My Journey with Bernie

By Kacey Carpenter

In My Journey with Bernie, Kacey Carpenter shares his personal story and lessons learned from people he met during the campaign, at caucuses and primaries, and conventions. Along his journey, he gains trust in the power of people with renewed optimism for "A Future to Believe In."

"Look it's not about me, it's about us, and when we stand together we can do anything," Bernie Sanders tells the volunteers at the Reno Rally in December 2015, pointing his finger directly at me, Kacey recalls, urging all of us to do more. "At that moment, Kacey says, "I feel the Bern."

Soon, he is co-leading 300 people from 30 states to go to Iowa for the first Democratic Party caucus to begin a journey traveling around the country and the world.

My Journey with Bernie is an adventure and reads like a "roller coaster ride" with incredible highs, steep drops, and lows with inspirational, uplifting stories about the people who are bringing enthusiasm, hope, and leading a new political revolution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kacey Carpenter
• Release date: Feb 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370339938

Kacey Carpenter

Kacey Carpenter is a community organizer, volunteer, technology innovator, parent, and author. He served as a Bernie Sanders delegate at the 2016 Democratic National Convention and as a volunteer to get out the vote in California and ten other states, including co-leading 300 people from 30 states to Iowa. Kacey's journey with Bernie inspired him to continue to fight for the people. He formed NorCal4Bernie, leads NorCal4OurRevolution, ran for Mountain View City Council, helped pass Measure V for rent stabilization, is an elected California Democratic Party Assembly Delegate (AD24), and co-chairs the Bayshore Progressive Democrats club. With a career spanning three decades in the technology industry, he led global teams focused on the intersection of technology innovation and public sector transformation. He collaborated with local, state, and national government organizations leading initiatives for healthcare, justice, community policing, and smart communities around the world. He holds an MBA from The Wharton School of The University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor of Science degree from UCLA. He has a passion for life, family, friends and loves the outdoors biking, hiking, kayaking, traveling, and volunteering. He lives in northern California.

Book preview

My Journey with Bernie

THE REVOLUTION STARTS WITH US

KACEY CARPENTER

Copyright © 2017-2018 Kacey Carpenter

Visit my website at MyJourneywithBernie.com

Smashwords Edition License Notes:


Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.

Cover design: Cari Templeton

To all the amazing, creative, and dedicated people around the country and the world, inspired by Bernie, leading our revolution every day.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Chapter One: The Big Short

Chapter Two: The Campaign Begins

Chapter Three: I Feel the Bern

Chapter Four: Let’s Go to Iowa

Chapter Five: The Revolution Starts with Us

Chapter Six: My Journey Continues

Chapter Seven: California, Here We Come

Chapter Eight: Philadelphia, 1776–2016

Chapter Nine: All Politics Is Local

Chapter Ten: California Grassroots Progressives

Chapter Eleven: Power of the People

Chapter Twelve: Lessons from My Journey

About the Author

Notes

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Amazing people helped me create this book and I am forever grateful. Thank you, Bernie, for sharing your vision for a future to believe in, Jane, for everything that you do, and my parents, Margaret and Ken, who inspire me every day of my life’s journey. Thank you, Kathy, for your support, patience, and love. To all my family with a special appreciation for Cass and Rob for providing my purpose.

Thanks to everyone on the journey, including volunteers, surrogates, campaign, nurses, California delegation, the 1900 delegates, California grassroots progressives, Mountain View Tenants Coalition, Our Revolution, NorCal4OurRevolution, and the Bayshore Progressive Democrats club.

To the reviewers of the manuscript for their valuable feedback and creativity, thanks to Maren Hackmann-Mahajan, Bobbie McGowan, Kathy Sharp, and Michelle Elizabeth Smith, and many others. To Cari Templeton for the cover design. To Michele Gibson for reviewing the layout. You have made the book better.

CHAPTER ONE

THE BIG SHORT

I have a feeling, in a few years people are going to be doing what they always do when the economy tanks. They will be blaming immigrants and poor people.

—Mark Baum, The Big Short¹

Eight years of policies that have shredded consumer protections, loosened oversight and regulation, and encouraged outsized bonuses to CEOs while ignoring middle-class Americans have brought us to the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression.

—Barack Obama²

There's been tremendous turmoil in our financial markets and Wall Street and it is - people are frightened by these events. Our economy, I think, still the fundamentals of our economy are strong. But these are very, very difficult times.

