stop was a previously scheduled interview with the late journalistic icon Gwen Ifill. It was one of the most pleasant and upbeat interviews of the campaign. Bernie and Gwen sat at a picnic table while the huge crowd of fairgoers stood around them in a big circle.
We headed next to the Des Moines Register soapbox. The soapbox gives presidential candidates an opportunity to speak to the fairgoers. The crowd around Bernie kept growing and growing. It was an incredibly hot day. Bernie’s shirt was dripping with sweat. As he was speaking on stage, one of the organizers of the event asked Robert Becker what we had done as a campaign to attract so many people. “Nothing,” he replied. And in fact, we had not. The people just wanted to hear Bernie.
We squeezed through the crowd after the speech for an interview with Bloomberg’s With All Due Respect political show. It was short, but the hosts concluded by getting Bernie to do the “monster”—a routine involving a scary face and accompanying growls that amuses Bernie’s young grandson. He had told them about it in an earlier interview, and they often had him repeat it. Bernie was happy to oblige.
It became almost impossible to move after we left that interview. After a quick visit to the Bernie booth in one of the exhibit halls, we headed for the exit. Bernie ordered a draft root beer from one of the sellers on the way to the exit so the media could get their obligatory photo of Bernie eating fair food. In truth, had the crowds been more manageable, he would have had quite a bit of it. It was a far cry from the 1980s, when Bernie and I campaigned regularly at county fairs across Vermont and ate a lot of fair food. As we drove away, we lamented our inability to eat more of it that day—that and not getting to see the famed Iowa State Fair butter cow.
OF BERNIEBROS, HILLBOTS, THE RUSSIANS, ALT-RIGHT RACISTS, AND A WHOLE LOT OF REALLY GREAT PEOPLE
It bears stepping away from the chronological account for a minute to discuss the incredibly important role played in the campaign by the internet in general and social media in particular. It is more than an understatement to say that Bernie 2016 would not have been possible without the internet. Coupled with other modern means of communications, such as texting, it provided almost all the funding for the campaign. It provided a means for the campaign to communicate with, organize, and persuade people from one end of the country to the other. It also had a darker side. The internet in its anonymity can be a rude and unpleasant place, and a place where not everyone is who he or she appears to be.
In terms of fund-raising, no other campaign has been able to raise the amount of small-dollar contributions online as Bernie Sanders’ did. The generosity of millions meant that for the first time in modern American history a truly progressive candidate had the resources necessary to go toe-to-toe with a well-funded establishment candidate. Without that funding, the campaign would certainly never have gotten off the ground. There were times—at the end of fund-raising quarters, for example—when contributions were coming in two per second for hours.
At particular moments in the campaign, people expressed their support in enormous ways. In his speech following the New Hampshire primary, Bernie asked all those watching to go to his website and donate. The result was some $6.5 million over the next twenty-four hours. After a bird landed on his podium at an Oregon rally in late March 2016, we asked for any donation to receive a “Birdie” sticker. In the few days after the bird landed, people responded with over $3.5 million. There is no way to thank properly all of those who gave to support Bernie and his run for the White House. But everyone who donated should know that they truly changed politics forever—not because every candidate will be able to fund his or her race the way that Bernie did, but because we now know that at least at the presidential level it can be done.
In total, through the hard and effective work of Revolution Messaging, we raised over $218 million online from over 8.2 million contributions. We reached our first million contributions in September, our second in December. It only took a month to get to 3 million and another month to get to 4 million. In March, we went over 6 million contributions. April saw us over 7 million and in May we reached 8 million. The $30 million budget that John Robinson and I painstakingly drafted had to be thrown out the window.
That’s more contributions in a presidential primary than any candidate ever, and more than President Obama had in his 2008 campaign in total.
The web also allowed us to organize the huge rallies that Bernie held across the country. Texting and the internet allowed us, after the Madison rally, to build crowds with no paid online advertising at all. Hustle—which is a peer-to-peer texting program—was invaluable in crowd building for rallies. We also saw Bernie supporters across the country using the internet, and particularly Facebook, to keep in touch with one another. There was a proliferation of Bernie-supporter Facebook pages during the campaign.
