Endorsement Ethics & Bernie Sanders
With everyone freaking out over Sanders touting Joe Rogan’s endorsement nobody seems to have noticed that Rogan didn’t actually endorse him. Complimenting candidates and telling them you’ll vote for them when you have no intention of doing so is common in politics — if the candidate wins you don’t want them mad at you. To turn mandatory courtesy into an endorsement you have to say the actual words “I endorse [candidate name]”. Rogan didn’t do that.
So why did Sanders say he did?
The Problem
Sanders has always had trouble getting endorsements. Advocacy groups want to be listened to and Sanders never has time. Not listening means that even when he means well he often doesn’t do the right things. For example in 1995 he started advocating to increase the sentences for powder cocaine to match the sentences for crack. That’ll fix the sentencing disparity, right? Wrong. Even 5 minutes of actually listening to a civil rights advocate would have let him know that this was not the resolution they were after. He treats advocates for all sorts of issues this way including health care advocates like this group seeking to combat AIDS.
So the pattern is this. Issue advocates try to talk to him. He won’t meet with them. If they strong arm him into a meeting he doesn’t listen and then goes off and does whatever. Occasionally he gets into fights with them that could have been easily avoided with some courtesy. Surprising no one, Bernie then has a hard time getting primary endorsements. He can pull them in the general only because the alternative is a Republican.
He could have addressed this decades ago by cleaning up his act. Instead he took an easier route. He started lying about getting endorsements. It worked and he’s never stopped.
Liar Liar
In 2016 this started getting noticed with AARP. AARP is a non-partisan advocacy group for seniors that only endorses policy proposals. They never endorse people. So when Bernie mailers started going out to senior citizens with AARP logos on them anyone who knew anything about politics smelled a rat. He was using the logos without AARP’s permission. AARP issued notices in response on their web page and in their newsletter while demanding Sanders stop.
It didn’t stop. Sanders was co-opting the brands of any group he could to imbue his campaign with their heart, accomplishments, and credibility on a variety of issues. The League Of Conservation Voters was next to discover Sanders slapping their logo on things without their permission. And not just organizations, people too. Tom Wily of the American Legion discovered that his image, and the American Legion emblem, was being used in Sanders campaign postcards when he received one in the mail. The Legion had to send lawyers after Sanders to get him to stop using their logo and Wily’s image.
It was with shock and dismay that Wiley discovered that his image was used in a Sanders flier and distributed throughout his state. On the flier, Wiley is wearing his white American Legion hat. “I said, ‘oh my God,’ ” said Wiley. “I went out to the mailbox that day, and my flier was in there. It was addressed to my wife, not to me.”
Sanders needed to shore up his credentials with the veteran community after his role in the VA scandal. As chair of the Veterans Affairs committee he refused to hold hearings about care rationing in the VA for over a year while veterans were dying for lack of medical care. By targeting veteran households with the mailer using Wily’s image and the Legion logo he avoided the difficult process of repairing the damage by appropriating the Legion’s credibility. They trust/forgive me. You should too.
In the New Hampshire primary he falsely claimed the endorsement of local papers, The Telegraph and Valley News. Iowans were told by the Sanders campaign that the Des Moines Register endorsed him — but in reality they endorsed his opponent. In Nevada Sanders asked Hispanic community leaders work with him on understanding their issues — then listed all who agreed to be part of his panel as having endorsed him to the press using their images and names without consent. Several pushed back by publicly endorsing his opponent.
In Las Vegas Sanders campaign staffers put on buttons of the Culinary Union, Local 226 and entered employee dining areas up and down the strip to promote Sanders in the union’s name. The union was not pleased with the appropriation of their voice. Even if they had endorsed Sanders this behavior is not OK and doubly so when they had not.
Big Spender
Take a moment and look at that tweet. Specifically the likes and retweets. How many people were approached over lunch by Sanders staffers pretending to be union reps? How many people saw that tweet and realized they’d been tricked? This is why lying about endorsements is so incredibly effective. The reach of a campaign dwarfs the reach of an advocacy group. Sanders has the biggest war chest in 2020 and in 2016 outspent his opponent in the primary by almost 50%. He spent more on social media advertising than all federal races combined did in 2008 and is on track to do it again in 2020.
The Sanders campaign spent more on digital advertising than all federal races combined in 2008 … The campaign was marked by many firsts in the political advertising space. We were the first Presidential campaign to employ Facebook Canvas ads, Twitter conversational video ads and YouTube bumper ads. The campaign ran the first-ever political takeover on the homepage of the New York Times. Bernie Sanders was also the first presidential candidate to employ sponsored content with publishers like Buzzfeed, The Hill and Politico.
