"Bernie Sanders Is More Ogre Than Prince," Frank Bruni

Bernie Sanders during last night’s debate.Patrick Semansky/Associated Press

Bernie Sanders Is More Ogre Than Prince

By Frank Bruni Opinion Columnist

“Nobody likes him.” “Nobody wants to work with him.” When Hillary Clinton’s withering statements about Bernie Sanders were reported last month, many people interpreted them as sour grapes — as the fruit of her resentment that he bruised her during the 2016 Democratic primary and didn’t do more to help her in the general election.

But while her words were uncharitable and unnecessary, they spoke to a wider truth about Sanders that didn’t get all that much attention four years ago and hasn’t been widely discussed this time around, either: He isn’t and has never been popular with his Democratic colleagues in the Senate. Clinton would know that firsthand because she served with him there. I know that because I’ve heard some of those colleagues talk about him, describing him as arrogant, uncooperative, unyielding, even mean. One of them once joked that he was the Democrats’ Ted Cruz.

I mention that not in the interest of reviewing his legislative career or assessing his personality. I’m intrigued by the way in which his political success — he is indisputably the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination — contradicts bromides about the importance, professionally, of making friends and using honey instead of vinegar. Sanders didn’t do that. And neither did Donald Trump on his path to the presidency.

While they’re very different men with very different values, they both demonstrate that personal charm, kindness and the regard of your peers matter less in politics than does the power of your pitch or, to use the lingo that my fellow Times columnist David Brooks did recently, the resonance of your myth.

If you’re telling a story and making a case that enough voters strongly connect with, you can be abrasive. You can have many episodes in your past that don’t square with most Americans’ sensibilities. You can be a thrice-married, trash-talking showman with bankruptcies, lawsuits and all manner of other messiness in your wake. Or you can be a 78-year-old who honeymooned in the Soviet Union, had a heart attack just last year and has not been as forthcoming with your medical records as you pledged to be.

Again, I’m not equating Trump and Sanders, to whom that would be grossly unfair. I’m noting how flawed conventional wisdom is and how Trump first and then Sanders exposed that. We journalists should never again write that someone is too old, too young, too polarizing, too petty, too cranky or too whatever to win an election. We should listen to what he or she is saying and then analyze, with an open mind, how it’s being heard.

Trump told voters that arrogant elites were ignoring their struggles and even contemptuous of them, and while many of those voters didn’t admire him personally, they thrilled to that message and how he delivered it. Sanders is telling voters that America has become a sort of oligarchy in which affluent citizens exploit poorer ones, and while many voters aren’t lining up to have a beer with him, they’re thirsty for — and sated by — that narrative.

We in the media too often cover politics as if it’s all about personality, but the ascents of Trump and Sanders have more to do with ideas — with arguments, perspectives, lenses for looking at America. If you have a seductive one, you needn’t be a storybook seducer. You can even be more ogre than prince.

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