In terms of social media, Bernie 2016’s numbers were impressive:
YOUTUBE VIDEOS: over 30 million views
FACEBOOK VIDEOS: over 42 million views
VIDEOS PRODUCED: over 550
FACEBOOK: 4.3 million page likes
TWITTER: 2.4 million followers
INSTAGRAM: 1.3 million followers
The campaign, again due to the success of Revolution Messaging, was responsible for a number of “firsts” online:
# of digital ads: 1,185
First presidential candidate to use Instagram ads
First candidate to sponsor multiday Snapchat filters
First in 2016 election to sponsor a national trend on Twitter
First candidate to secure a NYTimes.com takeover ad
Bernie had a tremendous following on Reddit. The folks on Reddit raised over a million dollars for the campaign. The discussions on Reddit helped keep our most active online supporters engaged and up-to-date on campaign developments. They may not know it, but they also provided a big morale boost to those of us on the campaign. My daughter especially liked “Beast Mode Weaver Is Best Mode Weaver” and the comparison of me to Henry Knox, a Rhode Island bookstore owner who became one of George Washington’s generals.
Reddit users also spawned what became a tremendous asset to the campaign—Coders for Bernie. It was originated by Kyle Pierce, who, according to the New York Times, started a Coders for Bernie thread in June 2015. Coders for Bernie, like Daniela Perdomo and over 120 others, were responsible for the issues-based site FeeltheBern.org.
Coders for Bernie—which billed itself as “a loose collective of developers, designers, and creatives working to elect Bernie Sanders for President”—built apps and programs that allowed people to find events, places to stay, voters who needed calling, and a host of other tools. Their devotion to Bernie and the campaign allowed us to do things online that would otherwise have been hugely expensive.
The internet also had its downside. The first was the Berniebros meme advanced by the media and echoed by the Clinton campaign. The phrase was coined by The Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer in a condescending piece published on October 17, 2015. It described a subset of Bernie supporters: young, male, educated, and rabidly pro-Bernie. Among the faults ascribed by Robinson to the Berniebros: their belief that Bernie could win (apparently Meyer’s establishment crystal ball didn’t reveal Bernie winning twenty-three nominating contests or the consistent polling that showed Bernie beating Trump) and their support for “pie-in-the-sky” proposals such as free college tuition and the $15 minimum wage. Both proposals are now included in the Democratic platform and are gaining widespread support across the country in the wake of the 2016 presidential campaign. By the time of the Democratic convention, Hillary Clinton supported both.
What started as a negative meme meant to belittle a group of Bernie supporters turned much darker. Throughout the fall and early spring, there was a proliferation of articles on a presumed wave of rude Bernie supporters—all supposedly testosterone-crazed, twenty-one-year-old misogynists—taking over the internet and making it unsafe for anyone who was not as fanatically for Bernie as they were. Leaked DNC emails had top communications staff labeling a reporter a Berniebro just because he wanted to ask the DNC chairwoman about the questionable operation of the joint fund-raising agreement that the Clinton campaign and the DNC had signed. Soon it was being said that all Bernie supporters were racist, misogynistic twenty-one-year-old men. There were no women, no people of color. Just Berniebros.
Before we get too far into this discussion, which could consume a book of its own, let me say that there is no doubt that there were some supporters who posted offensive and hateful content. It was not welcome or encouraged by the campaign. And we worked to tamp it down. On the other hand, there was and is tremendous support for Bernie Sanders online. People can and did complain that his supporters were too zealous in supporting him online when he was being ignored in the media and defamed by paid agents of the Clinton campaign such as David Brock and by the hired online trolls—the Hillbots—that Brock employed. Often this ardent support for Bernie was conflated with legitimate concerns about offensive posts. To the extent the complaints were really about zealousness and not offensive content, those were not complaints that found any resonance with the candidate or any of the senior staff. If folks in the media or on Twitter expect only praise from the world, they are in the wrong playground.
While I don’t embrace every conclusion and observation in it, Glenn Greenwald’s January 31, 2016, Intercept article laid out many of the problems with the Berniebro meme, including the abuse of the term by Paul Krugman, who not only disliked Bernie supporters but also was a public hater of Obama’s 2008 supporters. There’s no room in the ivory tower for the unwashed masses who actually want to see progressive policies implemented rather than just jawboned about in the paper.
