Bernie Sanders lost the election, but he won control of the White House anyway

You have to hand it to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). He lost the Democrats’ presidential nomination but won the presidency. Congratulations, Bernie, that’s quite an accomplishment.

OK, technically he’s not the president. But I’m not sure Joe Biden knows that.

Biden won the nomination because the smart money figured Bernie couldn’t win the general election, since voters would see him as too far left, as out of the political mainstream. So they gave the nomination to the safe candidate, moderate Joe Biden, the Democrat whose centrist politics would bring normalcy back to American politics.

That was the plan, anyway.

But Biden has political debts to pay. Without Bernie’s support, he might not have won; progressives who preferred Sanders might have sat out the election.

So, despite Biden’s assurances that he is a middle-of-the-road Democrat, he’s governing like, well, like Bernie Sanders, who has said that Biden could be the most progressive president since Franklin Roosevelt.  

First there was the nearly $2 trillion of long-term spending passed as a COVID-19 relief bill just as the crisis was fading — a bill that was jam-packed with all sorts of progressive goodies that had nothing to do with COVID-19 relief. When 10 GOP senators visited the “moderate” president in the Oval Office to offer a few adjustments to the bill, Biden said, in essence, “Thanks but no thanks.” 

Bernie surely approved of that.

Coming soon will be more multitrillion-dollar bills. One will be on “infrastructure,” but be assured there will be more progressive treats hidden away in the small print. 

Also on the progressive agenda is climate change legislation, costing a few more trillion.

Democrats are still hoping House Resolution 1 will somehow get through the Senate — a bill they’re selling as a plan “to overcome rampant voter suppression” that targets minorities. Can reparations for the descendants of slavery be far behind? What about packing the Supreme Court? Or adding a few more Democrat-leaning states to the union? Or free tuition at state universities?

This was Bernie’s agenda — and now it’s Biden’s. Even President Obama must have noticed that Biden is more like Bernie than he, Barack, ever was.

President Biden and Sen. Sanders know they can’t pass a lot of their progressive wish list without nuking the Senate filibuster. In February 2020, when Biden was running for president, he was unequivocal about the filibuster, saying at the time: “[I do] not support ending the filibuster.” But at his first formal news conference last week, he said the filibuster has been “abused in a gigantic way,” prompting The Wall Street Journal to comment: “Mr. Biden’s flip-flop tells us that Democrats in Congress are preparing to break the 60-vote filibuster rule, and he’ll go along for the ride as he has on everything since Jan. 20.”  

Maybe Biden will settle for simply making a few tweaks to the existing filibuster, like turning it back into the old “talking filibuster” that he has said he favors. But it’s a safe bet that Sanders and the other progressives in Congress will pressure the president to come out for killing the filibuster altogether. And he just might “go along for the ride as he has on everything” since he was sworn in. 

So far, Sen. Sanders has been keeping a low profile. Except for his trip to Alabama to support a union drive at an Amazon facility, we haven’t really heard much from him lately — not directly, anyway. Maybe that’s because he’s got the “moderate” in the White House doing the talking for him.

Bernard Goldberg is an Emmy and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award-winning writer and journalist. He was a correspondent with HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel” for 22 years, and previously worked as a reporter for CBS News and as an analyst for Fox News. He is the author of five books and publishes exclusive weekly columns, audio commentaries and Q&As on his Patreon page. Follow him on Twitter @BernardGoldberg.