The NPR Politics Podcast - The Eight-Hour Speech That Made Bernie Sanders A Household Name

Episode Date: December 25, 2019

This week, the NPR Politics Podcast investigates defining moments in the lives of four top Democratic presidential candidates to understand how those experiences shape their politics today.On December 10th, 2010, Bernie Sanders gave a marathon speech on the floor of the Senate protesting a tax deal negotiated between Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and then-Vice President Joe Biden. Sanders was upset that the package included tax cuts for high-income Americans.Though his speech failed to sway hearts and minds in the Senate — the deal passed with a bipartisan super-majority — but gained traction online and to helped establish Bernie Sanders as a progressive standard-bearer.This episode: campaign correspondent Asma Khalid, campaign correspondent Scott Detrow, and White House correspondent Tamara Keith. Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Asma Khalid. I'm covering the 2020 campaign. I'm Scott Detrow. I'm also covering the campaign. And I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And this week, we're going to take a close look at the top four leading Democratic presidential candidates. We each took a candidate, dove into their rise as a politician, and focused on a moment in their life that was a turning point for them, professionally or personally, which is why we're calling this series Turning Points. Pretty clever, huh? So today, Scott, we're going to dive into Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders' life. You did that piece. So talk to us about how you actually decided on the moment that you chose. Yeah, one of the big things about Bernie Sanders is how consistent he's been over the decades. And

you can look at speeches he gave as Burlington mayor or a congressman or a senator or a presidential candidate. And they're like often almost identical. And there's been a lot of stories written about the early points of his political career. So I was thinking differently and I was wondering, like, what is the moment where Bernie Sanders went from Bernie Sanders to Bernie Sanders national iconic progressive figure? And the interesting answer is that there's a very specific moment, you know, an exact time of day, because it was this filibuster that he delivered on the Senate floor on December 10th, 2010, protesting a bipartisan tax deal. And it went viral. It was a big online social media moment at a period of time where those were a little more rare. And it really elevated him to this

leading progressive, sometimes critic of the Obama administration. And really, according to his top staffers, set the clear path to the eventual 2016 run for the presidency. I'm thinking back like this was before these long talkathons on the Senate floor became kind of a regular thing. This was unique. Yeah, that's right. In the years since, this is something that a lot of Republicans in particular have done. I'm thinking Ted Cruz reading Green Eggs and Ham at one point, among other things. But this is not something that had been done in a long time when Bernie Sanders did it. And it got a ton of attention and forced the White House to respond to him in actually really interesting ways. All right. We're going to do something a little different than what we normally do in the podcast.

Scott, you've actually reported this story out as a profile. So we want to take a seat back and listen to it. You all ready? Let's go. On December 10th, 2010, President Barack Obama was facing a lot of pressure. Democrats had just lost the House of Representatives, and here was Obama, about a month later, asking his party for a major tax deal that would extend the Bush administration's tax cuts for the wealthy, something Democrats had railed on for years. The issue here is not whether I think that the tax cuts for the wealthy are a

good or smart thing to do. That morning, Obama was on NPR's Morning Edition defending the deal. The problem is, is that this is the single issue that the Republicans are willing to scotch the entire deal for. Obama had tapped Vice President Joe Biden to figure out a deal with Mitch McConnell. They reached one relatively quickly in several phone calls over the course of a single weekend. Republicans got the tax cuts, the Bush extensions, plus a cut in estate taxes paid by the mega wealthy. Democrats got an extension of unemployment benefits and a range of other broader tax cuts. A few hours after Obama's interview aired, Bernie Sanders walked onto the Senate floor. I think we can do better. And I am here today

to take a strong stand against this bill. At this point, Sanders had been in Congress for nearly two decades. He had a long and consistent track record, but he hadn't emerged as a national figure. That would start to change over the course of the next eight hours. You can call what I'm doing today whatever you want. You can call it a filibuster. You can call it a very long speech. I'm not here to set any great records. I was sitting with him for the entire eight hours that Bernie was doing his filibuster.

Warren Gunnels has been on Sanders' staff for decades. That day on the Senate floor, he was running point. If Sanders needed notes, Gunnels handed them to him. If there was a sign or a chart that would help Sanders' point, Gunnels would send another staffer to fetch it. Gunnels says Sanders' speech notes were relatively minimal. I would call it a refrain of about three, four pages of how he wanted to set it up. Sanders kept returning to two points over and over. First, that public opinion was on his side. The polls show us the American people do not believe millionaires and billionaires need more tax breaks. Sanders also made a point to talk past the other lawmakers, who he likely realized were

mostly going to vote for the bipartisan deal. He kept urging people to call Congress to complain. If they make their voices heard and said enough is enough, the rich have got it all right now. The clock kept ticking and Sanders kept speaking. He started trending on Twitter. Traffic surged on the Senate website. At points, the phone lines to Senate offices jammed up.