In fact, President Obama’s online supporters faced identical criticism in 2008, being dubbed at the time “Obama boys.” On April 14, 2008, Rebecca Traister wrote an article in Salon called “Hey, Obama Boys: Back Off Already!” She wrote, “A growing number of young women are struggling to describe a gut conviction that there is something dark and funky, and probably not so female-friendly, running below the frantic fanaticism of their Obama-loving compatriots.… I was horrified by the frequent proclamations that if Obama did not win the nomination, his supporters would abstain from voting in the general election, or even vote for John McCain. I was suspicious of the cultlike commitment to an undeniably brilliant and inspiring man.”
The reality is that Bernie’s supporters were disproportionately young, and therefore disproportionately represented in the online community. The sheer imbalance between the number of Bernie supporters online and Clinton supporters meant that the majority of those discussing politics on the internet and commenting on stories at any given time were going to be Bernie supporters.
Naturally, the Clinton team was busy selling the Berniebros meme to reporters. New York magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi tweeted, “Maybe I would buy into ‘bernie bros’ more if I hadn’t been pitched a story about bernie bros by Hillary’s camp.” Many others did buy in, however.
The meme was an element of the political messaging designed to paint the campaign as hostile to women and people of color and to make people who were part of those constituencies feel ashamed for supporting Bernie. This fiction that all of Bernie’s support was coming from young, white males incensed many of the people of color and women who supported Bernie. This manifested itself in the most public way with #BernieMadeMeWhite, started by Leslie Lee III and comprised of people of color who supported Bernie and who expressed their sense of frustration and outrage that the media was making them invisible—that somehow supporting Bernie Sanders had made them white. Lee and people of color supporting Bernie were right to be offended.
As NPR reported in March 2016, Randy Brown of Edison Research, after conducting exit polls in twenty states, said, “Among African-Americans, who are 17 through 29, Bernie Sanders is actually leading that group, 51 to 48 [percent]. Among 17- to 29-year-old Hispanics, Bernie Sanders leads Hillary Clinton 66–34.” “I think the big takeaway,” Brown said, “is that whether it’s among whites or African-Americans, Bernie Sanders does significantly better among the youngest voters in the Democratic primary.” In truth, Hillary Clinton was winning older voters of all races, and Bernie Sanders was winning younger voters of all races.
While exit polling was capturing this reality, public polling and polling paid for by the media did not. It was extremely frustrating to see the media provide all kinds of breakdowns of white voters (age, education, and so forth) while lumping all black voters into one pot. This was all about money. Getting enough black voters to provide statistically valid breakdowns requires oversampling. That means more phone calls must be completed for each poll; and that, in turn, means more money. I don’t know if the media ever spent that money.
In addition to the media’s failure to make the investment needed to truly understand the complexity or nuance within many minority communities, there was certainly Clinton-world messaging that verged on both race-shaming and gender-shaming against people who supported Bernie. It was not just people of color who were upset. Young women supporting Bernie registered their outrage online when Madeleine Albright said that there was “a special place in hell” for women not supporting Hillary Clinton, and when Gloria Steinem said on Bill Maher’s show that young women were only supporting Bernie so that they could meet “boys.”
A young Vermont woman interviewed by the New York Times put it best: “‘Shame on Gloria Steinem and Madeleine Albright for implying that we as women should be voting for a candidate based solely on gender,’ Zoe Trimboli, a 23-year-old from Vermont who supports Mr. Sanders and describes herself as a feminist, wrote on Facebook. ‘I can tell you that shaming me and essentially calling me misinformed and stupid is NOT the way to win my vote.’”
When pressed by CNN’s Carol Costello about whether Hillary Clinton should disavow these statements, campaign spokesperson Karen Finney said, “These are women who are passionate advocates, they support Hillary Clinton. We can’t control what they say.” In the eyes of her campaign, Secretary Clinton apparently lacked the mystical powers that Bernie Sanders—like Barack Obama before him—possessed, but refused to use, to control what each of his supporters wrote or said.
