Commentary
Photo by Michael Vadon
Photo by Michael Vadon

Bernie's Bogus Numbers

by / Mar. 8, 2016 6pm EST

 1. Tim Hardin’s song “Don’t Make Promises” 

I like nearly everything Bernie Sanders says, except for one thing: He is making promises he cannot keep. He has been in Congress since 1991, so he must be aware of that. If he isn’t talking about it, it is because he has chosen not to talk about it.

He talks about the various ills in American society and a plethora of programs he is going to initiate. He’s right about the ills, and the programs are all wonderful. Healthcare for all, free education for all: wonderful.

But I think about the real world in which a US president functions and I want to put on that old Tim Hardin song with the chorus line, “Don’t make promises that you can’t keep.” 

Sometimes I do put it on. It’s on YouTube. You can put it on, too

 2. “Bernout” mail 

Bernout: Why I’m Supporting Hillary Now,” my opinion essay in the February 17 edition of The Public, generated more than 119,000 reads averaging 12 minutes. The essay was short, so that average reading time indicates visitors to the site were reading not only the article but the comments on it.

There were (the last time I checked), 234 comments, plus another 600 or so in strings commenting on those comments. Clearly this is a Democratic primary about which voters care deeply and passionately. 

Many of the comments posted to The Public website agreed with me: that despite the wild accusations mounted by Republicans over the years, Hillary Clinton is the candidate who, as president, is more likely to accomplish more for us, domestically and internationally. Nearly as many disagreed with me: They found Bernie Sanders the preferable candidate. But not for the same reasons: They focused, mostly, on his promises, not on the likelihood of his fulfilling them.

Some people posting comments seemed to hate Hillary because she was a woman or because she didn’t divorce Bill. “Nicholas Jay (Vibes at Aurize)” wrote: “Lol so instead of supporting a genuine human being you vote for a lying bitch…How many fucking scandals ae enough for you? Fuck off Bruce Jackson with your article paid for by HRC. You are a pussy. You grew up in BK? Doesn’t sound like it.”

He wasn’t the only one to attack Clinton or me personally. “Wade Lawson” wrote, “Hillary loves blood and endless war.” And “Jerrica Nach (Belleville, New Jersey)” wrote, “Fuck Hillary and FUCK YOU!” 

Some found Hillary unsuitable because, over the past three decades, Republicans had raised questions about her. Questions are not answers; they are only questions. Questions are things like, “If the government did not plant explosives in the World Trade Center, why did it go down?” “If God does not exist, why are there stars in the sky?” “If there are no ghosts, why do unseen things make noises in the night?” Yes, it is possible that there were explosives in the World Trade Center, that God exists, that ghosts roam the land. But those questions are not evidence of any of those things. They are evidence only of questions that cannot be answered, have not been answered, or have not been answered to the questioner’s satisfaction. 

Some went after Hillary using guilt by association: She talks to Henry Kissinger, therefore she is as guilty as he, whatever he might be guilty of; she got money from Wall Street for lectures, therefore she is in the pocket of Wall Street. No one offered any evidence addressing either of these accusations; they were just accusations, mostly guilt by association, the same sort of thing the Republicans have been tossing at the Clintons and Obama for a very long time. (The sad part, for me, was to see some Democrats seduced by and sucked into that relentless campaign of innuendo.)

Some faulted her for praising Obama and linking herself to his administration. Well, she was his secretary of state. A lot of people think he has been a very good president, especially considering the relentless Republican opposition to anything his administration proposes and the shameless racism undergirding much of that opposition. Why shouldn’t Hillary Clinton be proud of having been part of Barack Obama’s administration? 

(I’ve long thought two things cost Al Gore the 2000 election. One was the Republican Supreme Court, which gave Florida to George W. Bush. The other was Gore himself, who was so annoyed at Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky that he almost never referred in his campaign speeches to their mostly very good record. Bush talked about what he did in Texas; Gore went abstract about good government. It was as if he hadn’t had a job the previous seven years.)

About 50 of the comments were from someone signing himself “Dante D’Anthony (Film Producer at DreamTeller Studios).” A dream it might be: It doesn’t turn up in a Google search.

Some were totally off the wall, such as “Harry Davis (Works at Leslie Fiedler),” who wrote to complain that once, when he was trying to peddle an interview tape with my late friend Leslie Fiedler, I didn’t offer to buy it from him. 

But most went to the issues. If I read the comments right, most of those backing Hillary think she is a person of great experience who can get things done, and most of those backing Bernie think him a person of unimpeachable integrity whose driving issue—economic disparity—trumps all others. 

 3. That was then, this is now 

Several letters focused on specific votes each candidate had cast in Congress in years past and used those votes to endorse or condemn one of the candidates now. 

One long post said that, unlike Clinton, “Sanders has been nearly unequivocal in his opposition to the death penalty.” Clinton supports it in “extreme cases.” The Sanders “nearly” is a huge exception: He voted for the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, a bill that massively expanded the death penalty at the federal level to 60 offenses. There have been no other such sweeping death penalty laws coming before Congress during Sanders’s tenure there (or before). This is the one time he had a chance to say he was opposed to killing for a huge range of new reasons. He didn’t and voted yes.

Some writers faulted Hillary for voting for the Patriot Act, which Sanders opposed, and for voting for the Iraq War, which he also opposed. Others pointed out that he twice voted for regime change in Iraq and that he voted with Republicans in preventing the Centers for Disease Control from gathering information on firearms incidents. 

