The Candidates: Bernie Sanders

We ran candidates in almost every ward in the city. I probably have never worked so hard in my life. I knocked on almost every door in the city with the candidates that we were running with. And this is the winter time in Vermont, so we’re talking about 10 below zero, in zero weather. And on election night, the turnout was phenomenal for a non-mayor’s race, it was just off the charts. In five — if my memory is correct, in the five wards that we ran in, we won outright three of the wards, in all of the working class areas. And here is the most exciting thing about all of this. If you go back to the basement of City Hall and check the old records in Burlington, what you’ll find is that between 1979, that was the previous election before I won, and two years later when I was running for re-election we doubled voter turnout.

Well first of all this is a really charged moment in his early career and in American politics. There has been a revolution in Nicaragua. Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas are a left wing revolutionary movement that overthrows a repressive regime. They are seen as dangerous by the Reagan administration because they are so left wing, and the Republicans in Washington prop up a brutal right wing militia to fight the Sandinistas. Bernie Sanders is one of many Americans on the left who get involved at that point in demonstrating in favor of the Sandinistas, or against Ronald Reagan. Except Sanders takes it considerably further when he actually goes to Nicaragua, shakes hands with Ortega himself. This is a story that someone in Sanders’s position probably ought to be able to explain. Or at least you would think he would feel comfortable explaining it. And what I find somewhat confounding as a reporter is how much he resents even the prompt to go into his thinking at the time and to reflect a little bit on some of the things about his support for the Sandinistas that may not look as justifiable in retrospect. He doesn’t want to do that. My sense is that, at the heart of it for him, is this sense that even asking the question is a kind of red baiting, that it reflects the way the political establishment — and he very much lumps the media in with the political establishment, is out to get him. Much as it was in Burlington, much as he believes it was in the 2016 campaign. This is a guy who in his early days as mayor was described by a fellow elected official as representing the fungus of socialism. He is somebody who is very, very sensitive to anything he perceives as the charge that he is not just a populist, not just very liberal, but this wildly outside the mainstream dangerous radical. And when you raise Nicaragua, I do think that’s the nerve that it hits.

Source: The New York Times

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Bernie Sanders • Vermont • Working class • Back to the Basement • Puerto Rican general election, 2008 • Voter turnout • Politics of the United States • Nicaragua • Daniel Ortega • Sandinista National Liberation Front • Left-wing politics • Political repression • Ronald Reagan • Left-wing politics • Republicanism • Washington, D.C. • Right-wing politics • Militia • Sandinista National Liberation Front • Bernie Sanders • Left-wing politics • Sandinista National Liberation Front • Ronald Reagan • Nicaragua • Daniel Ortega • Bernie Sanders • Sandinista National Liberation Front • Red-baiting • Burlington, Vermont • Fungus • Socialism • Populism • Liberalism • Nicaragua •