The Poet Laureate of Bernie Porn Does Not Want To Talk To The Beast

Published May 31, 2016 in

Every candidate gets the surrogate he deserves, and Bernie Sanders has H.A. Goodman, a dedicated, secretive supporter who’s become a cable TV staple and a near legend among the campaign press corps, which celebrates each new missive from the man who’s been called “the poet laureate” of “Bernie porn.”

When supporters of Bernie Sanders turned a normally placid state party convention into a chair-tossing riot, one that included death threats against the party chair, H.A. Goodman took to YouTube.

Wearing a polo shirt and glaring down at the camera below, Goodman said it was time for Hillary Clinton and her supporters to face facts and rally around the inevitable nominee—Sanders. If the party was descending into chaos, blame not the young supporters of the Socialist insurgent, but the establishment hacks blinded by their lust for the power.

“There are probably millions of examples online of Hillary supporters intimidating, bullying, berating and attacking Bernie Sanders supporters,” Goodman said beneath two framed water colors in the room where he shoots most of his legion of video commentaries, which appears to be in his Los Angeles-area home. “So the whole Bernie Bro myth is actually reversed. The most condescending, the most aggressive, the meanest people online, and also the most entitled people are Hillary supporters. They can’t even imagine not voting for someone not under criminal FBI investigation.”

For nearly 20 minutes Goodman goes on like this: It is Hillary Clinton who is propping up extremists, it is Bernie Sanders who is the front-runner and who would stand a better chance of beating Donald Trump in November if only the Democratic Party power base would listen, never mind that Clinton has an insurmountable lead in delegates and has won millions of more votes.

“It has never been about rules or delegate count. And everything is completely fixed,” Goodman says in the video, which as of last count has been viewed nearly 14,000 times.

“Democratic establishment, are you stupid?” Goodman continues, before adding, “Don’t blame Bernie Sanders voters for your not only flawed candidate, your horrible candidate, Hillary Clinton. The worst candidate you could ever imagine!”

Every election season bring new voices jumping on new media platforms. In 2004 there was the rise of Netroots, with Wonkette and the Daily Kos and others snapping and snarking away on their laptops to bring down the Bush regime. 2008 saw Politico and the rise of Facebook, 2012 Buzzfeed and Twitter. And this moment, with the state of online discourse seemingly coarser than ever, platforms becoming increasingly irrelevant, and a full revolt threatening to tear the Democratic Party apart is made for someone like Goodman.

Consider just a few of Goodman’s headlines for The Huffington Post, for whom he contributes as an unpaid blogger, which combine a faint air of menace with a near complete disregard for either facts or nuance.

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Such yawps have been greeted with smirking appreciation from the political press corps.

“HuffPo should start running HA Goodman's Bernie fanfic in the entertainment section,” tweeted Business Insider editor Josh Barro.

“Hoooolllllllly shit, H.A. Goodman continues to be the greatest source of comedy this election cycle,” wrote columnist Gary Legum after Goodman wrote a blog post comparing Hillary Clinton to Enron.

“I call this genre Bernieporn” wrote Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel.“HA Goodman is its poet laureate.”

Even in the progressive blogging community, many have cast a skeptical eye on Goodman, not least because before jumping on the Sanders bandwagon he wrote columns endorsing Republican Rand Paul and conservative Democrat Jim Webb.

“He wrote a piece saying that if Bernie isn’t the nominee, we should all just throw the election and let Donald Trump win,” said John Amato, one of the original progressive bloggers at the site Crooks and Liars and someone whose political action committee, Blue America, endorsed Sanders early on and raised tens of thousands of dollars on his behalf. “I was reading that and I was just like, this is insanity. What kind of idiot would ever say something like that? A guy who supported Rand Paul and then Bernie Sanders now wants to turn over the White House to Donald Trump? It’s insanity.”

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As Amato sees it, people like him are about a decade in to building a progressive movement that mirrors what conservatives have been doing for 30 years on the Republican side. At this point, the goal is to have a big liberal tent, and welcome institutional players inside so long as they pivot to the left. Goodman is five steps ahead, acting like a Tea Partier, and trying to kick out anyone who doesn’t toe the liberal line.

