Bernie Sanders says Gaza could be Joe Biden’s Vietnam. But he’s ready to fight for Biden over Trump

WASHINGTON – In April, Bernie Sanders repeatedly stood shoulder to shoulder with President Joe Biden, touting their joint achievements on health care and climate at formal White House events while eviscerating Donald Trump in a widely seen campaign video on TikTok.

Then, last week, Sanders warned bluntly that the crisis in Gaza could be Biden’s “Vietnam” and invoking President Lyndon B. Johnson’s decision not to run for re-election as the nation was in uproar over his support for this war.

Such is the political dichotomy of Bernie Sanders when it comes to Joe Biden. They are two octogenarians who share a bond that was forged through a difficult primary in 2020 and strengthened through political achievements in the last three years.

Now, in this election year, Sanders will be Biden’s most powerful emissary among progressive and younger voters – a task that will test the senator’s influence among sectors of the Democratic Party most disillusioned with the president and his policies, especially in Gaza.

Privately, Sanders has felt less enthusiastic in recent days about defending the policy position on Biden’s behalf as the Gaza crisis has worsened, according to a person familiar with Sanders’ feelings. Still, Sanders remains adamant that the specter of Trump’s return to the Oval Office is too serious a threat and stresses that “this election is not between Joe Biden and God. It’s between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.”

“I understand that a lot of people in this country are not at all enthusiastic about Biden for a number of reasons and I understand that. And I strongly disagree with him, especially when it comes to Gaza,” Sanders said in a recent interview with the Associated Press.

But Sanders continued: “You have to have a certain maturity when it comes to politics and yes, you can disagree with someone. That doesn’t mean you can vote for someone else who could be the most dangerous person in American history, or not vote and allow this other guy to win.”

That will be the thrust of the message Sanders delivers throughout November, even as the progressive furor over Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza continues to escalate, protests continue to fester, and Sanders’ own criticism of the administration’s policy becomes more forceful.

“He’s not lowering his sails on Gaza because of Biden,” said Senator Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont, who succeeded Sanders in the House and joined him in the Senate last year. “Bernie’s credibility is that he has stood by his strong positions and will then make the case for why, Biden versus Trump.”

Few can doubt Sanders’ influence during Biden’s presidency. Once rivals for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, the two men later joined forces to bring together a half-dozen policy task forces that underpinned the party’s policy platform later that year — an unusual effort that helped bring Democratic socialist supporters to the Biden group.

That laid the groundwork for an explosion of ambitious policies in the first two years of the Biden administration, from a sweeping $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package in early 2021 to legislation in the summer of 2022 that was a mixed bag of priorities. Longtime Democrats, including cheaper medications for Medicare beneficiaries. Sanders, who helped craft these plans as head of the Senate Budget Committee, was directly encouraged by Biden to advance these proposals, with the assurance that the president would support him.

“You and I have been fighting this for 25 years,” Biden told Sanders admiringly at their joint health care event in April. “Finally, we finally beat Big Pharma. Finally.”

Sanders, like many others who support Biden’s domestic achievements, believes the public is still unaware of them. He was the one who approached White House officials about holding an event specifically to highlight the falling cost of inhalers.

More than three years into Biden’s term, Sanders’ connections throughout the West Wing run deep. He speaks regularly not only with the president but also with his top aides, including White House chief of staff Jeff Zients, senior adviser Anita Dunn and national security adviser Jake Sullivan.

“He doesn’t mince words,” Dunn said. “He’s very direct with us, very direct, and that’s a good thing.”

It took just hours for Sanders, who announced his own re-election bid on Monday, to endorse Biden’s campaign once the president made it official last April. It was an unmistakable signal to his supporters that, despite any doubts, it was imperative to support Biden without hesitation.

However, some Democrats are concerned that anger among progressives over Gaza is so deep that not even Sanders can persuade them to support Biden. A persistent bloc of voters in multiple primaries continues to choose “uncommitted” or a variant to protest Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war, sometimes far surpassing Biden’s margin of victory in those same states in the 2010 general election. 2020.

