Bernie Sanders was on blazing form.
The two-time presidential candidate’s eyes flashed with conviction as he warned millions of Americans will suffer unless Republicans agree to extend health care subsidies — a dispute that caused the government shutdown.
“Why is the United States the richest country in the history of the world, the only major nation not to guarantee health care for all people as a human right?” Sanders asked at a CNN town hall event covering a shutdown that is now dragging through its third week.
Sanders, in his broad Brooklyn brogue — by way of Chicago and Vermont — punctuated points with his trademark gesture, with his right index finger stabbing the air, like he was conducting an orchestra or hailing a cab.
An independent senator who votes with Democrats, Sanders remains a major political figure. He’s been hammering away for decades on his top issues — the cost of healthcare, an economy weighed toward the rich and a government controlled by millionaires and billionaires.
The White House lampoons him as "crazy Bernie" the socialist. But he wouldn't be regarded as radical in many European countries. He's merely asking for benefits that citizens there take for granted.
Sanders' ideas are easily caricatured, and many in the political center see him as a liability. A central reason the Democratic Party establishment rallied around Joe Biden in 2020 was that they feared his presidential primary rival Sanders would be a general election liability.
Still, it turns out that Sanders was right about quite a lot. What once looked outlandish now looks prescient. His warning the US could fall under the sway of oligarchs sounds a lot like Donald Trump’s second term.
The Democratic Party is pining for someone to fight Trump, who is authentic and genuine and can frame a simple political message. No one has done that more convincingly and consistently over the shutdown than Sanders.
There’s only one problem. He's 84.
Sanders might have the same hyperactive energy that powers Trump, but he’s hardly the left’s long-term future. He does seem to be trying to pass the progressive torch — even if he’d much rather keep it. He appeared on CNN with New York Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 36, and the pair plans to rally next week with the hot favorite to become the next New York mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who is 33 and is being falsely slimed by Trump as a communist.
The prominence of Sanders is an indictment of the Democratic Party, which traditionally has swooned at the youthful magnetism of up-and-comers like John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, but now resembles a gerontocracy. It’s still baffling that the party thought it was a good idea to go into the last presidential election with a candidate already showing the ravages of age who would have been 86 by the end of his second term.
Democratic messaging over the government shutdown is being led by Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer. The New Yorker is a whippersnapper of only 74, but is increasingly tonally out of touch with younger voters.
Lessons don’t seem to be being learned.
Maine Gov. Janet Mills, who is 77, just launched a campaign for the Democratic nomination to fight one of the few GOP-held Senate seats the party could win in 2026. If she prevails, she’ll rob her party of a powerful generational argument against incumbent Sen. Susan Collins, 72.
In Massachusetts, Rep. Seth Moulton a 46-year-old Iraq war veteran, is trying to primary Sen. Ed Markey, who was first elected to Congress on the day that Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976. “We’re in crisis, and with everything we learned last election, I just don’t believe Sen. Markey should be running for another six-year term at 80 years old,” Moulton said. “I don’t think someone who’s been in Congress for half a century is the right person to meet this moment and win the future.”
The issue is not that all of the Democratic Party's seniors are incapable. Ironically, Moulton proved this himself. He tried and failed to block Nancy Pelosi from returning as speaker of the House in 2019, the year she turned 79. She responded with a new term that helped destroy Trump’s hopes of reelection in 2020. But older candidates naturally find it harder to appeal to the younger voters who will be critical to driving Democrats back to power.
Come 2028, a first-time voter may have been only 6 when Barack Obama — once seen as the clarion of a new generation rather than an interregnum between oldies — left the White House.
As JFK said in 1960: "It is time for a new generation of leadership, to cope with new problems and new opportunities"
