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Bernie Sanders’ Campaign Manager on Why Pundits Don’t Like His Boss
Faiz Shakir lets loose on partisan rancor, how MSNBC treats Bernie, and his dream to coach high-school baseball
April 2016, and the bad blood between the two Democratic presidential hopefuls, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, was near its peak. Calls for Sanders to quit the primary race were growing louder — as were accusations that the Clinton campaign had its thumb on the scales at the DNC. (The emails that would eventually prove the latter claim had been stolen from campaign chair John Podesta just weeks before.) Social media was a howling vortex of enraged Sanders and Clinton supporters.
And Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and his close aide, Faiz Shakir, were busy pouring oil on the troubled waters of their fractious party.
“Bernie usually finds a way to be helpful at the end of the day,” Shakir told Politico at the time. “That’s always been the case, whether it was the Affordable Care Act, Dodd-Frank. There are places where he might have, initially, some concerns. But at the end of the day, he’s found a way to be helpful.”
This delicate, diplomatic approach is still very characteristic of Shakir, who is now working as Bernie Sanders’s campaign director. Shakir doesn’t exhibit a trace of the vicious, win-at-all-costs instincts of prominent Democratic campaign operatives of earlier times, like James Carville or Rahm Emanuel; Shakir is a new kind of superstar in Democratic politics, with a long history of working to lead the party from the center to the left.
He’s 39 years old, the son of Pakistani immigrants, Muslim, grew up in Florida; he’s married, with two daughters, ages four and almost-two. The product of elite institutions (Harvard B.A., where he played baseball; Georgetown J.D.), Shakir has soft-spokenly risen to the top at every institution, every gig. He started out as a legislative aide to Senator Bob Graham and worked on opposition research in John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign. Thence to the Center for American Progress (CAP), where, over seven years, he helped found the ThinkProgress blog, serving as its editor-in-chief until 2012. [Three days before this interview was published, ThinkProgress was summarily…