“He sounds like somebody who is going to eventually write for Breitbart. Every article is, ‘Hillary is going to be indicted and arrested’, along those lines. I am for a lot of what Bernie has proposed but he is playing the progressive community to just get clicks.”

On Reddit, there has been talk of banning Goodman from a subreddit devoted to Sanders’s supporters.

“He's optimistic to the point of delusion, everything he writes is worthless reposted fluff that refuses to acknowledge that while, yes, Bernie's doing surprisingly well, he's still FAR behind nationally and if any of us are honest, we know that he's not where he would prefer to be,” wrote the user who proposed kicking Goodman out of the club.

Goodman, who also writes semi-regularly for pay for Salon and The Hill, has parlayed such sentiments into an even larger platform, appearing semi-regularly as a pro-Bernie pundit on left-leaning radio talk shows or cable TV, where hosts can be seen battling exasperation with Goodman’s ability to turn every question into an answer about Bernie Sanders’ superior qualities as a general election opponent.

For example, in March, when CNN International host John Vause asked Goodman about a new report from the Economist Intelligence Unit that ranked the possibility of a Trump presidency as a global threat on par with the rise of ISIS, Goodman responded that no one had reason to worry since Trump wouldn’t get most of his agenda through Congress—unlike Sanders, who would.

When the host cut him off and asked about concern from the international community about the rise of Trump, Goodman responded that George W. Bush wasn’t very popular globally either, and that “the same people who advised Bush hate Trump and are advising Clinton.”

“If you fear Trump, like I said, vote for Bernie Sanders,” Goodman added, to which Vause, perhaps realizing how the rest of the segment was going to go, started audibly chuckling to himself.

In a media environment in which self-promotion is a necessary ingredient to success, Goodman stars. His commentary, whether on YouTube, on cable, or in print often references his previous utterances in another medium.

“During my latest appearance on MSNBC, I explained that superdelegates exist to elect a candidate like Bernie Sanders, not Hillary Clinton,” is a typical Goodman lede. In the piece noted above about Clinton’s hypothetical treatment of Jewish Americans, four of the first six sentences in the opening paragraph begin similarly: “Recently, I appeared on CNN New Day…” and “I 2014, I wrote a piece…”

I reached out to Goodman to interview him about his place in the media firmament of 2016, and to find out how someone who once pledged his fealty to Rand Paul this election cycle came to so fervently #FeelTheBern.

And so I emailed him from the address listed on his website. He didn’t write back, so a day or two later I followed up. Worried that my email had somehow ended up in his spam filter, I tracked down a phone number and called him. Before my full name was out of my mouth, Goodman hung up on me. In case his phone had dropped the call somehow, I dialed again and got his answering machine.

Then Goodman took to Twitter.

“Dear @freedlander if I wanted to do an interview, I would have emailed you back. Second, I never gave you my number. Third, don't call again,” Goodman wrote. My Twitter @ mentions soon became a repository of Bernie-bro bile and threats. One of Goodman’s minions threatened a lawsuit (not sure over what, exactly.) Another simply wrote, “FEAR.”

I emailed Goodman back to find out what the hell was going on.

“I am not sure why you are being so aggressive here,” I wrote. “My interest is genuine and sincere. Apologies for calling you, but I am a reporter. It comes with the job description. How was I to know you had seen my email? If you just wrote me back and said you weren't interested in an interview, I would have bothered you no more.”

He never emailed back, but responded on Twitter and began one of his YouTube segments (after running through a listing of his appearances on cable television) thusly.

“Creepy reporter guy: this is day two of the creepy weird reporter guy trying to contact me for an interview. Now I have interviews in the works with other people, I don’t know why this guy feels that I owe him something, but he contacted me for the fourth time via email saying, ‘Why won’t you answer my questions?’

“Excuse my language, but I am thinking, ‘Who the fuck is this guy that I am supposed to answer his questions after he calls me, and I didn’t even give him my phone number?’ So now I am wondering how did this guy get my phone number? Very weird. Very bizarre. So today was the second day on Twitter I told him to never contact me again. Very weird, very bizarre creepy reporter guy.”