—John McCain³

The year was 2008.

Life was good. I was optimistic about my life and confident that the future would be even better for myself and my family. I believed in the American dream and based on my life experience, I trusted others. As a student, I studied hard to get an education and earn degrees in college and graduate school. As a parent, raising children, I volunteered in schools, scouts, and sports programs. As a provider, I worked hard in a career in high-tech Silicon Valley, saved for college for our children, and bought a family home.

I felt confident that I would be able to continue on this journey, would honor the commitments to my family as a parent and provider, and fulfill our dreams. My conservative approach to saving for our family goals and all my hard work was beginning to pay off. Everything was coming together, and I was looking forward to a great future. I felt thankful and realized I was very fortunate.

HOW DID I GET HERE?

During the 1980s, I attended college at UCLA. I studied math, engineering, and computer science when access to public colleges and universities was affordable and available to residents in California.

Originally, the University of California was tuition-free for California residents when first established at the Berkeley campus in 1868. UCLA was founded in 1919 as the Southern Branch of the University of California and is now one of 10 U.C. campuses. In 1960, the California Master Plan continued to keep tuition free for residents with fees for laboratories, healthcare, and athletics. But in the 1970s the university system began to move away from free tuition for residents.⁴ Fortunately, in 1986, the year I graduated, college costs were still very affordable with annual tuition and fees of $1,296. I was able to work on campus during my college years at UCLA, as a community service officer and resident assistant in the dorms, then graduate without the burden of debt from student loans.

The value of my college education represented much more than the lessons I learned in the classrooms and computer labs. I experienced independence living away from home, developed skills working on campus in part-time jobs, and created relationships with other students and professors. At UCLA, I gained the confidence to overcome academic challenges in the classroom and life challenges in the dorms. I learned how to learn, met new people with different perspectives, and grew up to become a responsible adult. The experience was life-changing for my own journey and I hoped that my children would have this opportunity in the future.

After graduation, I began my career as a software engineer. Three years later, I decided to continue my education and learn more about business, marketing, and global markets. I applied to a dozen MBA programs and was very fortunate to be accepted to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. I applied for federal student loans and grants to help cover the costs of tuition, room, and board. This was a big step and financial commitment but I felt confident and believed that this investment in my education would be invaluable for my future.

It was the beginning of another new adventure.

I took a road trip and drove across the country, from California to Pennsylvania, in the late summer of 1989. I began my study at the preeminent Wharton program. It was a very interesting time to study international business, economics, and global markets. The economics professors were outstanding in their fields and taught about market economies, capitalism, and the banking system. At that time, the United States, Japan, and West Germany, were the three primary free market economies. The rest of the world was split between developing markets and communist regimes.

1989 was historic.⁵

During 1989, the world witnessed the death of the Supreme Leader of Iran. In China, the Tiananmen Square Massacre occurred when protesting students were suppressed and killed by troops of the People’s Liberation Army.⁶ There was the end of the Cold War; the collapse of the communist block; the invention of the World Wide Web; and expansion of the global Internet.⁷

In the fall of 1989, the Berlin Wall was opened by East German officials to allow travel from East to West Berlin. Immediately, Germans began to tear down the wall to protest and eliminate what had been the most symbolic image of the Cold War.⁸ This all happened during my first semester at Wharton.

I visited Germany during the holiday vacation break in December of 1989, and had the opportunity to see many East Germans driving small cars very slowly in the far right side on the autobahn. The Trabants, or Trabis, as the autos were named, were heading to the west with passengers ready to celebrate their new freedoms, the New Year and a new era. I will never forget that New Year’s Eve in Paris as thousands of people gathered in Champs-Elysées to celebrate freedom together.

But with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, political, economic, and technological changes all accelerated and would dramatically shift the world from communism to capitalism, from regional to global economies, and from manual processes and paper to digital computing and the Internet. Two years later, in 1991, George Bush was at the end of his term as the president of the United States; the Soviet Union had dissolved. The U.S. economy stalled and plunged into recession. Unfortunately, there were fewer jobs available for college graduates saddled with student loan debt.

Once I graduated with my MBA degree, I had accrued additional financial commitments, I had a mountain of college student loan and credit card debt, and I did not have a job lined up. The day after graduation, I loaded all my possessions into my car and drove back home to California. With my engineering expertise and MBA degree, I hoped I could find employment back in Silicon Valley.