Of course, unlike the Clinton campaign, Bernie himself did disavow unacceptable comments from supporters. When asked in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper in early February about inappropriate supporter posts, Bernie responded in his usual circumspect manner: “We don’t want that crap.” He added, “Anybody who is supporting me and who is doing sexist things, we don’t want them. I don’t want them. That is not what this campaign is about.” If only he hadn’t issued such a vague denunciation, or if he had used his behavior-altering mental control superpowers, all the bad online conduct would have stopped.
While Berniebros got a lot of media attention during the campaign, what did not get coverage were the over-the-top attacks online coming from Clinton supporters. It is impossible to know if these were hired trolls or real people. As I discuss below, the Clinton campaign–controlled super PAC Correct the Record admitted to hiring online trolls—something, for the record, our campaign never did.
Here are just a couple of the many enlightened Twitter posts by supporters of Hillary Clinton:
DavezNotHereMan @daveznothereman tweeted · May 2, 2016: #HillaryOrBust I will never bote for Bernie fucking Asshat and his detestable, disgusting, POS lying-bitch wife. #fleethebern #fuckBernie
Jo Ann @Catslawrence tweeted · June 7, 2016: I wish Nina Turner would shut the fuck up!
Deng @Hayabusa_19 tweeted on · June 2, 2016: @VinnyTimNJ Sniveling Weaver tries to weasel his way out. #FuckJeffWeaver #FuckBernieSanders.
Sexist attacks by the Hillbots (or Hillbros or Hillbullies) against Jane Sanders became so frequent, as documented by Patrick Curl’s pro-Bernie pivotamerica.com in early April 2016, that Bernie’s supporters on Reddit rallied to defend her. If you read some of the threads, it is also clear that some Clinton supporters defended Jane as well.
The aggressiveness of Clinton’s online supporters is reflected in the findings of a poll done in early March 2016 by Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Lincoln Park Strategies, and Rad Campaign. The poll found that 57 percent of respondents described Trump supporters as very aggressive online; 13 percent believed they were somewhat aggressive. Coming in a strong second were supporters of Hillary Clinton, at 30 percent very aggressive and 18 percent somewhat aggressive. Cruz’s devotees came in third, at 21 percent/18 percent. Lagging in fourth place were supporters of Bernie Sanders. Only 16 percent felt Bernie’s supporters were very aggressive on social media; another 16 percent felt they were somewhat aggressive. Politico’s Hadas Gold reported these results in May 2016. Oddly, I can’t find the story in the rest of the mainstream media, but I may have missed it.
This story of ugliness on the internet is not limited to the bad behavior of random Sanders and Clinton supporters. While I do not intend in any way to distract attention from unacceptable, albeit organic, social media conduct, it is important to recognize that there was also organized political warfare taking place in the anonymous world of the internet among super PACs, the racist alt-right, Trump supporters, and interests outside the United States. They all contributed to turning what would otherwise have been zealous and at times unacceptable internet discourse into a political cesspool. Let’s look at some of them.
1. HILLARY CLINTON’S SUPER PAC CORRECT THE RECORD AND ITS PAID TROLLS
The head of CTR, David Brock, revealed in April 2016 that the group was spending $1 million on paid trolls to attack its opponents online. Whether it was happening even earlier than he admits is not verifiable at this point and probably never will be, given his tortured relationship with the truth. But Correct the Record’s own statements, reported by Ben Collins on April 21, 2016, in the Daily Beast, indicate that they did, in fact, start earlier. Collins reports that CTR’s own press release stated that they had already “addressed more than 5,000 people that have personally attacked Hillary Clinton on Twitter.” He further reports, “Correct the Record’s communications director, Elizabeth Shappell, told the Daily Beast, ‘The expanded task force was established in anticipation of the general election.’ Expanded task force? How big was the task force before it was expanded? It could have been very big; Correct the Record had already spent $4.5 million when it made this announcement.
Correct the Record played a distasteful role in the Democratic primary campaign, using what some describe as a campaign finance loophole—or, as others allege, engaging in outright improper behavior—to fully coordinate with the Clinton campaign, something that super PACs are not supposed to do. The Los Angeles Times reported in November 2016: “Campaign finance reformers were appalled.” The assessment was not confined to people outside the campaign. In that same Los Angeles Times story:
Even Clinton’s allies worried that the unprecedented setup has gone too far, the hacked emails show. “This does seem shady,” Clinton friend Neera Tanden wrote to Podesta. His response was brief: “Brock $ machine!”
