David Sirota has a way of thinking about Bernie Sanders’ career that he’s been kicking around for years. Sirota worked for Sanders in the House in the late 1990s and again on his 2020 presidential campaign, serving as a senior adviser and speechwriter for the progressive champion. And more than a decade after Sanders launched his first presidential run, improbably transforming from Vermont’s independent gadfly senator into an insurgent political rock star, Sirota has settled on a surprising historical analog for his old boss. “Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party could be Barry Goldwater to the Republican Party,” Sirota told me earlier this year. “That’s how I’ve thought about him for a very long time.” Goldwater was a firebrand with a crystal-clear ideology, hard right in his case, who seized his party's presidential nomination in 1964 and lost the election — only to see one of his star campaign surrogates and ideological torch carriers, Ronald Reagan, go on to win the White House 16 years later and preside over a conservative realignment. “If 2016 is Bernie's 1964,” Sirota said, “we’re 10 years into that trajectory.” It is a literary, almost biblical, framing of Sanders’ career: the prophet who toils for years but never gets to the promised land himself. Just don’t ask Sanders about it. “It’s interesting,” Sanders told me when I asked about Sirota’s analogy, in a way that meant he didn’t find it interesting at all. “But you know what? It’s not something I stay up nights thinking about.” What Sanders has been up thinking about is ensuring the movement he jumpstarted, and most importantly its policy agenda, has been winning primaries across the country — and right now, that fight is going better than it ever has. As the 2026 midterm primary season wraps up, it has already produced a wave of astonishing progressive victories: insurgents ousting incumbents, first-time candidates toppling the party’s stalwarts and democratic socialists winning in states the establishment swore they couldn’t. Much of the credit for this string of political success belongs to Sanders, who turns 85 in the coming days and has spent the last year campaigning like he’s 35. Since the start of last year’s “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, Sanders has spoken at 63 rallies and events to more than 300,000 people around the country. He has endorsed more than 90 candidates up and down the ballot this cycle, from the… [TheTopNews] Read More.
3 weeks ago
