Hanging with Jane Sanders!!!

Jane Sanders picks me up at the Burlington, Vt. airport in her light green 2011 Subaru Forester with a “Bernie 2016” sticker in the window and a child’s booster seat in the back. No entourage, no driver, no hint that the wife of a presidential candidate is at the wheel.

“I’m still allowed,” she says happily, adding that the Secret Service “won’t let Bernie drive anymore.”

After apologizing for being late (although she really isn’t) she asks if I mind if we stop by Staples to return the printer cartridges she bought in the wrong size. “I use up ink so fast,” she says. “I just want to print in black and white but I keep using up the color, even in draft mode…”

I wonder for a moment if Melania Trump or Bill Clinton change their own ink cartridges. Or do their own printing. Or pick up reporters from the airport and then apologize.

Sanders and I first met early last fall, when her husband’s campaign for the Democratic nomination was heating up. I’ve come to Burlington to talk again, to take stock of the then vs. now, as that same campaign may or may not be coming to a close. Bernie is still barnstorming in delegate-rich California, where polls show him in a tight race with Hillary Clinton, and where he is hoping that somehow a landslide will help him make his increasingly unlikely case for the nomination. Jane has taken a break from the trail for a few days to come home, nurse a cold, see her grandchildren, and give me a tour of the place that launched this unpredictable run in the first place.

The printer cartridge exchanged (“of course the new one is more expensive”) we drive through the city that both native New Yorkers call home, the one that gave Bernie 92 percent of the vote during the Vermont primary. We pass the site of an old oilfield that Bernie helped convert into a waterfront park when he was mayor, and that became the place where her son was married and her husband announced he would run for president. A tour guide behind the wheel, Jane points out the site of Bernie’s Senate office, and his presidential campaign office, and his former congressional office all within blocks of his former office in City Hall.

“Everywhere you look there’s something” that her husband fixed, or changed or envisioned, she says. Being here seems to energize her, a last deep breath and squaring of shoulders before she heads back across the country for the next round in the bruising battle that this campaign season has become.

“How’s your baby?” Jane asks Jacquelyn Ralph Perron, the one-woman hair-and-makeup operation at the Polaris Mediaworks location that serves as a remote site for many of Jane’s local TV appearances.

“His first birthday party was this weekend,” she answers. “We had a ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ theme.”

Jane is here so often that Perron knows exactly what kind of minimal makeup meets with Jane’s less-is-enough preferences, and Jane has basically watched Jackie’s 1-year-old son grow up in near weekly increments. At first reluctant to speak for the campaign (“I thought, ‘I’m the wife, who the heck cares’“), Jane has grown into one of her husband’s most vocal and popular surrogates (though let’s admit it, Susan Sarandon draws bigger crowds).

“That’s one thing that’s changed from when we first met,” she says as Perron applies a little lip color. “I looked around and saw that other campaigns had more people out there spreading the word, and I realized that if I wanted that for Bernie I would have to be one of those.”

CNN is playing on the green-room screen — a mix of Donald Trump berating the press for asking about his donations to veteran’s groups, and outrage over the shooting of Harambe the gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo. When bizarro worlds collide, and Trump is asked about the ape, Jane is unexpectedly sympathetic. “Reporters ask, so he has to answer,” she says. “Then they can make it seem like that’s all he wants to talk about.’”

As she waits for a microphone to be clipped to the colorful tropical-bird-themed shirt that she bought on a campaign trip to Puerto Rico ahead of the June 5 primary there, she worries briefly that Wolf Blitzer might actually ask her about gorillas too. But instead most of their conversation is about another topic that frustrates her — the math of the nomination. Can her husband possibly win a large enough percentage of the June 7 vote to overcome Hillary Clinton’s delegate lead?

In response, she takes CNN to task for including superdelegates in their tally.

“I think CNN and MSNBC should listen to the communications director of the DNC when she says don’t count those superdelegates before they vote,” she says. “Yes, he’s 272 pledged delegates behind Secretary Clinton, and it is a steep climb, but the fact is he’s won a number of races, a number of elections, by large margins,” and if he somehow does that well in California, he could lead in the pledged delegate count.

