Why Bernie Sanders Matters by Harry Jaffe

ONE: The Evangelist

"There are a lotta people here. A lotta. I cannot believe this crowd." —BERNIE SANDERS, Phoenix, July 18, 2015

The Penn Branch Shopping Center sits at the top of Pennsylvania Avenue as it crests a hill overlooking Washington, DC, from the east. On a clear day, when the leaves are off the trees, you can glimpse the tops of landmarks in the nation's capital city: the US Capitol dome, the Washington Monument, the Jefferson Memorial.

This stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue bears little resemblance to the power corridor between the White House and the Capitol, the grand boulevard that some call "America's Main Street" because it hosts the Inaugural Parade every four years. Penn Branch occupies a corner of the other Washington, the one that stretches along the part of Pennsylvania Avenue that runs east of the Anacostia River, where middle- and lower-class African American families struggle to make it in neighborhoods just a few miles from the nation's halls of power. The shopping center is a row of fifteen shabby storefronts strung along a cramped parking lot. The windows of the beauty salon are cracked. The restaurant-supply store has gone out of business. You have to drive miles to find a sit-down restaurant. But the liquor store and check-cashing joint are bustling. Unemployment in surrounding neighborhoods is around 15 percent; black youth unemployment hovers around 50 percent.

Penn Branch, where small businesses go to die, is the setting for Raymond Bell's lifelong dream. Up a dusty staircase and down a long, narrow hall Bell runs the HOPE Project out of a corner office on the strip mall's second floor. For nearly a decade the nonprofit, which stands for Helping Other People Excel, has offered free classes to train low-income, predominantly African American young adults for information-technology jobs. In a job-training field that's not known for positive outcomes, Bell can point to a roster of success stories. His program has trained 375 students since 2010, most of whom have found well-paying jobs in the region's burgeoning government-contracting sector. Brandon Craig enrolled in HOPE while working at a Virginia liquor store, completed the course, and landed jobs with Hewlett-Packard and then a US Navy contractor. Sonya Davis went from credit union teller to analyst for the Commerce Department. Alyssia Suarez graduated from the program in 2012 and signed on with a defense contractor in Herndon, Virginia.

"These young people are energetic, smart, and talented," says the tall, wiry, bespectacled Bell. "All they need is strict, straightforward training."

On June 4, 2015, a red Ford Focus with Vermont plates pulled up to the door leading to the HOPE offices. US Senator Bernard Sanders swung his long legs out the back door and pulled himself up. He reached back in for a yellow legal pad and tried to organize the sheets of paper sticking out of it. He looked around and scowled, as if he had arrived at a wake. "Is this it?" he asked.

A week earlier, before a rousing crowd in Burlington, his political base, the seventy-three-year-old Vermont senator had officially launched his campaign for president. The audience thrilled to his call to arms for the "political revolution" he would commandeer from the White House. He embraced his "brothuhs and sistuhs" as if the thousands who came to listen were among his political intimates. Many were. But Sanders returned to a nation's capital that was unimpressed. The visit to HOPE had been on his schedule for weeks, yet no news cameras, no hordes of reporters, no rope lines to hold back fans greeted his arrival. If Hillary Rodham Clinton, his principal competition for the Democratic nomination, had shown up, reporters would have been elbowing each other aside for a better glimpse of the former secretary of state.

Sanders, though, was unfazed. He had come to HOPE to unveil the Employ Young Americans Now Bill, his latest legislation to stem high unemployment. It would allot $5.5 billion in federal aid to states to employ young people in summer and year-round jobs. He entered the program's cramped rooms to find more than a dozen students sitting at rows of tables with desktop computers. The only cameras were from a couple of local TV stations. Sanders smiled and waved as he walked to the lectern and microphone at the front of the class beneath a sign on the wall that read "Harvard of the 'Hood."