Bernie Sanders' Monster Comes For Him

Ploy To Cynically Misrepresent Donor Reports Boomerangs On Ex-Pres Candidate

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will almost certainly be our next Secretary of Health and Human Services. People will likely die because of it, but Republicans have the Senate majority now, and his confirmation needs no votes from the Democratic caucus.

That includes Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), who for a time seemed open to the idea of voting for RFK Jr. because of some of his ideas on nutrition and regulation of pharmaceutical companies. However, any potential crossover support Sanders would be willing to give died a brutal death last month when RFK Jr. and Sanders butted heads in a confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.

Sanders aggressively questioned Kennedy on his past anti-vaccine and support for pseudoscience, to which Kennedy laughably accused Sanders and his ideological near-equal Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) of being on the dole of Big Pharma.

“By the way, Bernie, the problem of corruption is not just in the federal agencies, it’s in Congress too,” Kennedy said. “Almost all the members of this panel, including yourself, are accepting millions of dollars from the pharmaceutical industry and protecting their interests.”

When I heard that in Kennedy’s crackling cocaine-ravaged voice, I almost couldn’t believe it.

His allegations are based on an OpenSecrets.com report that showed Bernie was the top recipient of donations from the “Pharmaceuticals and Health Products” industry in 2020. The report lists Bernie as having received $1,417,633 in donations from donors who are employed in the industry, but the report doesn’t explicitly explain that, so a casual observer can easily mistake it as money raised from the industry in general, through significant donations from CEOs or other top big wigs. Sanders, unlike several other senators on the list, received no money or support from political action committees formed and dedicated to advocating for the industry’s agenda. All that money Kennedy alluded to came from everyday people who happened to be employed in the industry. Since people employed in the sector are likely to be higher educated, live in liberal areas, and are younger – all Bernie Sanders’ base voters – it’s not surprising they would donate to him and other Democrats.

OpenSecrets’ definition of “Pharmaceutical and Health Products” doesn’t just mean people employed by Pfizer or Eli Lilly but also those used in companies that make products like deodorant, soap, makeup, and skin cream. Does Kennedy think the 26-year-old who does billing for Estee Lauder, donating $324overf a year to Bernie in 2019-2020 because she wants Medicare For All or her student loans forgiven, is a cog in the wheel of corruption? It’s a laughable accusation, considering Kennedy himself got the backing of one of the wealthiest pharmaceutical CEOs in the country to be HHS Secretary.

The top five Democratic Senators who received donations from those employed in the Pharmaceutical and Health Products industry in 2020.

It is utterly dishonest and ridiculous to accuse Bernie Sanders of all people of being a shill for Big Pharma. The only other person the industry hates more than him is Warren. Kennedy and MAGA allies are using a disgusting, disingenuous lie to sell the argument that the donations given to Sanders and Warren by rank-and-file employees of companies in the industry are instead donations that come from CEOs or Super PACS. It’s not the same thing. It is meant to deceive people and convince them that Sanders is a hypocrite.

When you donate to a political candidate, you must include where you work in the disclosure forms.

When a close friend of mine decided to run for the New York State Senate years back, he asked me to donate to him, and I was hesitant. Not because I didn’t support him, I did. Still, because in the disclosure, I would have to acknowledge that I worked as a real estate agent and was a member of the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY). I was worried, probably needlessly and a bit too narcissistically on my part, that his opponents would use that against him. When I donated to him, I did not do so in a quid pro quo, expecting that he would support pro-real estate industry legislation. I knew he would call for stricter rent control laws and rent regulations and perhaps eliminate rental broker fees, but those were not my top priorities.

Protecting drug patents and protecting industry profits are not the top priorities of the thousands of employees of the pharmaceutical and Health Products industry who donated money to Bernie Sanders because he explicitly campaigned against those things. Those donors likely donated to Bernie and other Democrats for different priorities, whether it be social issues, foreign policy, or labor issues.

Nevertheless, this is a disingenuous monster Bernie and his rabid supporters created. Weaponizing fundraising reports against their opponents to make it seem they were tools of unpopular industries and corruption simply because of the vagueness of the information was used by Bernie’s campaign against Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and other Democratic candidates for office in 2016 and 2020. They had hoped to use the information to spin a narrative that these candidates and the Democratic Party, in general, are hopelessly corrupt and only Bernie Sanders is clean enough to have the credibility to lead the party.

This type of cynical ploy did not work. It turned off a lot of moderate and loyal Democratic voters who didn’t vote for Bernie, in part because of the behavior of his supporters and campaign. Worse yet, it set a precedence that Bernie now fell victim to; this type of information can be weaponized against an opponent to damage them politically by presenting it in a disingenuous way.

Like Dr. Frankenstein losing control of his monster, Bernie Sanders is the target of this type of cynical politics. We’d all be better off if this type of politics also rode off into oblivion on an iceberg.