MANCHESTER, NEW HAMPSHIRE—Hillary Clinton has been laying the groundwork for possible damage control here by advancing the geography theory of inevitable defeat. "I know I am in a contest with your neighbor," Clinton explained at a rally Tuesday night in Hampton. "We are in his backyard." And neighbors, she said, vote with neighbors.

She may have a point. In 1960 "neighbor" Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kennedy won with 85.2 percent of the New Hampshire Democratic primary vote, followed by Maine Sen. Edmund S. Muskie in 1972, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis in 1988, former Massachusetts Sen. Paul Tsongas in 1992, and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, who in 2004 handily beat the neighbors known as former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean and Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman. In fact, the only time a neighbor failed to prevail was in 1980, when incumbent president Jimmy Carter beat Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy by 10 points. But then Granite Staters had always appreciated that when Carter visited, he carried his own bag.

Two of Bernie Sanders' neighbors climbed the backyard fence and dropped in on Sanders' debate watch party in Manchester last night. Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, founders of Ben & Jerry's ice cream, were there to deliver the scoop on their fellow Vermonter to the three dozen or so supporters gathered in Milly's Tavern, a craft brew pub not far from the Merrimack river.

"Jerry and I have been constituents of Bernie Sanders for the last 30 years," said Cohen, bouncing a bit below the flat screen TV. "We've seen him and we believe him." Jerry, holding aloft a small Bernie sign studded with purple LED lights, concurred. However, much to the disappointment of a broke and hungry volunteer who'd been scrounging for french fries, there was no free ice cream. Cohen had just dodged a bullet in Iowa, where he'd promised, "If Iowa voters do the right thing and support Bernie, I will personally come to Iowa and make as much ice cream for them as I can." A tiny fraction of the vote had kept him from having to deliver on that pledge, and, given Sanders' recent polling in New Hampshire, he was unlikely to risk repeating that offer anytime soon.

The evolution of Ben and Jerry as businessmen parallels the evolution of Bernie Sanders as a politician in the very small universe that is Vermont. The two childhood friends, who were born just four days apart in the same Brooklyn hospital, took a $5 correspondence course on ice-cream making from Penn State, and in 1978 opened the first Ben & Jerry's in a converted Burlington gas station. The duo advanced a business model they called "caring capitalism," founded in a new corporate concept of linked prosperity, the notion of a reciprocal relationship between consumer and producer that is based upon a cooperative ethos. In response to the community's support, Ben & Jerry's donated 7.5 percent of pretax profits to charity.

Ben and Jerry lost control of Ben & Jerry's back in 1999 when multinational corporation Unilever offered to pay significantly more than the company's stock value on NASDAQ. As a public corporation (they'd begun by offering stock to Vermonters only to "share the wealth"; in 1985 they had a national stock offering) Ben & Jerry's had a fiduciary duty to its shareholders. If the founders attempted to have the offer declined, they would have been vulnerable to legal attacks from major shareholders.

"The directors of a company could actually be sued because they are responsive to their employees, to family farmers in our state and to the local economy," then-Congressman Bernie Sanders said at the time. "That sounds to me to be quite unacceptable." But in the end, Vermonters—from Governor Howard Dean, who saw it as a contest between globalization and local control, down to a street theater group, who suggested new flavors like Chubby Bureaucrat and Funky Money—had to accept it.

The acquisition meant that Cohen's stake was suddenly worth about $40 million, while Greenfield's was worth about $10 million. The two also got seats on an "external board" charged by Unilever with overseeing Ben & Jerry's culture and social mission. But a non-compete clause keeps them from marketing their own ice cream—which is why when it occurred to Ben Cohen that Bernie Sanders' campaign theme of economic inequality could be embodied in frozen cream and sugar, he ended up making Bernie's Yearning in his kitchen churn and giving it away for free.

Bernie's Yearning is plain mint ice cream beneath a solid layer of chocolate on top. Originally, Cohen had the uninspired thought to make the ice cream vanilla, but after a discussion with CNN's Carol Costello, who asked if the ice cream itself would be mint-flavored "so you could feel the Bern," Cohen made the switch. (Cohen has anosmia, a loss of smell and near-loss of taste, so what interests him about ice cream is textures.) According to the label, "The chocolate disc represents the huge majority of economic gains that have gone to the top 1 percent since the end of the recession. Beneath it, the rest of us." Eaters are encouraged to smash up the chocolate "into lots of pieces," mix the chocolate pieces around in the ice cream, and share the result with "your fellow Americans."

That last part may be a little difficult. Cohen created only 40 pints of the ice cream. Twenty-five were sent to Sanders' campaign and an unspecified number were the prizes in a daylong online contest yesterday. (Although "no purchase is required," the link to enter stubbornly remained joined to a Sanders campaign donation site.)

No word yet if demand will follow that old reliable model of capitalism, and cause Cohen to return to the kitchen and increase the supply.

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