For example, more than 48,000 voted “uneducated” in the Wisconsin Democratic primary in early April, which surpassed the roughly 20,700 votes by which Biden overtook Trump, a Republican, in the swing state four years ago. This year’s Wisconsin primary took place three weeks after Biden had already clinched the nomination.

“This campaign is in trouble. And Senator Sanders will do everything — again, everything — he can to try to get this man to the finish line,” said Nina Turner, who was national co-chair of Sanders’ 2020 campaign. “I’m not so sure it’s going to work this time.” .”

Mitch Landrieu, national co-chair of Biden’s campaign, told CNN that Sanders’ comparisons to the Vietnam War were an “excessive exaggeration.” A March poll by the Harvard Institute of Politics found that 18- to 29-year-olds were less likely to say that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was the national issue that most concerned them, compared with issues such as the economy, immigration and abortion.

But it’s not just in Gaza that Sanders has been putting pressure on Biden and his advisers. He is urging them to change their campaign strategy to not only contrast Biden with Trump, but also to set ambitious goals on health care, education, child care and workers’ rights.

Biden’s State of the Union address, which his advisers point to as a roadmap for his second term, was a “general start,” Sanders said, but added that Biden must do more to inspire voters.

“What I told the White House is that it’s not enough to just talk about Donald Trump,” Sanders said in the interview. “It’s not enough to talk about your accomplishments, which I have. You need to have a bold agenda for the future.”

Biden aides point to specific proposals released around the State of the Union, such as an expansive housing plan that would build or preserve two million homes. Sanders is also now developing new health care legislation with the White House that would extend to all Americans the $2,000 annual limit on prescription costs that the Inflation Reduction Act provides for seniors who benefit from the Medicare.

Biden doesn’t hesitate to point out where he breaks with Sanders when he gets the chance.

“I like him, but I’m not Bernie Sanders. I’m not a socialist,” Biden said in January 2022. “I’m a traditional Democrat.”

Yet top advisers to the president, long a supporter of the center-left Democrats, and Sanders, the undisputed leader of the party’s progressive wing, say the two men share more characteristics than their ideological positions might indicate.

On the one hand, both have the fundamental belief that government should be a force for good. Their political careers are anchored in small, sparsely populated states that have exposed them to more hyperlocal and grassroots politics. They have a sense of pragmatism in working within the realities of the political system, even as Sanders works to push past those limits and Biden governs within them.

Biden, as vice president, was the rare establishment Democrat who warmed to Sanders during the senator’s first presidential run. He invited Sanders to the vice-presidential residence at the Naval Observatory to discuss his campaign and political ideas in 2015 — a time when tensions between Hillary Clinton’s coalition and Sanders’ rising wing were increasingly bitter.

“I know he felt that even though there was a lot of hostility within the Democratic Party and in the upper echelons…he felt the warmth and positivity of Joe Biden,” said Faiz Shakir, who served as Sanders’ 2020 campaign manager and remains a close political advisor.

Even though the 2020 debates were fiercely fought, Biden and Sanders never allowed the disputes to get personal. Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, another of Sanders’ national co-chairs in 2020, recalled that when some of his advisers wanted to forcefully attack Biden in personal terms, the senator responded: “Absolutely not.”

Now, Sanders is determined to make sure Trump doesn’t win again.

The Biden campaign has made it clear to Sanders’ political team that it wants him involved as much as possible, seeing his long-standing ties to key voting blocs as an advantage. Because Sanders campaigned for Biden four years ago, the reelection team also knows well, specifically, how Sanders would be most useful to Biden.

It wouldn’t be a surprise, for example, if Sanders were again sent to Michigan, where he stumbled over Biden in October 2020, or to union meetings to energize working-class voters.

“He knows himself, his team knows him and we know what worked,” said Carla Frank, director of surrogate operations for the Biden campaign.

For his part, Sanders is still grappling with exactly how he can be most effective as an activist this fall and how he can best reach the audiences who most need to hear his defense of Biden, according to aides.

But “I intend to be aggressive,” Sanders said.

“I see this as an extremely important election and one that I will not stay away from,” he added. “I will be active.”

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Associated Press writer Lisa Rathke in Marshfield, Vermont, contributed to this report.