If that’s the case, she argues, superdelegates might change their votes. “It’s tough, but it’s doable,” she insists. “You don’t quit before the final vote is counted.”

The segment ends, but she waits to have an unaired word with Blitzer. “Don’t include those superdelegates and pronounce her the nominee immediately after New Jersey closes” she warns — meaning three hours before voting ends in California on Tuesday. “Don’t count those superdelegates until they actually vote on July 25.”

We stop for lunch at Sweetwater’s, a restaurant across from the pedestrian mall that Mayor Sanders helped create in the middle of town, a spot not far from the church where Jane first heard him speak during his first campaign and almost instantly fell in love.

Jane and Bernie often came here for late dinners after City Council meetings during the early years of their marriage, and there is a small cartoon version of his face tucked amid the elaborate mural at the entrance, which otherwise consists mostly of naked Grecian-looking young men.

We are still on the subject of superdelegates.

“I knew nothing about the Democratic primary process” at the start of this campaign, she admits, since both she and her husband are both Independents. “It has been a real education. And we need to reform that electoral process, not from a self-centered point of view, but for the future. If it were a self-centered view, we would have been complaining all along, we’re just taking notes.”

Not complaining? I ask. Isn’t all this “don’t count the superdelegates yet” actually complaining?

No, she says. It’s just clarifying the larger existential reason for those delegates in the first place.

“The purpose of the superdelegates is supposedly to make sure the right person gets the nomination,” she says. Her husband disagrees that such a mechanism should exist, and if he were designing the rules they would not, but since they do, she argues, they should be permitted to actually do that job. “They are the insurance policy,” she says. “And our question is: Are they the insurance policy for the establishment candidate or are they the insurance policy for the Democratic Party.”

She cites the many polls that show Bernie Sanders having more of a lead over Donald Trump than Hillary Clinton has, then says she is tired of having to argue this viability question at all.

“Virtually every interview from a year ago until today has as the question or the intimation, ‘but you really can’t win’, and it’s more of a scorecard that they’re interested in rather than why he’s running and what he wants to accomplish,” she says.

When pressed, she concedes that voters do in fact know where Bernie stands on his key issues — for a single-payer health care system, a higher minimum wage, less gun control than Clinton and more regulation of Wall Street. But she credits social media for getting that message out, because the mainstream press was too busy covering Donald Trump.

“I think the press deserves responsibility for giving Trump the nomination, especially the TV press,” she says. “Rally after rally of his was covered beginning to end, while everyone else got a snippet of time. Then Marco Rubio said one outlandish thing and his next four rallies were also covered live. Anyone trying to talk about issues never got any coverage. I think this is a real comment on our democracy.”

I reviewed the notes from our first interview this past fall, I tell her, and was surprised to see we didn’t mention Donald Trump at all. “This isn’t the campaign anyone expected,” she says, adding she thought the Republican nominee would be Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. “Lindsey Graham’s a smart guy, I would have thought he’d have done better. I thought the brash one would have been Chris Christie. And I never would have thought it would have gotten this ugly. But you never get the campaign you expect.”

I suggest that the ugliness of supporters, the name-calling and online trolling, is not limited to Donald Trump’s campaign. Aren’t both Sanders and Trump tapping into similar wellsprings of dissatisfaction, turning over the same rock and exposing some very angry people beneath?

“In some ways, yes,” she agrees. “Trump looks like he just tells it like it is. Bernie also tells it like it is. I think people are sick and tired of the poll-tested, canned politicians and both Trump and Bernie offer something completely different. But you need to get past that and get to the issues and then you see a real distinction between our supporters.”

She goes on to reject the worst of the so-called Bernie Bro behavior, with its implicit misogyny directed at Clinton. “Our campaign has always been and will always be about a vision for the future,” she says. “It has been about solutions, not about tearing apart people. We fight back against people who say hateful things supposedly on our behalf. Our social media people were ‘No, this isn’t us; no, that’s not the way.’”