I kept wanting to say: “Get real. Anyone with a long career in Congress has voted for or against bills for a host of reasons not explained by a one-line summary of the bill.” 

Sometimes one votes because of bad data (who argues that the Bush administration lied going into Iraq?) or because there are other things tied to the bill that have nothing to do with it but which are of major importance. 

We could argue these “he voted” and “she voted” all day long and get nowhere: Nothing is that simple. As Octave says in Jean Renoir’s great film, The Rules of the Game, “The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.” 

Parsing old votes is an endless argument. For me, Sanders and Clinton are both good people who made hard choices on the bases of what seemed to make sense in those distant legislative moments, some of which we have the luxury of rethinking and judging now. That is fair to neither of them. 

What matters more is where the candidates are now and what we might realistically expect them to accomplish if elected. 

 4. Bernie’s numbers 

The single point in my criticism of Sanders that seems to have stung his supporters most was my saying he presented issues and named programs to deal with them, but said nothing about how he was going to move from the identification of social ills to the enactment of real solutions. 

Several people wrote to ask if I had looked at the page on Sanders’s website on which he says how he was going to pay for all his promises.

This was, I think, the most important question raised about my article. 

The answer is: Yes, I had looked at Bernie’s funding page. I have looked at it again after reading those emails.

I am not convinced by it. I read it and think: “This is like saying I am going to finance my grandchildren’s education by walking into the vault of the nearest bank and going home with a backpack full of money that will cover everything.” 

I can say that; doing it is more difficult. 

Likewise Bernie Sanders.

 5. Paying for it 

Sanders tells us what taxes he will impose, what loopholes he will close to generate the income for his programs. Fine ideas, all of them. If he could impose all those new taxes and close all those loopholes, he surely would have a huge amount of money with which to do good works, and we would be a better country, both for the closing of many of those loopholes and for the good works done with the money. If he had them, he could probably do all the good things he wants to and promises he will do.

The final page on his website—the one those critics of my essay incorrectly assumed I’d missed—is titled “How Bernie pays for his proposals.” If you’re reading this on the web click on that phrase and it will save you a lot of time, because it will take you directly to it. 

Beneath the page title are two columns. The left-hand column is the Plan; the right-hand column is the Payment

The Plan, for anyone to the left of Godzilla or the four Republican candidates for the nomination, is all wonderful: rebuild America, free college, expand Social Security, give a million kids jobs, provide at least 12 weeks of paid family leave to all workers, healthcare for everyone. And more.

And how will Sanders pay for it? 

The right-hand column says corporations will pay taxes on all profits, on- or off-shore; Wall Street will pay far more taxes than it now does; the cap on taxable income for Social Security will be obliterated; the inheritance artwork loophole will be abolished; the amount wage-earners pay for healthcare will be increased. There is more. Click on the link above and you can read it all.

That is where, for me, where Sanders’s promises morph into Sanders’s pipedreams. 

 6. Reality 

Two specific things stand in the way of Bernie Sanders keeping the promises he is making. 

The first is the Constitution of the United States. 

Article 1, Section 7, Clause 1, the so-called Origination Clause reads:

All bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose of concur with Amendments as on other Bills.

And Article 1, Section 8, Clause 1 reads:

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United State; but all Duties, Imposes and Exists shall be uniform throughout the United States. 

Not the president, the White House, the Treasury Department, the Supreme Court, or any other agency. Only the House of Representatives. The president can ask for it, but only Congress can give it. And only the House can initiate it.

The Constitution alone would not be an impediment to Sanders’s plan, if he had a compliant or cooperative House of Representatives. He doesn’t, and he won’t. 

Republicans now control the House of Representatives. Nothing indicates Democrats are close to retaking the House in 2016 or in the election following it. The House currently has 247 Republicans and 188 Democrats. Districts are mostly gerrymandered. In the last election 96 percent of incumbents were reelected. That lock on power is not going to undo itself.

Sanders’s funding promises are possible only if he gets a compliant Republican Congress (as likely as it was for Obama), or a (miraculously elected) Democratic Congress that will back him. 

He’s not going to have either, and even if there were a Democratic majority, there is no guarantee they’d buy his reforms anyway.

 7. The polls, belief, and the clap 

Bernie Sanders has soared in the polls the past year. So has Donald Trump. A year ago, nobody considered either of them as a viable contender. Both have made passionate cases to their constituencies, both have worked the public and social media well, and both have seen their numbers rise. In one regard, both are remarkably similar: Both have simple messages that they utter again and again. 

I think I understand why some of my friends are so passionate in their belief in Bernie. I’ve seen such belief before, and I’ve had it: McGovern and McCarthy come to mind. 

But I keep remembering that belief is not evidence for or proof of anything. The great comedian Lenny Bruce had a riff in which he satirized “those people who think you can cure the clap by taking a good shit and running three times around the block.” You can believe that, but if curing the clap is your goal, you really want to talk to someone who can prescribe antibiotics.

 8. Words and music 

I began with a song about unkept promises; I end with a novel about wishful thinking.

Specifically, the final scene of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: Jake Barnes and Lady Brett, who deeply love one another, are talking in a car. 

Brett says to Jake, who was castrated in the war, “Oh Jake, we could have had such a damn good time together.” 

And Jake responds, “Isn’t it pretty to think so.”

“Isn’t it pretty to think so” is not sufficient reason to serve the Republicans the Democratic candidate they would most like to confront as their opponent in November 2016.


Bruce Jackson is the James Agee Professor of American Culture at UB and a SUNY Distinguished Professor. He is also Affiliate Professor in the UB Law School. 

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