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

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

Last week, Sanders bluntly warned that the Gaza crisis could be Biden’s “Vietnam,” and invoked President Lyndon B. Johnson’s decision not to run for re-election as the country was in turmoil over his support for that war.

That’s Bernie Sanders’ political divide when it comes to Joe Biden. They are two octogenarians who share a bond that was forged during a hard-fought 2020 primary and strengthened by the policy achievements of the past three years.

Now, in this election year, Sanders will be Biden’s most powerful emissary to progressives and younger voters — a job that will test the senator’s appeal among the sectors of the Democratic Party most disillusioned with the president and his policies, especially regarding to Gaza.

Privately, Sanders has been less enthusiastic in recent days about making political arguments on Biden’s behalf as the Gaza crisis worsened, according to a person familiar with Sanders’ sentiments. Still, Sanders remains adamant that the specter of Trump’s return to the Oval Office poses too serious a threat, insisting 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 particularly excited about Biden for a number of reasons, and I understand that. And I absolutely disagree with him, especially when it comes to what’s happening in Gaza,” Sanders said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

But Sanders continued: “You have to have a certain maturity when you’re dealing with politics and that means 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 let that other person win.”

That will be the thrust of Sanders’ message in November, even as progressive furor over Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza continues to escalate, protests continue to rage and Sanders’ own criticism of the administration’s policies sharpens.

“He’s not trimming the sails on Gaza because of Biden,” said Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., who succeeded Sanders in the House of Representatives and joined him in the Senate last year. “Bernie’s credibility is that he has maintained his solid positions, and then he argues 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 put together a half-dozen policy task forces that supported the party’s policy platform later that year — an unusual undertaking that helped galvanize Democratic Socialist supporters into to Biden’s lap.

That laid the groundwork for a burst of ambitious policymaking 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 hodgepodge of longstanding Democratic priorities , including cheaper recipes. medications for Medicare beneficiaries. Sanders, who as head of the Senate Budget Committee helped draft those blueprints, was directly encouraged by Biden to go big on those proposals, with assurances that the president had his back.

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

Sanders, like many others who support Biden’s domestic achievements, believes there is still a lack of public awareness. He was the one who approached White House officials about hosting an event specifically to highlight the reduction in the cost of inhalers.

More than three years into Biden’s term, Sanders’ ties run deep throughout the West Wing. He talks regularly not only to the president but also to 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 his words,” Dunn said. “He’s very direct with us, quite blunt, 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 after the president made it official last April. It was an unmistakable signal to his supporters that, despite all doubts, it was imperative to support Biden without hesitation.

Still, some Democrats worry that anger among progressives over Gaza is so deep that even Sanders cannot convince them to support Biden. A persistent bloc of voters in multiple primaries continues to choose “uncommitted” or some variation to protest Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war, at times far exceeding Biden’s margin of victory in those same states in the 2020 general election .

In early April, for example, more than 48,000 people voted “uninstructed” in Wisconsin’s Democratic primary, which was more than the roughly 20,700 votes by which Biden surpassed Trump in the battleground state four years ago. This year’s Wisconsin primaries came three weeks after Biden had already clinched the nomination.

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

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

But it is not only on Gaza that Sanders is putting pressure on Biden and his aides. He is urging them to change the campaign strategy to not only contrast Biden with Trump, but 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 road map for his second term, was a “general start,” Sanders said, but he added that Biden must do more to inspire voters.

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

Biden’s aides point to specific proposals released around the State of the Union, such as a comprehensive housing plan that would build or preserve two million homes. Sanders is also now working with the White House to develop new health care legislation that would expand the $2,000 annual limit on prescription costs that the Inflation Reduction Act provided to seniors on Medicare to all Americans.

Biden doesn’t hesitate to point out where he’ll part ways with Sanders if he gets the chance.

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

Still, top advisers to the president, long a staunch supporter of the Democratic center-left, and Sanders, the undisputed leader of the party’s progressive wing, say the two men have more traits in common than their ideological positions might suggest.

First, they both believe that government should be a force for good. Their political careers have been anchored in small, sparsely populated states, exposing them to the most hyper-local and grassroots politics. They have a sense of pragmatism about working within the realities of the political system, even as Sanders tries to push those boundaries and Biden reigns within them.

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

“I know he felt that even though there was a lot of animosity within the Democratic Party and at the highest levels … he felt warmth and positivity with Joe Biden,” said Faiz Shakir, who was campaign manager for Sanders’ 2020 campaign and is still a leader. close political advisor.

Even as the 2020 debates were hotly contested, Biden and Sanders never let the disputes get personal. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., another Sanders national co-chair in 2020, recalled that when some of his aides wanted to violently attack Biden in personal terms, the senator would respond, “Absolutely not.”

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

The Biden campaign has made clear to Sanders’ political team that they want him as involved as possible, viewing his longstanding ties to key voting blocs as an asset. Because Sanders campaigned for Biden four years ago, the reelection team also knows specifically how Sanders would be most helpful to Biden.

For example, it wouldn’t be a surprise if Sanders were sent again to Michigan, where he championed Biden in October 2020, or to union halls to energize working-class voters.

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

For his part, Sanders is still grappling with how exactly he can be most effective as a campaigner this fall and how best to target the audience that most needs his case for Biden, according to aides.

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

“I consider this a hugely important election that I will not sit out in any case,” he added. “I will be active.”

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