Author who wrote book about presidential hopeful: ‘Sanders is the revolution’

By Kyle Roerink

Monday, Dec. 7, 2015 | 2 a.m.

Writer Jonathan Tasini and Sen. Bernie Sanders have at least one thing in common: They’ve both campaigned against Hillary Clinton.

Tasini challenged Clinton in 2006 in the Democratic primary for one of New York’s U.S. Senate seats. He lost by 58 percentage points.

More recently, Tasini, 59, wrote a book about Sanders, Clinton’s opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Tasini’s “The Essential Bernie Sanders” isn’t an expose or biography. It is a handbook and introduction to Sanders.

Based on speeches, news clips and legislation, “it’s an organizer’s book and designed as a conversation between Sanders and voters,” Tasini said.

Tasini, a former National Writers Union president, has spent his career advocating for many of the same things that Sanders supports: higher wages, worker protections (Tasini led a lawsuit against The New York Times and won) and bashing the billionaire class.

Tasini conducted an extensive interview with Sanders in 2013 for Playboy. At the time, Sanders said he was 1 percent sure he would run for president.

When Sanders announced his presidential campaign in May, Tasini mobilized. He pitched his book idea to a publisher and wrote it in 22 days. The original run of 50,000 copies was published Sept. 8. The book now is in its second edition.

Tasini recently spoke with The Sunday about why he has no advice for Sanders and how Google makes life easier for writers.

You knew Sanders from union events and interviewed him for more than six hours for Playboy. What was it about him that made you “feel the Bern”?

What struck me was how authentic he was. The person you see speaking in front of 20,000 people is the same person you see one on one, both in the way he talks and in the way he communicates. When he decided to run, I thought: “What can I do to make a contribution to the debate?”

Both you and Sanders have run against Clinton. Any advice for Sanders?

He is doing a lot better than I did. He doesn’t need advice.

You lost to Clinton, but you don’t write negatively about her in the book. Why?

There are two reasons: I wanted to mirror the high road that Bernie has always wanted to take, which is not to attack. Second, I wanted people to know what his positions were. For years, he has believed firmly in expanding Social Security, breaking up big banks and raising the minimum wage. I thought it would be useful to put his words out there. I thought about it as an organizer — how do you mobilize the movement?

It took 22 days to write. How is that possible?

If Google didn’t exist, you couldn’t do this book in that timeframe. I spent 12 hours a day researching. I knew a lot of it, but I spent a lot of time self-editing.

Sanders’ label as a Democratic socialist has spurred lots of questions about his political philosophy. What do you think his most radical idea is?

Let’s consider the mainstream public versus what elites say. When you say to mainstream people, “Let’s have health care for all,” nobody says that’s radical. How you get there may be different, but it’s the elites who think that’s radical. Inside Washington, they talk about cutting Social Security, but for the majority of the public, that doesn’t make sense. Another area: free education. That’s radical only in a country where people leave college with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. In the real world, that’s not radical.

If Sanders loses, what happens to the revolution he’s calling for?

Ask me that down the road. I firmly think he’s going to win. He’s an extension of Occupy Wall Street. Whatever criticism people have of it, a lot of people came into politics because of that movement. A lot of Bernie supporters cut their teeth in Occupy.

I’ve been to all four of the early voting states (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina). When I see the crowds, nobody disagrees that you need a political revolution. The majority is frustrated and sick of politics. Sanders is the revolution; all the other candidates are the status quo. Given the choice, I think people are going to want the revolution. We’ll see what happens when votes are counted.