Hillary Clinton’s Vermont socialist rival may cause her more trouble than she thinks

Bernie Sanders seems like an eccentric but there is a chance a wave will build for him, driven by suspicious Democrats

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Bernie Sanders hasn’t been much more than a curiosity in American politics since he was elected as an independent to the House of Representatives from Vermont in 1990. “I am a socialist and everyone knows that,” he said at the time, instantly shunting himself into his own political siding. Most voters in this country, after all, tended then, and still today, to equate socialism with Karl Marx or Fidel Castro.

A quarter of a century later, Mr Sanders is the longest-serving independent in the history of the US Congress. But he has voted consistently alongside Democrats and there we were on Thursday witnessing his declaration for the White House in 2016. To get all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, he will first need to block Hillary Clinton’s road to the Democratic Party nomination and claim it for himself.

This looks more intimidating than a full tub of Ben & Jerry’s. (He and the ice cream folk call Burlington, Vermont, home.) There is something of the late Michael Foot about him with his unkempt white hair and spectacles. He is 73 years old. Foot was 70 when he led Labour to disastrous defeat in 1983. He has a brother, Larry, currently the Green candidate for parliament in Oxford West and Abingdon.

Even the manner of his announcement seemed to spell quixotic. Rather than offer slick theatrics for the TV cameras, he released a simple email to supporters and in the afternoon spoke for five minutes to the press on a patch of grass at the Capitol called “the Swamp”. There was even feedback from his microphone.

Lucky Hillary, you may be thinking. Even her own camp has along assumed that a progressive figure would jump in either to take her down or at least force her to make a leftwards swerve. Many on the liberal wing wanted that person to be Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts but she is disinclined. Some are still pinning hopes on former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, though he was badly winged this week by the riots in Baltimore where he was once mayor.

And yet, might this be Bernie’s time? Squint at least a little – OK, squint a lot – and you may just see a way for him to win. Put all the positions he laid out on Thursday on to one easy menu and you can see why a lot of Democrats might actually be tempted to bite, not least all those thousands who have been marching in different cities this week for justice for Baltimore’s Freddie Gray. They are Sanders people.

The most compelling of these threatens also to be his undoing. He will not form a Super-PAC (political action committee) to feed cash towards supporting his cause. He rages at the Koch brothers for bankrolling conservatives. He told CNN that were there a billionaire out there willing to write whopping cheques for him he would tear them up. “We now have a political situation where billionaires are literally able to buy elections and candidates. Let’s not kid ourselves. That is the reality right now,” he said at the Swamp.

Mr Sanders wants to do it the old-fashioned way, persuading regular voters to send him modest sums, with some additional support from the unions. The latter may be inclined to help because, unlike Mrs Clinton, he has come out firmly against President Barack Obama’s proposed new free trade deals with Asia and Europe. The unions abhor them too. He is also way ahead of Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton on dramatically raising the federal minimum wage, on increasing social spending and breaking up the Wall Street banks.

Mrs Clinton already knows that next year’s election will be dominated by the crisis of economic inequality in the United States, the slow fade of the American middle class as well as the marginalisation and ill treatment of minorities as symbolised by the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, which prosecutors yesterday said would lead to criminal charges. On Wednesday, she made her most compelling appeal yet in a speech at Columbia University for judicial reform to rebalance the scales towards the disadvantaged.

Yet on these and on nearly all the issues that Mr Sanders will be running on, she has a credibility problem. As Secretary of State she began the process of negotiating the biggest of the new trade deals, with countries of Asia and the Pacific. Her husband, former President Bill Clinton, passed the welfare reforms that have so frayed the social safety net and oversaw changes in sentencing laws that helped to ensure that today one in three black males will spend time in prison.

Her history of cosiness with Wall Street, the gargantuan fees she charged for giving speeches before she made her own White House declaration earlier this month and the back story of barely transparent streams of foreign money going to the Clinton Foundation all give her declared interest in getting big money out of American politics an awfully hollow ring. Hers will sound like armchair populism.

Mr Sanders seems like an eccentric from an eccentric state. It won’t help that in the scheme of things Vermont will hardly matter in 2016. Even the name President Bernie doesn’t sound quite serious. But there is a chance a wave will build for him, driven by Democrats suspicious of the old triangulations of the Clinton clan and genuinely concerned that the bottom is falling out for the poor and the middle class.

He may not win a seat in parliament, but Larry Sanders may yet be able to dream of being first brother.