Bernie Sanders is a United States senator from Vermont. John Kiriakou’s account of him is not political but observational, drawn from the years he spent as a staffer for Senator John Kerry on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, when the two men kept the same early hours in the same building.
The cafeteria
Kiriakou’s routine was a bagel from the Senate cafeteria every morning, and the detail he retained is that Sanders was always already there. “Every single morning there was Bernie sitting at a table having breakfast and inviting any Joe who walked in off the street to sit and have breakfast with him — and the only thing he insisted on was that you call him Bernie.”[1]
He sets that against the opposite manner in the same room, which he says he witnessed directly: another senator who would announce “I’m a senator coming through, I’m going to the front of the line, I’m a senator” — and who, on one occasion, “shove[d] a pregnant woman out of his way so he could go to the front of the cashier’s line.” Kiriakou’s summary of the comparison is four words: “Bernie’s not like that.”[2]
The 2016 field
Asked in April 2016 whether any presidential candidate might address the torture question seriously, Kiriakou named two. The first was Sanders — “who I just absolutely adore” — and the second, “as crazy as it sounds,” was Rand Paul, whom he immediately discounted on electoral grounds: Paul “doesn’t mind polling at two percent,” but “he can’t win a Republican primary.”[3]
Sanders reappears in Kiriakou’s argument about why American foreign-policy debate had narrowed to counterterrorism alone. His explanation is structural — that the country has “transitioned to a permanent wartime economy,” that large corporations “can thrive only in this permanent wartime economy,” and that this requires “an enemy that we can build up against” at all times. The evidence he offers for the grip of that arrangement is the silence of the field: “almost none of the presidential candidates, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, are talking about actually downsizing the military.”[4]
February 2020: the vote and the expectation
Two weeks before his primary, Kiriakou said flatly that he loved Sanders and would “proudly vote for Bernie Sanders,” and thought he had “enough momentum to put everybody else away.”[5]
The expectation attached to it was pessimistic: “that’s not to say that the Democratic National Committee won’t steal this thing from him at the Democratic convention again, exactly” as in 2016.[6] The evidence he gave for again was two contests: “Bernie Sanders won the West Virginia primary and the Colorado caucus, won handily, and didn’t get a single delegate in either one of those states. Hillary Clinton got all the delegates. That’s not democracy.”[6]
Asked whether the party would break up over it, his answer was two sentences long: he would not be surprised at all, “and Trump’s gonna win anyway.”[7][8]