Robert Reich on What’s Next for Bernie — And His Supporters
Robert Reich has known Hillary (Rodham) Clinton since he was 19. Heads of their respective college classes, the pair met, at Reich’s suggestion, for a “president’s summit.” (She remembers it as a movie date.) They went on to become Yale Law School classmates, along with Bill Clinton. Reich would later serve as Clinton’s Secretary of Labor.
So it was particularly noteworthy when Reich, now a professor at UC Berkeley, endorsed Bernie Sanders for president in February. He cited Sanders’ commitment to addressing income inequality as a major motivating factor, calling him “the agent of change this nation so desperately needs.”
Reich added that if Clinton won the primary, “I’ll work my heart out to help her become president.”
With the nomination contest all but wrapped up, Rolling Stone caught up with Reich to ask how Clinton might get Bernie-or-busters on board, and where Sanders’ political revolution should go from here.
You’re not one of those Democrats who’s impatient for Bernie Sanders to concede the nomination to Hillary Clinton. Why is it a good idea for him to take this fight all the way to the convention?
Well, the minute he concedes and gets out of the race, officially he loses all bargaining leverage. I mean, he doesn’t have much bargaining leverage left, to be sure, but at least he has the hope of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee that he will get out of the race and endorse Hillary, and urge all of his followers to vote for Hillary. That hope and expectation gives him a little bit of bargaining leverage right now. I don’t know that it’s all that much, but it’s better than nothing.
How long do you think he can put off throwing his weight behind Clinton?
I think the real issue here is the Sanders supporters. Probably a third of them will vote for Hillary without any question. They will move their allegiance smoothly and effortlessly. Another third will not vote for Hillary under any circumstances, at least right now. They may change their minds as the election approaches. Right now they’re adamant; they’re Bernie-or-busters. That means the last a third who could be persuaded if Bernie made a convincing pitch and explained why they should throw their allegiance to Hillary, and [whether he’ll be able to do] that depends on how far Bernie feels she has come to embrace the ideas and policies he believes are important.
Does the split among Democrats feel more pronounced to you this year than in years past?
It’s somewhat different. In 2008, there were many Hillary supporters who did not like Obama right after he became the presumptive nominee and really were not enthusiastic. But in the end, I would say roughly 90 percent or more of them came around and voted for him. It’s different today in the sense that many of Bernie Sanders’ supporters supported Bernie Sanders not because of Bernie himself but because of his message: He is the candidate against big money in politics. He is the candidate who understands that wealth and power are completely imbalanced in this society, in our political economy. That great concentrations of wealth — whether they be individual wealth or big corporations or Wall Street — have distorted and undermined our democracy. If Bernie Sanders hadn’t run and Elizabeth Warren had run, it would have been the same message. If almost anybody with any name recognition had run with that message they would have attracted the same enthusiasm. I think Bernie has his own very strong attributes — I don’t mean to suggest that it didn’t matter who was running. He obviously has extraordinary passion and a very important degree of indignation about all of this. But Bernie Sanders supporters are not, generally speaking, overwhelmingly enthusiastic about who Bernie is [so much as] what Bernie stands for. And that makes it a different and more challenging transition for many Bernie supporters to throw their lot behind Hillary Clinton. I think most ultimately will, because the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency is so utterly terrifying.