[For months, Bernie Sanders has been making a case for the
multitrillion-dollar reform bill he’s spearheaded in the Senate.
Now, he’s taken that case to Joe Manchin’s home turf in West
Virginia — and is facing backlash from the mainstream media. ]
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BERNIE SANDERS IS SHOWING THE DEMOCRATS HOW TO TAKE ON JOE MANCHIN  
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Luke Savage
October 19, 2021
Jacobin [[link removed]]

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_ For months, Bernie Sanders has been making a case for the
multitrillion-dollar reform bill he’s spearheaded in the Senate.
Now, he’s taken that case to Joe Manchin’s home turf in West
Virginia — and is facing backlash from the mainstream media. _

What's In The Damn Bill? A Panel Discussion with Progressive Leaders,


 

Last Friday, Bernie Sanders published an op-ed
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in the West Virginia–based _Charleston Gazette-Mail_ laying out the
argument for the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package currently before
the Senate. With his trademark message discipline, Sanders made a
direct, accessible, and moral case for the key items in the bill,
going on to note the strong opposition from corporate interests and
cataclysmic wealth disparities that form the appalling backdrop of the
current wranglings in Congress.

From start to finish, every word of the intervention was true: from
Sanders’s claim that a majority of Americans stand to benefit from
the bill’s passage (and support
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its most significant provisions
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to his observation that the greatest source of opposition comes not
only from the Republican Party but also “drug companies, the
insurance companies, the fossil fuel industry and the billionaire
class” who “want to maintain the status quo in which the very rich
get richer while ordinary Americans continue to struggle to make ends
meet.” Given his choice of newspaper, Sanders’s ultimate objective
was quite clear — though, for what it’s worth, West Virginia’s
coal baron Senator Joe Manchin, who, alongside Arizona’s Krysten
Sinema is currently the biggest obstacle to the reconciliation package
— received only a single passing mention in the second to last
paragraph.

Needless to say, the response to Sanders’s op-ed, both from parts of
the media and from Manchin himself
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entirely predictable. Leading the charge was prominent Iraq War
booster and #resistance member Bill Kristol, who smugly questioned
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strategic wisdom of publishing the piece. “Maybe there’s some
brilliant strategy I don’t get here, but this attempt by Vermont
socialist Bernie Sanders to publicly pressure Joe Manchin through an
op-ed in a West Virginia paper seems at best pointless, and at worst
reckless and likely to backfire.”

Ignoring, or at any rate giving only cursory attention to, the actual
substance of Sanders’s op-ed, several outlets immediately opted to
frame the exchange as an interpersonal war of words between two
politicians: “U.S. Senator Manchin slams Bernie Sanders in battle
over Biden spending plan” (Reuters
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“Bernie Sanders wrote an op-ed to West Virginians. See Joe
Manchin’s fiery response” (CNN
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“Manchin slams Sanders for newspaper opinion article amid spending
debate” (the _Washington Post_
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It’s more than a bit ironic, given the
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comments Sanders made during a recent interview
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Anderson Cooper, in which he noted the extent that the actual content
of the reconciliation bill has been at best a secondary concern in
much of the coverage:

One of the problems we have is that millions of Americans don’t know
what’s in the bill. Because, I think, Congress has not done a good
job, I don’t think the president has done a particularly good job.
And the media, I think, has done a particularly bad job in talking
about what is in this legislation.

Some members of the media may balk, but the way some outlets chose to
frame Sanders’s _Gazette-Mail_ op-ed very much affirmed his
grievance. And it’s hardly the first time the reconciliation fight
has been framed as pure spectacle, with the substantive political and
human dimensions substituted for horserace theatrics. As media critic
Adam Johnson noted
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earlier this month, major cable networks in particular have remained
largely uninterested in the actual contents of the reconciliation
package, preferring instead to wallow in a shallow “progressives
versus moderates” melodrama that, at times, has failed to take even
a perfunctory interest the legislative details of the bill.

Particularly emblematic of this approach is one October 2 discussion
between
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CNN’s Jake Tapper and correspondents Jeremy Diamond and Lauren Fox.
As Johnson noted
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of the roughly six minute segment:

Other than a single vague reference to “social safety net”
spending, none of them actually mention anything that is actually in
the bill. They discuss the matter for six whole minutes without
mentioning Pell Grants, housing vouchers, community college tuition,
dental and hearing coverage for seniors, expanded medicare coverage,
repairing run-down schools, school lunch for poor children, or
universal pre-K. The bill is just an abstraction—a vague “social
program” being pushed by left-wingers, the substance of which is
incidental. In lieu of examination of content, we get six minutes of
horse race and speculation about the near-term political stakes and
vague reference to “moderates” being “uncomfortable” with the
“high price tag.”

In correctly calling out the media for its shallow coverage and then
publishing an op-ed in a West Virginia newspaper, Sanders has once
again violated the cherished norms of Beltway political etiquette. But
the Vermont senator is, as usual, giving a masterclass in how politics
can and should be practiced if the actual goal is to pass real
legislation which even begins to meet the urgency of the moment and
benefits ordinary people. In bypassing the theatrics of DC elite
brokerage and making good faith policy arguments addressed directly to
the electorate, he’s also pursuing a coherent and straightforward
strategy — an approach apparently outside the comprehension of many
of his critics.

In a properly functioning democracy, staking out clear positions and
trying to rally popular support behind them wouldn’t be considered a
fringe political style or an act beyond the bounds of political
decency. Then again, in a properly functioning democracy, a coal baron
senator wouldn’t be able to hold the future of the planet hostage at
the behest
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of corporate donors and oligarchs.

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