“That’s fine,” Tanden wrote back. “But skirting if not violating law doesn’t help her.”
The questionable legality of CTR was matched by the questionable character running it, David Brock. Brock started his career as a defamer for the right, viciously smearing the reputation of Anita Hill and others during the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation process. The Los Angeles Times’s Evan Halper described Brock this way: “a Clinton confidant who once made a career of spreading such misinformation and misogynistic attacks against her and Bill Clinton.”
Brock confessed to having conducted full-out attacks on women who were detractors of Justice Thomas. In one instance, as reported on June 27, 2001, in the New York Times, he used information leaked to him about the details of one woman’s divorce to blackmail her into silence. “Mr. Brock wrote that he used the information to intimidate her into recanting her account, threatening that he would ‘blacken her name, just as I had done to every other woman who had impugned Thomas’s reputation.’” The article quotes Brock as saying: “I demonized Democratic senators, their staffs, and Hill’s feminist supporters without ever interviewing any of them.” He had also been a big promoter of attacks on Bill Clinton’s personal life.
Brock claims he had a road-to-Damascus conversion while writing a book that was supposed to be a hit piece on Hillary Clinton. While he was never viewed, and is still not, as a person with an ideological compass of any kind, he dropped the far right’s flag and became a crusader in the Clinton army. They readily adopted him, despite his long history of defaming anyone it was politically convenient to defame—even the Clintons themselves. What did Bernie think of the Clintons’ associating themselves with Brock? He summed it up this way in a May 2016 interview he gave to Time: “I don’t think you hire scum of the Earth to be on your team just because the other side does it.”
Correct the Record’s stated purpose was to protect Hillary Clinton from the expected barrage of right-wing attacks they were concerned about. In truth, CTR’s principal function was not the defense of Hillary Clinton but rather the smearing of Bernie Sanders while allowing the Clinton campaign to keep its hands clean. In our campaign, the group became known as Distort the Record. Brock admitted, as reported by Jonathan Swan in a mid-February story for The Hill, “One of the roles of Correct the Record is to do things that the campaign shouldn’t do or won’t do or can’t do, and one of those things is being more out front with some of the more pointed criticisms of Sen. Sanders.”
CTR’s primary tactic was a steady stream of attacks on Bernie that it provided to the media only if they agreed to accept such attacks “off the record.” However, Brock’s under-the-radar smear campaign was exposed by the media at various times. The Huffington Post’s Samantha Lachman and Ryan Grim reported in September 2015 that, despite the Clinton campaign’s claim that they were not attacking Bernie, Correct the Record circulated an email trying to tie Bernie to positions of Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. CTR had apparently expected the email to have been an off-the-record transmission but didn’t get the authors’ agreement in advance. Okay, from a professional point of view, that’s just sloppy.
The Burlington Free Press’s Emilie Stigliani exposed more details about how CTR’s smear machine worked: “Hillary Clinton’s super PAC has tried to ‘flag’ stories about Bernie Sanders, but the group does not want its name attached. Daniel Wessel, Correct the Record press secretary, contacted the Burlington Free Press by email and phone to offer ‘off the record’ story pitches.” Stigliani reported further that during a phone conversation, “Wessel said that his organization prefers to be named only when speaking about Republican candidates. He offered to have his organization named in certain cases if the Free Press requested permission. The Free Press declined to agree to Wessel’s terms.”
Reporters acknowledged to me privately that they were receiving anti-Bernie attack emails from CTR but couldn’t speak about it—because they had agreed to receive the material off the record. When I would confront a reporter who was chasing a negative story and ask whether the source was Brock, he or she would generally look away in silence. That told me all I needed to know.
It is common for reporters to take off-the-record story tips or pitches from campaign staff, including me. What is unusual here is that the Clinton campaign was running its dirty tricks through a wholly owned subsidiary funded by unlimited donations far exceeding the federal campaign finance limits. Considering that Brock was admittedly operating his defamation factory in full coordination with the Clinton campaign and therefore was just an arm of the campaign, his activities did not receive the kind of attention they warranted from the press—a press Brock held in such contempt that he told Glenn Thrush, in a December 2016 Politico interview, “The press are animals and they need to be treated that way.” In fairness, many in the media felt the same way about him. On two separate occasions, reporters independently told me that they felt like they needed to take a shower after interviewing Brock.
