How 3 Vehement Bernie Backers Made Their Peace With Biden
By: Andrea González-Ramírez
Tags: Politics, Election 2020, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Policy

How 3 Vehement Bernie Backers Made Their Peace With Biden

The Biden-Sanders task forces could be their only opportunity to craft policy from the inside in the next four years

Photo: Mandel Ngan/Getty Images

For Bernie Sanders’ fiercest supporters, the end of his presidential bid last month did not mean the demise of “not me, us,” the community-rallying cry of the Vermont senator’s campaign and movement. But that message is now being put to the test, as they confront how to either support former Vice President Joe Biden, whose policy positions they mostly abhor, or continue fighting for their priorities without making an alliance with the man now leading presidential polls. A group of 18 progressive activists and Sanders supporters have chosen peace, accepting appointments to Biden-Sanders “unity task forces” on six issues: climate change, criminal justice reform, the economy, education, health care, and immigration. Sanders handpicked three members for each panel, and personally asked them to participate.

Those who joined the task forces have had to come to terms with helping a candidate who they openly railed against for months.

“I think [Sanders] is right to bring a lot of what he has built to the Biden movement and say, ‘Listen, you won the primary, but you may not have won the war of ideas,’” said Abdul El-Sayed, a physician and former Michigan gubernatorial candidate whom Sanders appointed to the unity health care panel. “So how do we empower the Democratic Party nominee to have the best ideas going forward, most importantly, to heal and rebuild this country, but then also to win in November?”

El-Sayed is not under any illusions that Biden’s final platform would look like the progressive agenda he has been fighting for, but he thinks Sanders supporters must try anyway. “Even if you can’t score a touchdown — I’m going to use a football analogy — you should take the field goal,” he said. “And then come back the next drive and try to score a touchdown.”

There’s a sector of the movement that has viewed these unity efforts with cynicism, calling it a “show for the left.” Biden would never sign on to Medicare for All or tuition-free public college, for example. Why should the movement be comfortable with settling for anything less than that? The Biden-resistant position comes from a deep distrust of the party establishment and its approach to some of the nation’s most urgent issues. What is the point of coming to the table when you believe the table is irreparably broken?

Darrick Hamilton from Ohio State University, who joined the economy task force, has battled with those feelings but said that he would be a hypocrite if he did not take this opportunity to try to influence Biden. “I have a moral responsibility to engage, grounded in my values, and bring about an agenda that will be more economically inclusive, civically engaged, and socially equitable,” he said.

Would he have preferred if this agenda happened under Sanders as the Democratic nominee? Absolutely. But with the threat of another four years of a Trump presidency, Hamilton said he understands the stakes. “I’m not into settling either,” he said. “The extent to which we can bring about, in a persuasive way, a transformative economy that is authentically grounded in a government using its public power to facilitate its people to be their best selves — that’s what I hope the voters see as the potential [of these panels].”

Stacey Walker, chairman of the Linn County Board of Supervisors and co-chair of Sanders’ campaign in Iowa, views his decision to be in the criminal justice reform task force as a matter of pragmatism vs. idealism. “We can be upset and let that feeling of disappointment and angst just completely remove us from the process altogether, or we can be upset and channel that energy to do something constructive,” he said. “As a policymaker in the middle of the country, in a predominantly white space, advocating on behalf of all minority groups here and taking an interest in criminal justice reform, that means doing the best I can to advance Sen. Sanders’ ideas so that they make it into the Democratic platform and the vice president’s policy positions in the general election.”

How successful these conversations will end up being remains to be seen. There’s the chance that progressives will walk away from these panels without obtaining any concessions, and the whole thing ends up being an empty gesture from the Biden team, as cynics believe. But a window has opened — maybe the only one in the next four years — for them to weigh in on Democrats’ policy agenda from the inside and push the party to the left.

“Joe Biden didn’t have to do this. It is a credit to our movement that he did,” El-Sayed said. “Now, the responsibility we have is to make it mean something, right? You’re the reason we have a seat at the table, now let’s make our seat at the table count.”