Sanders warns of progressive dismay with ‘centrist’ moves by Harris

Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders | AP

WASHINGTON—With the November election just days away, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt., the top elected leader in the progressive movement, is warning Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris about progressive dismay with the incumbent VP’s “centrist” moves.

And Sanders, the Senate’s longest and strongest supporter of workers, says Vice President Harris risks turning off almost a tenth of her swing-state progressive supporters, and 15% overall.

In a worse-case scenario they would then sit out the presidential ballot, if not other races, he fears. Harris can alienate progressives, Sanders fears, by catering too much to the remaining anti-Trump Republicans, who’ve been virtually exiled from their party.

Sanders’s warning came on Sunday television interview shows, and in interviews with The New York Times and the Associated Press. Not all progressive leaders, however, agree with his analysis.

But in an election with razor-thin margins—such as this contest between Harris and convicted felon and outright fascist Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for the third straight presidential election—progressive defections could swing inordinate weight in swing states, tossing them, and the presidency, to Trump.

As evidence of this centrist turn which alarms some progressives, Sanders cites Harris’s flip-flop to favoring fracking for oil, a big issue in the biggest swing state, Pennsylvania. He also notes that when she was a senator, she backed Medicare For All. That’s a top issue for Sanders and around a dozen unions, led by National Nurses United. But now she’s silent about it.

And Sanders says Harris loses progressive enthusiasm, if not actual votes, by sticking with her boss, Democratic President Joe Biden, and not declaring she would end U.S. military sales to the right-wing nationalist Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Israeli leader has used U.S.-supplied ammunition, planes and one-ton bombs to wage his war on Gazans, killing more than 43,000 people and leaving the territory in complete ruins and with two million homeless refugees, many of them sick, starving, or both.

“I don’t know how you win an election if you lose the working class,” Sanders told the New York Times.

“The truth of the matter is that there are a hell of a lot more working-class people who could vote for Kamala Harris than there are conservative Republicans. She has to start talking more to the needs of working-class people,” Sanders added to AP.

Joseph Geevarghese, head of Our Revolution, the grass-roots movement Sanders founded after his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination ended eight years ago, is also sounding the alarm.

“Bernie said he’s alarmed by the number of working class voters he’s talked to who aren’t sure what Harris will do to raise wages or improve health care,” Geevarghese reported in a recent e-mail.  “They want to hear her be more aggressive in making it clear that she’s going to fight for the working class of this country,” he said, citing Sanders’s comments to the Times.

Harris has responded, in part, to such complaints, by repeatedly pledging that if elected, she would be a president for all the people (her emphasis). That’s a contrast with serial liar, misogynist, six-time-bankrupt Trump, who caters to the criminal corporate class, fanatic right-wing “Christians,” and his fellow conspiracy advocates and white nationalists.

Not all progressives agree with the warnings from Sanders and Geevarghese. In an interview in Philadelphia, where she was campaigning for Harris, Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., herself an immigrant from India, said Indian-Americans relate to Harris, whose parents were Indian-American and African-American.

Jayapal told BBC India that Indian-Americans identify with Harris because of both her background and what she faced as a migrant to the U.S.: Working her way through school at McDonald’s, being raised by a single mother, and a household barely in the middle class.

And Jayapal noted the number of Indian-American voters exceeds the margin of victory her boss, Democratic President Joe Biden, won in Pennsylvania and Georgia, another swing state. The Harris campaign is now running the BBC interview as a campaign ad.

“There’s only one way to save democracy: Build a better, more resilient, democracy,” said the Progressive Democrats of America, who staged a lot of counter-programming during the Democratic convention in Chicago, including a long session with Sanders.

“That means empowering the middle class, the working class, and poor who make up the majority of society, while diminishing the power of our reprehensible real-life oligarchs, reversing a 35-year trend towards greater concentration of power and wealth in the hands of an unethical de facto ruling class.”

Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., a Painters Union member and former Progressive Caucus co-chair, told Bloomberg News earlier that progressives—and workers—will vote for Harris as they had planned to vote for Joe Biden. “She has the cred,” Pocan said.

Besides, Trump’s platform, also known as Project 2025, would be a disaster for workers, Pocan added. Among other plans, it says Trump “would eliminate overtime,” replacing it with comp time—at the discretion of the boss.

“They want you to work forever. That’s insane,” Pocan said.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Mark Gruenberg

Award-winning journalist Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People's World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but tough when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.