Brock also used vehicles other than CTR to attack our campaign, including the website Blue Nation Review (BNR), originally established as a progressive blog that featured positive stories about Bernie and other progressives. According to the Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove, David Brock, with the help of BNR board member and pro-Clinton telecom magnate Leo Hindery, orchestrated a takeover in November 2015 that resulted in Brock’s owning an 80 percent share. The founder (and much of the staff) were unceremoniously kicked to the curb, replaced by Peter Daou, a militant Clintonista and Brock lackey—the perfect combination for his role as internet Bernie hater in chief. BNR thus became yet another part of the network of Brock-controlled smear vehicles unflatteringly known as the Brocktopus.
Brock’s tactics in attacking Bernie were so over-the-top that they even raised alarm bells in Clinton-world. When Brock went after Bernie’s age and health before the Iowa caucus, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta publicly tweeted that Brock should “Chill Out.” Top Clinton adviser Neera Tanden emailed Podesta opining that Brock was doing them so much damage that he might be a Republican plant.
So why was Brock allowed to run amok if top Clinton advisers thought he was doing them harm and they believed, through some campaign finance loophole, that they could fully coordinate with him? That’s a good question, and we may never know the answer. In an email to John Podesta, Neera Tanden suggested that Hillary Clinton or Bill Clinton was giving him the green light. In that same email, she suggested that Bill Clinton approved Clinton 2008 campaign manager Mark Penn’s attempt to insinuate that Barack Obama was a cocaine abuser.
In January 2017, Brock publicly apologized to Bernie and his supporters for his conduct during the 2016 race. People will have to judge for themselves whether he’s sincere. For context, the apology did come shortly after I wrote an opinion piece for The Hill imploring large Democratic donors not to waste more money on Brock’s failed electoral efforts when that money could be more effectively deployed in other ways to help elect Democrats.
For his part, Brock acolyte Peter Daou harbors so much venom toward Bernie that he continues to attack him online to this day. Daou reminds me of the World War II Imperial Japanese soldier who was left behind on an island only to learn decades later that the war is over.
We cannot know for sure what Brock’s paid troll task force was doing online throughout the campaign. As the Burlington Free Press documented, they went to great lengths to hide their tracks. How many anti-Bernie commenters in threads complaining of Berniebros were Brock operatives with multiple Twitter or Facebook handles having a conversation with themselves? Wired.com reported in December 2007 that Clinton presidential campaign staffers were caught creating fake accounts to appear as grassroots Clinton supporters on the progressive Blue Hampshire blog.
Or was the troll task force just putting out fun, positive facts—like how much Hillary Clinton loves puppies and kittens? Given Brock and Daou’s conduct during the campaign, are they in part responsible for ugly social media attacks targeted at Clinton supporters by supposed Berniebros? That kind of thing doesn’t happen, you say? As you will see below, there were many parties doing it in 2016. Kind of hard to believe the Brocktopus would have been so far behind the curve in the dirty tricks department.
2. ALT-RIGHT RACISTS
In addition to the paid Brock trolls, another group was maliciously injecting itself into the discussion between Bernie and Clinton supporters online. Alt-right racists organized on sites like 4chan to go out onto the web posing as Bernie supporters to harass black Clinton supporters with overtly racist attacks. I personally saw those boards, long since erased to hide their tracks, as did others on the campaign. They featured photoshopped images of Bernie standing next to a bed on which lay an interracial couple. They described African Americans as “apes” and “animals.” They were particularly incensed by Bernie’s refusal to attack Black Lives Matter activists after some of his events were interrupted. They described Bernie as “cuckolded” by the Black Lives Matter movement.
It was painful to see real political debate hijacked by such racist filth. I cannot say how much of a role these disgusting individuals played in ramping up the coarseness of the dialogue online during the primary season. But certainly their posts were incendiary and repulsive.
