NASHUA, N.H. — Inside the local library of this Granite State city, Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders is smiling uncharacteristically from ear to ear on the cover of a recent issue of Time magazine.
“Sanders is a crusader with little patience for small, human things,” the accompanying article says of the 2020 presidential candidate. “But will the traits of the crusader, which have gotten him to the threshold of the threshold of power, be enough to get him through the door? Or does the crusader — too focused on health care to do small talk — need to learn that sometimes you have to ask about someone’s kids to get everyone’s kids health care?”
Outside on the sidewalk, people who attended this weekend’s Nashua Pride Parade soon found out. They watched as the man summed up by the Washington Post as “our grumpy grandpa” bounded out of his campaign car shouting “anybody want a selfie?” before marching down Main Street amid a sea of rainbow banners and balloons.
“With so many of the other candidates snuggled up over in the progressive corner of the party,” the Post’s fashion critic wrote this past week, “he can no longer comfortably dress like the absent-minded professor who lost his comb.”
Perhaps that’s why Sanders accessorized his usual blue shirt and slacks with a baseball cap bearing an appliqué of the same golden-horned unicorn that rode in the float just before him.
“Can we get a quick picture?” a father asked alongside his young daughter.
“If you can catch up with me,” the 77-year-old candidate replied.
Then again, listen to Sanders go on to speak to the public after declining questions from the press and you heard a familiar, fight-picking refrain.
“I get criticized for being kind of repetitious and I don’t entertain the media quite as much as I should with a new dance or a new song,” he said. “But there has been a vicious war against the working class of this country. And we are going to turn that around. We are prepared to stand with the working class against the oligarchs to create an economy and a government that works for all of us, not just the 1%.”
Such is the challenge of the Vermont candidate who’s both setting the Democratic agenda with game-changing proposals as Medicare for All and facing mounting questions as several of his 2020 primary opponents are rising in the polls.
“Sanders has changed the debate in great measure because he has never really changed himself,” Time’s cover story notes. “His consistency is the selling point — his mantras against billionaires stealing the American Dream, the system being rigged, working people needing to form a movement to take power back. And yet he is now running against nearly two dozen competitors, many of whom have chipped away at his distinctiveness by emulating his stances, and just being Bernie may not get the job done.”
“Sanders has already changed the game,” the author concludes. “A question lingering over him is, To win that game, can he change?”
Just two months ago, Sanders was the Democratic front-runner in his neighboring state of New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation 2020 presidential primary, winning a full third of surveyed voters in an otherwise splintered field.
Then former Vice President Joe Biden announced his own bid, breaking Sanders’ record $5.9 million fund-raising haul in the first 24 hours after his campaign launch and skyrocketing past the Vermonter as much as two-to-one in the most recent Granite State polls.
Worse, Sanders’ fellow progressive U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has sparked headlines this past month for edging ahead of her Vermont colleague in several recent surveys of early voting states including California, Nevada and South Carolina.
“While the movement he built in 2016 has proven durable, there are few signs that it’s growing,” Time notes. “The relational side of politics may matter more for Sanders in 2020 than it did in 2016. Then, Sanders benefited from being the clear alternative to Clinton. In 2020, he is still a rare bird but no longer unique.”
Sanders offers a multifaceted origin story. He’s the son of an immigrant whose family was killed in the Holocaust; a young idealist who, growing up in a family living paycheck to paycheck, heard Martin Luther King Jr. give his “I Have A Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington.
But the longest-serving independent in congressional history now is summed up by many as an old white straight male. And so this weekend he campaigned in New Hampshire’s second-largest city beside LGBT activists, drag queens and, at a later stop, ice cream icon Ben Cohen, who scooped out free Cherry Garcia and Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough to anyone who asked.
“Before Bernie, I used to be the most famous guy from Vermont,” Cohen told more than 200 people squeezed into Sanders’ newly opened greater Nashua headquarters. “When we all work together and we get this guy elected, I promise that I will become the Minister of Ice Cream.”
Bernie 2.0 still has issues to work out. Just ask the new mother wanting a selfie.
“Will you hold my baby?” she asked Sanders.
“No,” he responded brusquely. “I don’t want to drop him.”
Then came the gaggle of reporters who circled the candidate as he waited for the parade’s start.
“No great speeches here,” said Sanders, shutting down any thoughts he was open to talking.
The Vermonter instead waited to shout the same stump speech he has during his nearly half-century career.
“We want to make a political revolution which transforms America,” he said. “We want to bring our people together by the millions to stand up to the corporate elite whose greed has destroyed the middle class of this country.”
Sanders cited a recent Wall Street Journal editorial titled “Bernie Sanders Won the Debate” that noted Democratic candidates’ increasing support for progressive plans to improve economic equality, health care, college costs, immigration and climate change.
“This is Mr. Sanders’ vision of America,” it said. “It isn’t clear why the Democrats have moved so far left so fast. Perhaps it is changing demographics led by the millennial socialists scarred by the Great Recession. Perhaps (President Donald) Trump’s conservative populism has inspired its counterpart on the left. Whatever the cause, this Bernie Sanders triumph is the single most important development in the 2020 campaign.”
Sanders’ didn’t share the Rupert Murdoch-owned, right-leaning newspaper’s closing line: “Mr. Trump should be grateful. If this is the opposition agenda next year, he might win a second term.”
Instead, the Vermonter returned to past words he considers his road map to the future.
“We have a lot of work to do, and it’s not going to be easy,” he said. “Real change, whether it was the labor movement, the women’s movement, the gay movement, the civil rights movement, all of you know from your history, it never comes from on top. It always comes from down below. It always comes when millions of people stand up and struggle and fight for justice.”
With that, the crowd cheered.
Sanders smiled.
“Anybody want a selfie?”