Most of the groups who didn’t endorse Sanders couldn’t effectively take their voices back against his avalanche of ads, paid posters, and bot nets. His paid speech completely buried their free speech.
Meanwhile if you did get your endorsement out loudly enough that Sanders couldn’t erase it he had another approach. To insist that your endorsement was rigged and that by all rights he deserves it more than his opponent. Sanders used this approach when he didn’t get the endorsement of organizations like Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign claiming on Rachel Maddow’s show that
“we’re not just taking on the Wall Street and the economic establishment, we’re taking on the political establishment.”
This lead to a torrent of online abuse aimed at both these progressive organizations from his fans for not endorsing him when he was clearly the more worthy candidate. He told them so himself.
But it doesn’t end there.
Bait And Switch
Sanders has another trick where he takes the endorsements he can get from smaller advocacy groups then makes an inappropriately big deal about them. He acts like they are the most authoritative voice in their fields when they are not. This doesn’t fool activists but it makes a very big impression on folks who are only passively invested in an issue. Lets look at two examples.
I’m sure you’ve all heard about National Nurses United from Sanders touting their endorsement as proof that his healthcare proposal is the best one. You probably haven’t heard of the American Nurses Association. The differences between these groups is that the ANA has millions of members from coast to coast while the NNU only a bit over 100 thousand — almost all in California. The NNU loves Sanders and M4A. The ANA does not. Campaign surrogates for Sanders did their best to ignore the ANA’s existence and to dismiss them as corrupt if someone else brought them up.
In 2016 Sanders had been resubmitting the same M4A bill annually. Full text here. It is a block grant to the states program where each state chooses how to spend the money and sets provider fees. This is how Medicaid works, not Medicare. In good states Medicaid and Medicare pay doctors the same for service. In other states Medicaid pays as little as 39% as much per service as Medicare leading to care rationing. So NNU over in happy blue California didn’t see any problem with Bernie’s bill. But when you include the voices of nurses from states where Medicaid is poorly run … well … lets just say you get a second opinion. You also never see Californian governors waging war on reproductive health but you do see this in red states so nurses from Texas and Mississippi are worried about things that the NNU nurses aren’t.
Sanders aggressive over-hyping of the NNU endorsement was calculated to erase the voices of the ANA, stifle policy debate, and create a false impression of consensus and support for his proposals in the medical community.
Or how about the environment? As we saw above Bernie lied in claiming the endorsement of the League of Conservation Voters and its over 2 million members. But he wasn’t lying when he touted the endorsements of Greenpeace’s US chapter with its 250k members. What is that about?
Greenpeace endorses Sanders because they want to shut down all nuclear power plants immediately. And so does Sanders. Both Sanders and Greenpeace ignore the scientific consensus that you can’t close nuclear power plants until fossil fuels are all gone. It is greenhouse gas emissions, not nuclear waste, that is an existential threat to our species. LCV isn’t thrilled about nuclear power but it lets science set it’s priorities. Sanders’ plan to issue an executive order to cease renewing operational licenses for America’s 99 nuclear reactors (that provide 1/5th our grid power) is a hard “No” for them. The only power sources positioned to fill that gap are fossil fuels and climate specialists estimate that Sanders moratorium would increase emissions over 2 billion tons/year. Remember the horrific Amazon fires last year? That was only 140 million tons. Closing those reactors is like setting the Amazon on fire 15 times every year.
Now some people think this is worth it. That nuclear power is a bigger danger than emissions. But did we have this conversation in 2016? No we did not. Bernie crowned himself the king of environmentalism all while skipping that pesky “policy debate” step. If you noticed that LCV and Sierra Club weren’t on board with this well, they are “the establishment” after all … perhaps they are corrupt? The Other Guy Takes Oil And Gas Donations! Green New Deal! I’m done talking about this, I will now talk about taking on Wall Street.
In Conclusion
Lying about your endorsements is as close to a deadly sin as there is in politics. Voters are busy. We don’t have the time — or the access — to sit down with each candidate and find out exactly who they are. And frankly neither do the candidates. There are over 330 million of us after all. Having issue advocacy groups interview them, pour over their records, fact check them, then report back to us is a perfectly reasonable solution to this problem. But the system breaks down when a candidate lies about or misrepresents their endorsements.
How can we know who he is, really, when he routinely flies false colors? On the upside, his flaunting of Rogan’s endorsement no more means that he is a misogynistic, birther, TERF than his flaunting of Greenpeace’s endorsement means he has a good climate plan. It’s just Sanders being Sanders and claiming yet another endorsement that never actually happened.