3. TRUMP TROLLS, FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC
The Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim and Jason Cherkis documented, in a lengthy article in March 2017, that as the primary season wound down there was a wave of activity by trolls on Bernie-friendly Facebook pages from a couple of different sources. This has been verified anecdotally by people active on pro-Bernie Facebook pages. The trolls in May were strongly anti-Bernie. The Huffington Post article posits that the trolls were from David Brock’s expanded program.
Grim and Cherkis note that in June 2016 the trolling changed. It switched to anti-Clinton messaging by supposed Bernie supporters who had decided to support Donald Trump or Green Party candidate Jill Stein. And it became more intense and vitriolic as the general election neared.
The authors document the efforts of the administrators of pro-Bernie pages to alert the Bernie online community about the trolling and to shut it down. Aleta Pearce, an “administrator of half a dozen pro-Sanders Facebook groups and a member of many others…, posted a memo to various Facebook groups about the fake news issue, warning of bogus sites.” According to Pearce, “The pattern I’m seeing is if a member is repeatedly posting articles that are only from one URL that person is just there to push advertising.… They probably have a sock account with little to no content. They are often from Russia or Macedonia.”
Another administrator, Bev Cowling, saw a surge in people trying to join her group. “It came in like a wave, like a tsunami,” she told Grim and Cherkis. “It was like a flood of misinformation.”
According to the authors, these trolls were joining multiple sites and were pushing over-the-top anti-Hillary stories, including ones about made-up illnesses, collusion with ISIS, and more. The article notes that efforts to eradicate this infestation were complicated by Brock’s public announcement of his troll army. Legitimate Bernie supporters became wary of anyone promoting a vaguely pro-Hillary position—including the message that pro-Trump trolls were the ones infecting the Bernie pages with anti-Hillary venom. In that way, Brock’s initiative actually helped create an environment of distrust that allowed anti-Hillary trolls to flourish.
The Daily Beast’s Gideon Resnick revealed that, like the alt-right racists, more garden-variety Trump supporters were also using 4chan as a place to organize efforts by Trump supporters to go online posing as pro-Bernie or pro-Clinton so they could sow discord between the two Democratic camps. One poster to 4chan laid out a line of attack:
They are going all out to paint Bernie supporters as non-Democrats and selfish “white people.” … This is an excellent wedge that you can exploit by finding Bernie supporters and calling them privileged and entitled white men from the point of view of a Hillary supporter.… Your main goal should be to mock and humiliate Bernie supporters while leaving subtle but unmistakable hints that you’re voting for Clinton.… Remember, if they hate you and you support Clinton, then they will hate Clinton.
Another 4chan poster quoted in Resnick’s article noted the opportunities presented by Brock’s announcement of his troll army to create divisions between Bernie and Clinton supporters. “Correct The Record is the greatest gift to Trump ever, let’s use it to our advantage and make both sides lose credibility with each other.”
Were the June trolls that invaded pro-Bernie social media sites part of the Russian effort to help elect Donald Trump by turning off Bernie supporters from voting for Clinton? The proliferation of links from Russia and Eastern Europe certainly suggest it. But like so much of what happened online, it is impossible to lock down 100 percent.
Taken together, foreign trolls, Trump trolls, Clinton’s paid trolls, and organic supporters of each of the campaigns who behaved inappropriately make it impossible to know who was doing what on the web. As bad as it was in 2016, it is sure to only get worse in the years ahead. One hopes that the media will take note of this and resist buying into false narratives.
A MOMENT OF PERSONAL INDULGENCE
Due to campaign appearances on television news programs, I personally acquired many “fans” during the campaign, particularly Twitter followers. Although many close to me felt bad about it, I would occasionally enjoy a glass of wine at my dinner table and read aloud some of the many mean tweets. The more creative and outrageous, the more I would howl. For the record, I do want to clear up a couple of memes. I am not related to Karl Rove, by marriage or otherwise. I did not make $800,000 a month on the campaign. And I do still like Cher, even if she’s not, as the following tweet suggests, my biggest fan:
SANDERS MANAGER,IS SCUM.HIS”HILLARY IS RESPONSIBLE 4 ISIS”IS PURE TRUMP!! #JEFFWEAVER IS 
ASSHOLE, BUT HE SAYS THE 
.BERNIE”WANTS 2 SAY.