The book is Outsider in the White House, written by Bernie Sanders with Huck Gutman and an afterward by John Nichols.
Months ago I had made one of my many donations to Bernie’s campaign and this time I was told via the tubez that I’d get a free copy of this book with my donation.
I waited for the book to arrive, then time passed and I forgot about it.
Last week the book arrived and I read the whole thing through practically at one sitting.
The book begins:
November 5, 1996. We won. Blowout. By 7:30 p.m., only half an hour after the polls close, the Associated Press, based on exit polls, says that we will win and win big.
The town-by-town election results are coming in by phone and over the radio. …
Bernie is describing his 1996 Congressional race, in the era of Newt Gingrich and his merry band of Contractors.
The book flashes forward and back, from the immediacy of the “now as it is happening”-tense style of its opening lines to more traditional types of time sense.
What impressed me the most about this book is the sanity of it.
That sanity produces an expansion of the mind, almost as though the mind can breathe again, that is, if minds could breathe.
Bernie goes into the nuts and bolts of legislating and finding a place for himself as an Independent and as a Progressive in a Congress that had pulled both major parties to the right.
He describes the legislative struggle over the issue of Lockheed-Martin:
Force a vote, so that the public can see the position of their representatives, and often the common good will prevail. This is what happened, to my great surprise, with an amendment I introduced in September 1995, seeking to eliminate outrageous corporate bonuses at Lockheed-Martin.
One of Burlington’s largest employers was Martin Marietta. When the defense contractor merged with Lockheed to form Lockheed-Martin, I was more than usually attuned to the implications of that deal — the down-sizing of 17,000 American workers. For making the “tough decision” to fire all those workers, the executives of the newly merged company decided to pay themselves $91 million in executive bonuses. Ninety-one million dollars as a reward for obliterating 17,000 jobs.
Bernie goes on to detail, step by step, the intricacies of legislating Progressively. He also gained some insight on his role as an Independent in Congress insofar as what he contributed to this process:
By developing that amendment, I touched on a major issue that had been well hidden, and that had apparently never before been discussed on the floor of the House. To my mind, I was doing what, as an Independent, I had been elected to do. I have come to understand that one of the most important roles I can play in Congress is to raise issues that, for a variety of reasons, other people choose not to deal with. Just shifting the framework of debate can have enormous consequences.
There’s a yuuuuuge number of wonderful passages in the book that are as wise and compassionate as we see when we watch Bernie speak in front of The People (that would be us, in case you are wondering).
There’s an element of Bernie’s style that is just plain educational. He uses repetition in a very effective manner, to the point where thousands of people can now finish his sentences. And what sentences! “Enough is Enough.” “Congress Doesn’t Regulate Wall Street, Wall Street Regulates Congress!” It’s a very basic educational tool that works particularly to cut through the years of conditioning so many of us have suffered through with our present Corporate Establishment.
This book gets a recommend from me.