BERNIE FROM A CRITICAL DISTANCE

I admit it.

I have never been enamored of Bernie Sanders.

Trying to soften a critique on what I thought to be his grandiose, almost messianic self-identity, I did once write that "Bernie is a good guy" (gender neutral). I would not now retract that assessment, but it would be far more qualified than it was then.

Of course, before his presidential primary run, there had been no reason to care one way or another about Bernie. He was just a name. He was just another politician who claimed to be for "the working man" though he had never lived the life of a "working man"---he's a professional politician, folks, having enjoyed The Man's paychecks and The Man's perks for over thirty years.

There is a reason why Bernie Sanders was just a name to most of us.

Having researched his record (finding, among other things, that he voted five times against passage of the Brady Bill), I found that those legislators, congressional observers and media members who characterize it as "vanilla," "unremarkable" and "notably lacking" are, well, absolutely right.

Bernie famously claims that he has been effective through "the amendment process," which, to be kind, is a novel way of justifying one's back-bench lack of achievement. Were I him, I would delete that phrase from my bio as well as my personal lexicon.

The absence of significant, real-time, real-world legislation authored and shepherded through the legislative process by his office partly explains his paucity of achievement.

A former colleague who wished to remain anonymous says that "Bernie was more interested in standing outside using a megaphone to 'rail against the establishment' than quietly and behind the scenes trying to actually do anything about 'the establishment' against which he railed." Another of his peers put it less delicately: "He seemed content to just 'pee into the wind' as opposed to accomplishing anything. The first requires only telling an aide to take your trousers to the cleaners. The second requires real work."

His negotiating style, characterized as a combination of "bullying" and "my way or the highway," has not helped.

Building a meaningful legislative record requires that one be collegial, something Bernie is described by peers as being anything but. Words and phrases such as "moody," "prickly," "angry," "argumentative," "hard to deal with" and "hard to get along with" seem, instead, to be the modifiers most commonly linked with his name. Indeed, I have never seen his name used in the same sentence with the word "collegial" unless the latter was immediately preceded by the word "not."

All of this taken together, the sense of those with whom he works---to the extent he actually works with anyone---seems to run along the lines of Bernie not being a very successful legislator because "in the end, Bernie is all about Bernie."

His promise to always be a "straight-shooter" has been badly compromised by his use and misuse of the Democratic Party---a relationship defined not by mutuality but by "Bernie [being] all about Bernie."

The fact is that Bernie is not a Democrat. He is an Independent. His 15-minute career as a Democrat owes not to party loyalty but to the essentials that running a national presidential primary campaign requires: The machinery, money, support and Rolodex that can be acquired only through a national party.

His loyalty to the Democratic Party is nil. He has no history of providing the party anything more than his vote (notably excepting the Brady Bill). Even as a presidential primary candidate given access by the good graces of the Democratic Party to the essentials required for such a run, he has offered in return no more than nickel-and-dime support to a grand total of three down-ballot Democrats (two of whom support him and one who is running a primary campaign against his favorite punching bag, DNC Chair Susan Wasserman Schultz). And he won no friends with his incomprehensible snark that Hillary Clinton's generous financial support to down-ballot candidates---she helped finance Bernie's initial Senate run, by the way---amounted to what he termed "money laundering."

Huh?

He grandiosely suggests that his 15-minute career as a Democrat gives him the juice to demand---in a most public, arrogant and unseemly way---that Ms. Wasserman Schultz resign, though she does more for the party in a week than Bernie will do in a lifetime.

He excoriated the party for super-delegates being part of the nomination process until they were his only, long-shot hope for winning. Suddenly, he and his obnoxious comic-book salesman turned campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, were courting them. When they didn't respond to his appeals, however, he was once again calling for their part in the nominating process to be deleted.

There have even been carefully-worded insinuations that, if particular demands weren't met to his satisfaction, he would not be offering a full-throated endorsement of Secretary Clinton. And would not be suggesting that his army of "revolutionaries" support her in the general election. Much to the consternation even of members of his own inner circle, by the way, his threat to withhold his imprimatur continues.

And who told Bernie that losing in the primary process gives one the right to control the platform committee at the national convention? When did that become a consolation prize? Or is it that Jeff and Jane---Bernie's wife who can't seem to find the time to click the "Submit" button on the Turbo Tax website so that we could see their last ten years of returns---haven't yet told Bernie that he lost?

At the end of the day, however, it is his policy proposals more than his legislative record or personality or lack of loyalty to anyone or anything other than himself that have most tipped the scales for me per the relative legitimacy of his campaign.

Bernie Bro's occasionally call his collective policies the "Handbook for the Revolution." However, upon close inspection of those policy proposals, one can make---and a number of people have made---the case that they are less a road map to "The Revolution" than rewrites of 1990's liberalism---Mark Schmitt of the NYTimes terms them a "Windows 95 version of progressive politics."

"Reducing Economic Inequality," "Free Tuition for All," "Break Up the Big Banks" and "Universal, Single-Payer Healthcare" are all admirable starting points for desperately needed and well-intended policies.

But a deep-dive into Bernie's signature policies reveals that his iterations of them are neither well thought-out nor well-detailed.

They tend to be "all-or-nothing"/"all-at-once" proposals that are not only dated but absurdly simplistic (e.g., the minimum wage is certainly part of the inequality discussion, as is tax reform, but has Bernie never heard of the gig economy?).

Their composition reflects Bernie's fatal disdain for the tough work of pushing legislation through Congress---particularly as it is presently constituted. And they betray his disregard for incremental gains, his lack of patience with discussions per economic sustainability and his sloppy/disinterested approach to gaming out policy proposals (e.g., Just what are the financial/cultural/social implications of these incredibly far-reaching programs that are painted with an incredibly broad brush?).

Having put Bernie on a skewer, however, does not mean I think his campaign has been devoid of positive significance for the country. He has done us all a real service by tapping into a river of both free-floating and targeted anger, frustration and resentment that defies age, gender, regional, cultural or racial boundaries and was flowing unseen, unheard and underground until a rumpled, 74 year-old, little-known white guy from Vermont opened the spillways full-bore a year or so ago.

Indeed, it is at their own peril that those on the cusp of leadership ignore the sounds emanating from that river or, for that matter, don't bother to go for a swim in it themselves just to see what all the fuss is about.

They will find that all the fuss is about the direction the country has been heading and the changes in direction being demanded by those who have had the least voice in determining that direction but have been most affected by it. They will, in other words, find that the latter want a lot more of the former. A. Lot. More.