27 thoughts on “Meet Bernie Sanders”

  2. Bolsie Bernie’s career seems to parallel that of his obvious mentor, Karl Marx. Marx was mostly a failure in the real world. He was a highly educated man for the time. At one point he even wrote guest editorials for the New York Herald Tribune, then edited by Horace Greely, a man who wrote personal letters to Abraham Lincoln. Yet he preferred to sit in the reading rooms of the British Museum while cooking up works like the Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto. Meanwhile, his wife and children lived in poverty, and his wife at one point had to pawn the family silver (what she had from her family). At one time he seems to have been on a British police watch list, and they actually visited his home, and the cops mentioned his family’s dismal living conditions. Losers attract losers. In a debate Bolshie Bernie would be ripe for the picking if he had to go against ANY of the Republican candidates on economics. If the MSM moderators would allow the debate to go that way, of course.

  3. Not to defend Bernie, but the article does seem to be incomplete. He was mayor of Burlington and a member of the House of Representatives before being elected to the Senate, so he *must* have received more than “single-digit support” during that time.

    Let’s be fair about this. When someone is this bad as Bernie, there’s no need to make him look worse than he is.

  4. “lack marketable skills”

    That’s a strange thing to say about someone who has been in high demand by his employers since 1981.

    – Sanders was elected Mayor of Vermont’s largest city four times. He was chosen as one of the 20 best Mayors in the country by U.S. News and World Report (and Burlington was recognized as one of the three most livable cities in America by US News and World Report, during Sanders terms in office).

    – Sanders was elected to the US House of Representatives eight times.

    – Sanders was re-elected to the US Senate with 70% of the vote.

    – Longest serving independent in US congressional history. Repeatedly succeeding in getting elected as an independent at the federal level is a marketable skill which should be of particular interest to libertarians.

    1. That’s cool but what skills does he have? Flesh out that argument a little. Accomplishments are achieved with skills, they are not skills themselves.

      1. Wodun, thank you for the reasonable reply, but truthfully, I didn’t have any idea when I read your question 15 minutes ago. I just know that marketable means “In demand by buyers or employers”, and, given Sanders’ independent status (so, no machine politics at work), his increasingly large electoral wins indicate that he has been in demand, and thus marketable.

        As I don’t know much about Sanders, I googled “why was Sanders a good mayor?” and I ended up reading this very complimentary article which explains how he won over the Republicans in Burlington by being pro-business, pro-entrepreneurial, pro-growth, pro-development (with clever progressive caveats which helped make Burlington into a nice place to live full of people getting rich):
        What Kind of Mayor Was Bernie Sanders?
        http://www.thenation.com/article/bernies-burlington-city-sustainable-future/

        1. IMO, when people say marketable it means in the private sector. It is often a different set of skills than those of politicians and I didn’t really see any skills listed in the article.

          That was an interesting article. The area I live experiences the push and pull between development and public spaces. Both can exist and for the most part, they do where I live. But when I read

           Under Sanders’s leadership, the city adopted a number of laws to stifle the owners’ plans. One ordinance required apartment owners to give residents two years’ notice before a condo conversion. Others gave residents a pre-emptive right to buy the units and prohibited landlords from bulldozing buildings unless they replaced them with the same number of affordable units. (These measures lowered the selling price of the property.) Sanders then worked with the state government and Senator Patrick Leahy to get the $12 million needed to purchase and rehabilitate the buildings.

          I see that as corruption. Government run utilities and government organized grocery stores are not the roles of government, in my opinion. Attacking franchises and other national chains isn’t either nor is elevating different genders over others in terms of getting favors and access from the government. Creating astroturf protest groups (did they get audited by the IRS?) and using government money to help them attack other members of the community is disgusting.

          Looking at this map, I see plenty of room for parks and for development. There are a lot of parks in the area, so why the hostility to one project in particular? Why not just build a park next to it or someplace else rather than scuttle the lawful actions of others?

          I see this same type of behavior from “progressives” where I live and the article whitewashed what progressives are actually doing around the country and in Burlington. They are the same unethical actions being used by Democrats who control the federal government to attack rural Americans. Hey, did you see your guys got an assassination in on a protester?

          I am sympathetic to having access to lakes, rivers, and the ocean but does the city government need to rent boats? I guess it is a money making venture for them? I doubt people are allowed to launch a boat without paying for it so it isn’t as if the public has access different than going through a business. So really “public access” is a bit dishonest.

          I am not really surprised that a rich land developer ended up supporting Sanders because Sanders ran a corrupt government that showered money, access, activists, and enacted policy to support those that supported Sanders.

    2. He’s not an independent, he’s a socialist. He said as much.

      Getting elected as being the furthest left on the political spectrum in the land of hippie-dippies is not “marketable” (unless you think the market is a one-size-fits-all mentality.) Marketable means you reach out and gather support from all views, you find new audiences and get them enthusiastic about your ideas.

      But, now that I think of it, marketable might be the right term for an uber-lefty socialist, as the mentality generally leads to forcing others to fit in your political scheme, rather than the opposite.

      1. Jon said “Marketable means you reach out and gather support from all views, you find new audiences and get them enthusiastic about your ideas.”