I tell her that I put a message up on my Facebook page asking what questions I should ask the Sanders and that the overwhelming majority of responses were from readers who fear that Bernie is effectively handing the race to Trump by hanging on. By continuing to criticize Clinton, and by feeding the Bros, their logic went, Sanders makes it ever more difficult for the party to unite before the general election.

Jane disagrees. “I think that we’ve been very clear that we’ll do anything to oppose Donald Trump, to beat Donald Trump,” she says. “That is a very necessary goal.”

Should he not get the nomination, might another goal be some role in a potential Hillary Clinton administration?

“Right now he is just focused on winning the election,” she says.

Maybe secretary of education? Or secretary of labor?

She smiles for just a moment, then deadpans: “Maybe you can join in on the conversations after …” but doesn’t finish the thought.

Back at the wheel, Jane is talking about what happens after November. Her husband does not take his talk of a “revolution” lightly, she says, and win or lose he and his circle intend to use the clout from this campaign to keep pushing their ideas. That means marshaling the lists and infrastructure built during the past year into some sort of organized change.

“It’s not just about winning the presidency, it’s about changing our country to have it be what we all want it to be and know it can be,” she says. “As president, he’d want an outside, really organized group of people helping support him, moving it in the direction of the issues that he’s talked about. And if he’s not the nominee, it will be him leading that group, leading that transformation.”

She’s been spending some time noodling on the details of such a group — something like MoveOn or Organizing for Action, but with a Sanders-issues focus. “It’s something I’ve thought about and will be able to bring to him at a future moment, not in the middle of a campaign. This is something we will move on regardless of the outcome of this election, and I will definitely be involved in that.”

As she drives, the landscape becomes more suburban, and soon we pull into the driveway of a cream-clapboard colonial on a quiet residential street. There is a fulltime Secret Service detail guarding the place, and they are confused because Jane forgot to tell them she was expecting a reporter and a camera crew.

Once we are cleared, she ushers us into exactly the house so many doting grandparents have. There are photos of the Sanders’ five children and seven grandchildren on all the walls, a clutter of knickknacks on all the shelves, and piles of mail, magazines and the stuff of daily life everywhere else. (Later, Jane will text me to ask if I remember where she put her keys when she came home because she couldn’t find them. I didn’t.)

In the room adjacent to the kitchen the floor is covered with grandchildren’s toys — drums, a keyboard, things that make noise that their parents prefer stay here rather than come home. (No, her 2016 taxes aren’t anywhere in this clutter, she says. They haven’t been released because they just haven’t been finished yet — the couple’s accountant filed for an extension until October.)

In the dining room, she moves a miniature Nativity scene out of view. “We’ve hardly been home since Christmas,” she says by way of explanation. Nearby is an antique sculpture of Don Quixote, which she asks that I not write about as a metaphor. And hanging on the walls nearby are several framed prints heavy with symbolism — all scenes from the White House. They are prints commissioned and sent as Christmas cards every year of the Clinton presidency — and they bear the signatures of both Hillary and Bill Clinton. Which means Jane and Bernie Sanders sit in their dining room and gaze at greetings from the Clintons.

“I guess maybe we should do something else with those,” she says. Then she explains proudly that they were among the first thing that her daughter, now a professional woodworker, custom-framed by hand, and you get the sense they aren’t going anywhere.

A Secret Service agent tells her that her husband has been trying to reach her. She turned off her phone during her TV interview earlier and during all the time we’ve been talking hasn’t glanced at it once. A scroll through her messages shows that she also has two radio interviews scheduled within minutes, so we say our quick goodbyes and I grab a ride back to the airport with my camera crew.

I am halfway down the driveway when she calls out with one last thought, one she seems to have been mulling for several hours.

“Those people on Facebook who are afraid we’re giving the election to Trump?” she says, “tell them not to worry. We always said we would do whatever is necessary to defeat him. I have no doubt we’ll be able to do that, no matter who’s the nominee.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/end-tour-hanging-jane-sanders-000000561.html