SILICON VALLEY

Silicon Valley is the nickname for the region surrounding the San Francisco peninsula, the home of technology innovation and revolution. Now we know it as the home of Google and Facebook but it’s origins go back to World War II. The region encompasses the original silicon chip manufacturers, Stanford University, and the surrounding cities and towns are home to startups and high-tech corporations, including Hewlett Packard, Intel, and Apple.

During the Cold War period, Silicon Valley innovation sparked after the Soviet Union was first to reach space with the launch of Sputnik 1. NASA was created to help achieve President Kennedy’s moonshot vision in the space race.⁹ The spark ignited the region with innovative startups and a risk-taking culture that changed the lives of the people living and working in the region and around the world. In 1965, Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, made a prediction that set the pace for the technology revolution. Moore’s law predicted that computing power would grow exponentially doubling in performance every 2 years.¹⁰

I arrived home from my cross-country journey from Philadelphia to Mountain View, the center of Silicon Valley, and was thrilled to receive a job offer from Sun Microsystems, one of the new startups following in the footsteps of HP, Intel, and Apple.

I planned to work hard in Silicon Valley, start my family, and pay off my student loans. Starting a college education savings plan for our children was a high priority for me. When the kids were in elementary school, I committed to save so that they could have the same opportunities to get an education as I had. As an extra conservative person, I put aside a large percentage of my earnings into cash savings rather than risky investments in the stock market.

The exponential growth of the Internet continued with the World Wide Web, new digital technologies, and a shift to an economy based on connected computers known as the Information Age.¹¹ The stock market continued to reach historic peaks until the dot com bubble burst in 2002. The Nasdaq Composite lost seventy-eight percent from the peak to bottom.¹²

Fortunately, my hard work and extremely conservative approach to saving for family goals, allowed me to avoid the crash and continue my journey to assure our children’s future; there were still many years ahead of us. My American dream was alive and well. I felt very fortunate and hopeful for our future.

By 2007, I saved enough for a down payment on a small 3-bedroom house in Mountain View in a quiet neighborhood close enough for the kids to bike to school and participate in sports, scouts, and other activities that were the center of their lives, and mine as well. The price of a small house in Mountain View was significant, but I secured a loan with leveraged debt from the bank to finance it. Buying a house was a big and scary decision to make since I still had memories of stress from the student loan debt. I trusted that, through hard work, my conservative approach to saving, and my focus on family, this investment in our home would pay off. I was living the American dream.

During this time, I continued to work in Silicon Valley at Cisco. Cisco benefited from the early, hyper-growth days of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Even after the bubble burst, Cisco continued to be a company with a positive vision to change the way we work, live, play, and learn. I trusted Cisco, and it was a great place to work. We believed that we were changing the world. We were part of a revolution, the Internet Revolution.

2008 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

The year was 2008. I felt optimistic about my life, confident. My belief that the future would be even better for me and our family continued to motivate me.

It was an election year. It was exciting to see all the candidates on national television networks covering the Republican and Democratic party primaries. There were three very strong candidates, including John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama.

According to the media and political pundits, all three candidates appeared to be highly qualified. Each had a different background and political perspective and with significant support from different groups in our country. I watched them on cable television and as I listened to them speak, I believed that each was a viable candidate to lead our country as our next president.

John McCain was portrayed as an American hero. Both his father and grandfather served in the United States Navy, both as four-star admirals. He followed in their footsteps, graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1958, and became a naval aviator flying ground-attack aircraft from carriers during the Vietnam War. In October 1967, he was shot down, seriously injured, and captured by the North Vietnamese and held as a prisoner of war until 1973. After retiring from the Navy, McCain entered politics and was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1982 and served two terms. He then ran for U.S. Senate in 1986 and easily won re-election again and again.

In 2000, McCain ran against George W. Bush for the Republican candidate for President but was defeated in a heated primary contest. This was his chance to run again in 2008 as he successfully secured his candidacy from the Republican party.¹³ At that time, during the televised debates, media interviews, and Republican convention speeches, I listened to him speak and felt able to trust his words, patriotism, and conservative vision for keeping Americans safe.

McCain was the presumptive Republican presidential nominee since incumbent President Bush had served two full terms and Vice President Dick Cheney chose not to run. On March 4, 2008, McCain became the Republican party’s nominee at the convention.