The speech was clearly hitting a nerve with progressives. Gunnell says it was something else, though, that made them realize they were breaking through. When the White House responded with a dramatic move. I thought it was a slow news day, so I'd bring the other guy in. I don't even know if they had a topic in mind, but they just rolled out Bill Clinton while Bernie was speaking. Obama had brought the former president into the White House briefing room to make his pitch for the compromise. The agreement taken as a whole is, I believe,

the best bipartisan agreement we can reach to help the largest number of Americans. Meanwhile, on the other side of Pennsylvania Avenue, Sanders kept going. This is a transfer of wealth. It's Robin Hood in reverse. Sanders rapped after eight hours and 30 minutes. He could finally take a break. So could Gunnels. I was exhausted. I was mentally exhausted. I can't say I was physically exhausted because I was sitting down the whole time. But the filibuster failed. The Senate voted overwhelmingly to approve the tax bill.

Sanders' speech hadn't seemed to change any minds. Still, very soon, Gunnell saw things differently. When you look back at that, I think that that might have been the spark that began to set things off. The speech was quickly turned into a book, which was a bestseller. And Bernie Sanders was suddenly a much more prominent figure. Another longtime Sanders advisor, Jeff Weaver, agrees. That brought Bernie Sanders to the notice of millions of Americans who didn't know who he was. And I think it laid a lot of the groundwork for the success that he would see in the 2015 and 2016 election cycle.

The next year, Joe Biden stood next to Mitch McConnell on a stage and defended the deal. Which we both believe has spurred the economic growth. We've got a long way to go, but it actually not only was a compromise, but it's a compromise that was useful for the economy. Obama did get those top tier Bush tax cuts eliminated down the line. Still, in the immediate wake of the filibuster, Bernie Sanders told NPR he was tired of compromises. Might we have to compromise? Yeah, maybe we do. But you've got to wage the fight before you compromise. You've got to take the case to the American people. And we didn't do that. Compromise or fight? Nearly a decade later, Sanders and Biden are battling for the

Democratic presidential nomination in a contest that largely revolves around that same key question. All right, we're going to take a quick break. And when we get back, we'll talk about how this moment has rippled through Bernie Sanders' career. NPR's Life Kit wants to help you make changes that actually stick this new year. From how to do dry January to how to start a creative habit. We've got new episodes all month to help you start the year off right.

New episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Listen and subscribe to Life Kit. And we're back. So, Scott, talk to us about what you feel has actually changed in Democratic politics since this moment, since 2010. Yeah, I think the Democratic Party has gotten a lot more outwardly populist. Obviously, populism has always been a thread in the Democratic Party. But Bernie Sanders was really an outlier in this deal. A lot of Democrats were mad, but he was really the only one taking this forceful stand. Only two other Democratic senators joined him in this filibuster to give

him a little bit of a break. And there's one moment that really just crystallizes all of this to me. And that's when Bill Clinton is talking in the White House early on. One of the first things he says is, I should say I'm really wealthy and that I'm going to benefit from this tax break. And I just want to put it out there. And it's like, there's no world where you would see somebody saying something like that now. You know, another thing that struck me about it is like that speech. Yes, it was about this tax deal, but it was really about Bernie Sanders worldview. It was him laying out all of these ideas and themes that we've heard repeatedly on the campaign trail. Yeah. And there was obviously not room to touch on all of the points he made in the eight and a half hour speech.

But there are so many refrains that just like are central themes that he talks about every single day and has been for years. And it just all came together in this one moment. One thing that I didn't really get a clear answer on with a lot of people I talked to was I asked, do you think this deal would happen today? Do you think it would get the votes it got in the Senate today? And a lot of Sanders supporters said, absolutely not. There's no way. I talked to Harry Reid a lot reporting this story. He was the former longtime top Senate Democrat, minority leader, majority leader at different points. And I asked him, do you think this still happens? And he says, I don't think that the Bush tax cut extensions do end up in that final package if it happens today. Though I will say that last week, Congress voted on a number of deals that include tax extenders

and other tax breaks. And basically, there have been some deals made that I'm not convinced that are all that different than what Sanders gave an eight and a half hour speech about. So Scott, at the end of this piece, you outline a kind of central question that I think we not only heard in Bernie Sanders, but we have already heard a lot about in this 2020 campaign cycle. And that's this question about compromising or fighting. What is the right tactic? What's the right strategy for Democrats to take? How do you think that is playing out now? I think it's a defining argument in this presidential campaign. I hadn't fully realized until I started reporting this how central a role Joe Biden played in putting together this deal that Bernie Sanders opposed. But it's something that Biden is really at odds with Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders on in this campaign.

The idea of cutting deals of incremental progress that, of course, plays out mostly on the health care front. Do you totally redo Obamacare or do you build on it? And Joe Biden's like a central argument of his campaign is that the Democrats who just want to fight, who don't want to compromise or cut deals are very vocal, are very public. But they might not be the majority of the Democratic electorate. And that's something that we are going to quickly get some receipts on when people start voting next month. As much as for Bernie Sanders, fighting is the answer and not compromising values is the answer for Vice President Biden, who I've worked on a profile of that sort of ability to compromise or the ability to bring people together, that's like fundamental to his pitch. It really is, as you say, it's just a major contrast between these sort of two camps in the campaign. All right. We're going to leave it there.

Make sure to listen to the rest of this Candidate Series. We will have new profiles in your podcast feed every day this week. And you can chat about them in our Facebook group at n.pr slash politics podcast. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the 2020 campaign. I'm Scott Detrow. I also cover the campaign. And I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House.

And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. Thank you.