The Fighting Soul by Ari Rabin-Havt

Author:Ari Rabin-Havt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2022-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

BERNIE MIGHT NOT BE a typical politician, but the plan to limit our participation in the Liberty and Justice Celebration in Iowa in late 2019 made others on the campaign nervous. Ultimately other senior staffers heard about Misty Rebik and Pete D’Alessandro’s idea to radically cut back on our presence at the event. “How many tickets did we have to the Liberty and Justice Celebration?” a number of senior staffers frantically asked those of us who had been in Iowa. The answer was, none. These staffers were in shock, and ran to Bernie to express their outrage. He would be onstage at the event and possibly face a hostile crowd, and they thought this was unacceptable. They called the state party to see if we could get any tickets, but the event had been sold out for weeks. We were stuck. It became a source of consternation within the campaign.

In my view, Iowa politics were Misty and Pete’s specialty. They knew the state and the main players. Better than anyone else, they understood the ramifications of what they had proposed. I also liked the idea of no longer accepting the extortionate practices of the Iowa Democratic Party. Campaigns were spending themselves into the ground and had been for a long time. I was reminded of a meeting during the general election in 2004 when I was on the internet team for John Kerry’s presidential campaign. Next to our area of the office in downtown Washington, DC, sat the political department. There were rows of desks, with each staffer focused on a different constituency. One time, a senior operative asked the lower-level staffers in the political department to introduce themselves. Each said which political group within the party they were responsible for speaking with. After about ten minutes of this, he screamed out, “Does anybody here talk to fucking voters?”

Every dollar that went to the Iowa Democratic Party was a dollar we weren’t spending to talk to voters, not only in Iowa but across the country. The state was critical because it went first. Bernie needed to win it, and a bad performance could end his campaign. But the people who attended the official Democratic Party would not caucus for us.

The night of the dinner, we held our “March Against Corporate Greed,” as planned. Thousands of Iowans joined us as we walked to the venue where the official dinner was taking place. It was precisely the type of celebration Bernie loved, working-class people, of all ages and races, joining together to make themselves heard. Our supporters split off and went to a dinner event and organizing training hosted by the campaign across the street. Bernie went into a backstage room to prepare for his speech to the state’s Democratic Party.

The night’s news was already dominated by the fact that Beto O’Rourke was dropping out of the race and would not appear at the dinner at all. After launching his campaign with the largest first-day fundraising haul of any candidate, Beto developed

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