        Jon, that is exactly what the article I linked to is about. The article starts out making Sanders sound like a typical statist control freak. But the article’s middle and end talk about how Sanders won over the business community and greatly expanded economic development in Burlington. In the process, Sanders created a new coalition of leaders (including, importantly, Pro-Sanders Republicans ) which continued Sanders’ policies and governed Burlington successfully for 29 of 31 years, well after Sanders went on the Congress.

        1. including, importantly, Pro-Sanders Republicans

          Well, I would certainly think they’d be important. I mean, if he’s “greatly expanded economic development”, that’s… that’s… well, it sounds important. Who cares if he sucks at carpentry, there’s important stuff there. He’s in demand. It’s all there in The Nation.

          1. Ok, lets try the Boston Globe:

            https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/10/31/socialist-even-conservative-could-love-burlington-mayor-sanders-was-able-out-republican-republicans/SCmh2TLifXxXRPFKC8NMjO/story.html

            “BURLINGTON, Vt. — Frederick J. Bailey is a conservative man. Fresh out of college, he volunteered for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and became an avid reader of the National Review. When he went to work as a stockbroker at Merrill Lynch, his goal was “to prosper.”

            And so when the baby-faced Bailey became a member of the Burlington Board of Aldermen at age 28, he was stunned to find himself sitting across from socialist Mayor Bernie Sanders. Like many conservatives in town, Bailey had dismissed Sanders as a “kook” when he became mayor in 1981 and presumed he would not last long.

            But here it was four years later and Bernie, as everyone called him, was still there, sitting under his beloved portrait of Socialist Eugene Debs in City Hall.

            Bailey, a banker’s son, disagreed with some of what the wild-haired mayor said, but on the bigger issues, like keeping property taxes down, they saw eye to eye. To the fury of his Republican colleagues, Bailey began to vote with the mayor.

            “Other people just could not look beyond that socialist shtick of his. I just never took it seriously,” said Bailey, who later became the chairman of the board. “The truth is, he was a very decent mayor. It is a nitty-gritty job of day-by-day executive decisions and he did it well. He got things done.”

            Click on the link for more.

          2. “Other people just could not look beyond that socialist shtick of his. I just never took it seriously,” said Bailey, who later became the chairman of the board. “The truth is, he was a very decent mayor. It is a nitty-gritty job of day-by-day executive decisions and he did it well. He got things done.”

            So your’re telling me that he’s not a Socialist at all? He got republicans to vote for him because he wasn’t a socialist? I imagine the Feel the Bern folks will be mightily displeased.

            Why were the other people furious at Bailey? Did the Boston Globe say why? I think it’s important, but it would contradict their story’s “theme” so they don’t mention it.

          3. “socialist shtick”?? So this single-payer stuff… shtick? 90% tax rates… shtick? The biggest problem our country faces is inequality… shtick? Self-described socialist… shtick?

          4. “Ok, lets try the Boston Globe:”

            You must be unaware that the Boston Globe is an uber-left wing rag

        2. My point is that Vermont is a world unto itself. I wouldn’t trust a story that talks about wooing over a group of business people in Burlington, especially if it’s from The Nation. Our current mayor in Seattle is considered successful because he’s gay and he hired a female police chief. I’m not kidding, that’s the criteria the local press uses.

          So, no. I don’t trust Sanders to be marketable at all simply on the facts given to me.

          1. Both articles I’ve provided go into the specifics of his policies, and those policies are lot more important than political labels. Read about those policies in a different publication if you like, and I’d be interested in hearing about what you find out. I really hadn’t been very curious about Sanders until today, but Wodun triggered my curious, and what do you know, the media is full of examples of business leaders and/or people with right wing politics who are full of praise for his accomplishments.

            For whatever it is worth, I haven’t seen anything that makes me want to vote for him for the Presidential nominee, but I’ve seen enough that I’m absolutely sure he could successfully market himself for the job of “Mayor” in any town in New England.

        3. “But the article’s middle and end talk about how Sanders won over the business community and greatly expanded economic development in Burlington.”

          He didn’t win them over so much as use the government and activist groups to attack and control them.

      1. In the US, politics is a market. Specifically, it is a job market. A so-called “career politician” still has to put himself back on the market before a new set of employers every election. As I mentioned, machine politics, big money, and so forth sometimes make elections an almost forgone conclusion, but in Sander’s case, they didn’t! Read the article – he won over his detractors!

          1. In addition to Pomerleau, and in addition to Bailey in the other article, there were the unnammed leaders in this paragraph, for starters:
            Most of Burlington’s business leaders initially distrusted Sanders. They didn’t know what a socialist would do once he held the reins of power. But even many of Sanders’s early opponents came to respect and even admire his willingness to listen to their views and his efforts to adopt progressive municipal policies.

            And this paragraph:
            After Sanders’s re-election victory in 1983, business groups concluded they could not defeat him and thus had to work with him. But many businesspeople also saw that Sanders shared their interest in “development”—what he saw as “good development”—while opposing projects that would hurt middle- and working-class neighborhoods or victimize low-wage workers.

            Your point about corruption is well taken.

  6. I don’t see Sanders having much success with GOTV amongst the black community as did Obama. That alone will probably cost him 2 points in the general.

    1. Hmm I don’t know. BLM has been advocating for socialist revolution so maybe they could throw together a GOTV campaign.

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