On the Doorsteps of the Iowans, part 2

Bernie’s slogan, “Not Me. Us.” reflects not only his altruistic appeal to something beyond one’s immediate self-interest, a refreshing contrast from the standard campaign query, "Are you better off now than four years ago?" Wow, it really is possible to think about what happens to other people instead of just yourself and your own brood—who knew?
But his slogan also highlights the long-term strategy that he’s been promoting incessantly for four—and probably forty—years: change doesn’t come at the voting booth but through the mobilization of millions of people to demand it. Bernie’s under no illusion about the difficulties of ramming his neo-New Deal program through a recalcitrant Congress comprised of billionaires’ toadies and hired guns serving the war profiteers and financier class.

The only antidote is a vast army of citizen advocates ready to push relentlessly for his radical vision, and that’s what is on display in Iowa this month. While doing our rounds with our canvassing app, rousing Iowans from their warm living rooms to stand on the doorstep in single-digit weather, we occasionally saw organizers from the other campaigns. But I seriously doubt Pete or Amy or Warren had busloads of eager 20-somethings pouring in from Chicago and St Louis like the one that joined me last weekend in Muscatine across the Mississippi River from Illinois. They had heard his message, and they are alert enough to realize that this movement is the only way they are likely to have a living-wage job, a domicile, a life.

Obama said the same thing in 2008, touting OFA (Obama for America) as a permanent vehicle for grassroots involvement. That was, as a polite Spanish-speaker would say, “short of the truth.” After we volunteers met and formulated our vision of his first term’s program and our role in it, we never heard back.

In their rare idle moments, Bernie’s staffers explained that our door-knocking shifts were building the database not just for his election but precisely for this post-electoral function, the issue-based mobilizations to come, together with the state and local races of 2022 and beyond. Every hint of data about a voter’s concerns is campaign gold to be mined later for spin-off groups like Sunrise, Fight for $15, Justice Democrats, and others yet to be born.

Bernie is tied up most days in Washington with the impeachment trial, so stand-ins Michael Moore and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez headlined a rally in a packed Iowa City auditorium. Fox News noted suspiciously that AOC never mentioned Bernie’s name in her remarks, but building a cult of personality is antithetical to the Bernie message.

Canvassing is unavoidably manipulative as one learns the subtle techniques of getting people to see things from your point of view. But politics is persuasion, and our Bernie platoons are up against billions of advertising dollars trying to tilt people in the opposite direction. I had a number of meaningful discussions with open-minded Iowans and enjoyed the chance to meet them literally on their doorsteps as fellow citizens determined to exercise a civic function based on sober thought and reflection. After drawing out their primary issues of interest, I learned to offer them my point of view by saying, “Would you like to know why I came out here all the way from New York to speak to you?” One head of a four-voter household said my visit would be the topic of their dinner-table conversation.

Mind you, most people either were not in, not eager to be interrupted, favored other candidates, hadn’t thought about it, or didn’t intend to. In a three-hour shift, one was lucky to get in two of these front-porch chats and maybe another couple of doubters tilted into the Bernie column. One of my first encounters was with a young guy who had just moved into the apartment and wasn’t listed as a registered voter. (Iowans can register on the same day of the caucus.) “You’re the third Bernie person to come by, so I guess I’ll have to have a look at what he says,” he told me. Persistence pays off.

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Despite these low percentages, experts assured us that the strategy works to build support, and Bernie’s canvassing operation is crushing the field—130,000 doors knocked last weekend alone. If he continues to cruise ahead and scores a solid victory, one of the main arguments against him will be seriously undermined: electability. My interlocutors often commented that Sanders might not have broad appeal for a variety of reasons. But curiously, they never referred in such terms to themselves—people almost universally said they liked or respected Bernie—but rather to the anonymous average voter out there somewhere. If Iowans show that entirely typical Americans from the quintessentially middle ground are ready for a guy who calls himself a socialist, the following dominoes could fall, just as they did a while back for a black dude with an Arabic middle name.