Minus Goodman’s help, I had to piece together what I could about him.

I reached out to David Daley, the executive editor of Salon, which gives Goodman perhaps his biggest platform.

Daley told me that he reached out to Goodman after reading his pro-bono columns over at the Huffington Post, and was impressed enough to repurpose one of them for his site. Every time Goodman puts something up over at HuffPo, he sends to Daley, who estimated that they end up publishing—and paying for—only about a quarter of what he pitches.

“He is the full-throated avatar of the Bernie-Or-Bust movement,” Daley told me. “This is an important element of the progressive cause right now and it deserves a voice.”

But Daley knew no more about his contributor — who was the subject of a spirited internal debate after one staffer there sent an email complaining about how his articles reflected on the rest of the company’s work — than I do.

“Clearly he is a passionate true-believer in the Bernie Sanders cause. That enthusiasm comes out in his emails to me the same way it expresses itself in his columns, but I don’t have a sense of his history or what his politics may be. I have no idea what he does when he is not writing about Bernie Sanders.”

On LinkedIn, Goodman lists himself as the owner of “Professor Consultant, Inc,” which links up businesses with academics for consulting, speaking gigs or research.

“Most professors do not even accept phone calls from the general public. Finding a professor willing to work for you, meet your deadlines, and negotiate a price for consulting service is an extremely difficult task,” Goodman writes on the site. “Professor Consultant does all this work for you!”

Goodman lists not a single connection on LinkedIn, but does note that his business is a member of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. Under “honors and awards” he says that he was voted “the biggest mensch” at his local synagogue.

According to online biographies, Goodman, 40, graduated from the University of Southern California, worked as a financial analyst for Morgan Stanley and Charles Schwab, a fact confirmed by both companies. He taught history briefly at a high school in Los Angeles, although two faculty members who taught in the same department at the same time as him do not remember him, even when presented with a photograph. A third did confirm that Goodman taught there briefly, but her only memory of him was as someone “who really didn’t want to be a teacher and did not leave a mark.” He worked, also briefly, for the U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute, an assignment that would have put him, however tangentially, under the employ of his current bête noire, Hillary Clinton.

Most of this information can be gleaned from promotional material gleaned from Goodman’s previous sidelight, as an author of fantasy novels. He has penned two, Logic of Demons and a follow-up, Breaking The Devil’s Heart, both of which were self-published.

The second book, as Goodman described it in a press release, “creates an afterlife never before seen in a novel. God is nowhere to be found, hell is an office, Satan is a female CEO, demons in suits peddle evil to fulfill sales quotas, and heaven is taken over by fundamentalists.”

The main characters “recruit demons as spies, torture demons for information, infiltrate the hellish Company and its Stock Exchange, and eventually find out that Satan, evil, and human fallibility share an eerily common connection.”

It is hard not to read the current Goodman—the one who condones Sanderista violence and who believes that Clinton is evil incarnate--with the novels, with their fantastical descriptions of a corporate underworld with a female CEO as its overlord. The novels really take place in the realm of ideas, and even his favorable reviewers on sites like Goodreads, the ones who admit to getting comped a copy of the book in exchange for a review, complain that the books could use an editor and feel a bit heavy-handed at times.

“How I know you ain’t a cop, white boy?” says one character, a Puerto Rican drug dealer, to the nerdy Jewish main character in a representative bit of dialogue.

Toward the end of his press release, Goodman describes his novel as one which “highlights how the confluence of tribalism, narcissism, and primal emotions allow even the most ordinary of individuals to engage in the most heinous atrocities.” Although no one would suggest that disputing caucus delegate results is a heinous atrocity, we are in a moment when tribalism, narcissism, and certainly primal emotions are permitting ordinary individuals to act in ways they would not have even a few months ago, whether it be sending death threats to state political party leaders or pledging to not vote for Hillary Clinton even if it means that Donald Trump will be the next president.

All of which would have been interesting to get Goodman’s take on, especially as he finds himself stuck in the middle of so much of it and encouraging the revolution to continue.

Which I thought I would be able to do. Because just below those lofty sentiments on the press release, on the Internet for everyone to see, is H.A. Goodman’s telephone number.