Just as John McCain was an American hero for millions of Americans, Hillary Clinton was viewed by many as a female American hero too. Her roles as First Lady in the White House during her husband Bill Clinton’s two terms as President from 1993 to 2000, the first female senator from New York elected in 2000 and re-elected again in 2006, and as Secretary of State contributed to her run.¹⁴

From the start, Hillary Clinton played a key role in Bill Clinton’s campaign and his two-term presidency. Both Clintons were visible on the campaign trail and after the election in the White House as well. Bill Clinton positioned himself as a New Democrat with centrist neoliberal policies and was the first Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt to serve two full terms. During his first term, the economy rebounded from the recession and entered a period of economic prosperity. As First Lady of the United States, Hillary Clinton advocated for gender equality and healthcare reform.

During the second term, however, Bill Clinton’s economic policy success achieving the first federal budget surplus since the 1960s was overshadowed by his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky and his impeachment in 1998. During the Lewinsky scandal, Hillary Clinton’s relationship with her husband came under public scrutiny, forcing her to issue a statement reaffirming her commitment to the marriage. Hillary Clinton then went on to build her reputation in the Senate from 2000–2008. The Clinton political machine was very powerful but some Americans were still divided in their trust of the Clintons and the race for the Democratic party nominee turned out to be competitive.

Barack Obama, the young, charismatic U.S. Senator from Illinois, was also a historic candidate. Once elected, he would become the first African American to be President. He was born in Hawaii, graduated from Columbia in 1983, and Harvard Law School in 1988. He was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. After graduation, Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School. He served three terms in Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. He received national attention, in 2004, after delivering a well-received keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, and he won the election for the U.S. Senate in a landslide victory.

The Democratic primary contest between Clinton and Obama was close. At the time, I did not have any experience with primaries, caucuses, conventions, and superdelegates. I only understood that it was a very close race and the Democratic party nominee would either become the first black candidate or the first woman candidate for president. Both were historic opportunities.

A poll conducted by Pew Research in March of 2008 showed a forty-nine percent to thirty-nine percent advantage for Obama over Clinton for the Democratic nomination. The poll also predicted a likability advantage for Obama versus Clinton. Eighty percent found Obama inspiring and seventy-eight percent honest, patriotic, and down-to-earth. Only sixteen percent found him phony and a measly thirteen percent said he was hard to like. Approximately twice as many white Democrats said the word phony described Clinton rather than Obama (30% vs. 16%). The gap was even larger in perceptions of likability; forty-three percent of white Democratic voters said the phrase hard-to-like described Clinton, while just thirteen percent said it described Obama.¹⁵

The Democratic primary continued to be a very close race and remained competitive for longer than expected. Neither candidate received enough pledged delegates in the caucuses and primaries to achieve a majority. As a result, the outcome of the process depended on superdelegates.

According to Democratic party rules, pledged delegates are elected in each state caucus or primary election by the voters in each state. Superdelegates, or un-pledged delegates, who make up just under fifteen percent of the convention delegates include elected officials, party leaders, and lobbyists. They are seated automatically and choose for themselves who they vote for.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign gained momentum late in the primary, but after falling behind in crucial early primaries, she was not able to close the gap with Obama. After the last primary in June, she suspended her campaign and ended her bid to win over superdelegates—only trailing Obama in pledged delegates by 100, and a dead heat in the popular vote.¹⁶

As Hillary recalls, Finally Barack broke the ice by ribbing me a bit about the tough campaign I had run against him. Then he asked for my help uniting the party and winning the presidency. He wanted the two of us to appear together soon, and he wanted the Democratic National Convention in Denver to be unified and energized. He emphasized that he wanted Bill’s help as well.¹⁷

With the election approaching, I enjoyed spending time with family during summer vacation. As I thought about the future, I felt confident and hopeful. The summer of 2008 held excitement with the presidential election going on and the Summer Olympics in Beijing, China. I had visited China the previous year and had an opportunity to walk along the Great Wall. As I watched the opening ceremony, with more than two billion people almost one-third of the world’s population, it seemed like anything was possible. The Olympic ceremonies showcased history, culture, and athletic excellence. Usain Bolt set a world record of 9.69 seconds in the 100 meters final. As summer transitioned to fall, I was looking forward to the day our children would be heading to college and my dream for their future could be realized.

THE BIG SHORT

Suddenly everything changed.

On September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest investment bank in the United States, filed for bankruptcy protection. It seemed this resulted from their involvement in the subprime mortgage crisis, excessive risk taking, and allegations of other illegal activities. It was the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history with Lehman holding over $600 billion in assets. The bankruptcy triggered