This man changed his city as mayor (with a list of accomplishments as long as a blue whale), his state as representative-then-senator, and, if we let him, he'll change our country

Recently, The New York Times published a piece called “As Mayor, Bernie Sanders Was More Pragmatist Than Socialist,” about Bernie’s time as leader of Burlington. The story is told through a distorted lens, questioning and undermining Bernie’s reputation.

Hints of bias are dashed here and there, a subtle attack— a withholding and twisting of the truth.

Written by Katharine Q. Seelye, the article opens with,

When Bernie Sanders, a self-declared socialist, served as mayor here in the 1980s, he often complained that the United States had its priorities wrong, that it should be diverting money from the military to domestic needs like housing and health care. So when dozens of antiwar activists blocked the entrance to the local General Electric plant because it was manufacturing Gatling guns to fight the socialists in Central America, the protesters expected the mayor’s full support. Instead, he lined up with union officials and watched as the police made arrests, saying later that in blocking the plant, the activists were keeping workers from their jobs. It was a classic example of how Mr. Sanders governed — as a pragmatist. He tended to talk globally but act locally, in this case choosing the real and immediate socialist principle of protecting workers over blocking the making of weapons to fight leftists abroad. Although he often shouted about foreign affairs, Mr. Sanders was consumed with running the city.

Bernie’s belief that government should put money towards people, not war, has absolutely nothing to do with his decision not to close down a factory. His choice wasn’t about where to direct government funding, but about whether to allow protesters to punish factory workers because of Washington’s policies.

Bernie didn’t pick “protecting workers over blocking the making of weapons to fight leftists abroad,” but called for the workers and peace activists to unite in that fight together.

He never abandoned the protesters, but stopped them from hurting the factory workers’ ability to survive and support their families. He never stopped talking globally, he just wanted the people to put those global efforts towards making constructive change. He never abandoned his foreign policy perspective, but refused to allow the people to fight amongst themselves.

Why should 3,000 individuals lose their pay because of the federal government’s foreign policy?

That’s the insanity of crabs in a bucket attacking each other instead of the person who put them there.

In his own words, from Politico,

“I’m not going to throw 3,000 people out of their jobs at union wages and create a depression,” he said in an interview at the time. In another interview he argued that “you cannot spilt the movement and push workers to one side and have peace activists on the other side.”

Yet, Seelye portrays him as a complainer who didn’t actually back his words up with action, a man who might have “shouted about foreign affairs” but, in reality, was “consumed with running the city”— to the point of sacrificing his idealism. She tries to show him as a part of the establishment, someone who did not stand by protesters, as expected, but allowed them to be taken away by the police.

That is not Bernie Sanders. Again, he didn’t pick “the real and immediate” welfare of factory workers OVER activists, but advocated for them to stand as one to combat the power structure.

And the words the author uses to describe him — “complaining,” “shouting,” being “consumed”— are pointedly negative, as well as untrue. Again, he was not “consumed with running the city,” but calmly focused on the best way for those protesters to work against Washington, instead of their fellow citizens.

Further down, Seelye continues,

Critics on the right said their socialist mayor gave the city a bad image, wasting time on foreign affairs, including trips to Nicaragua and the Soviet Union. At the same time, critics on the left said he compromised too much with business interests and did not go far enough in pursuing socialist ideals.

Seelye paints Bernie as a radical socialist touring the radical socialist world and a corporate stooge selling out to big business all at the same time, a guy not very well liked by either side.

But the truth was, after people got to know him, Bernie didn’t have many critics.

Those on the right admired him for his sincerity, frugality, good-for-small-business policies, and open-mindedness, while those on the left loved him for challenging the power structure, standing up for the voiceless and underserved, keeping housing costs down, fighting for women, and making sure the city belonged to them, the people.

There’s a reason he got voted back into office three times, each election garnering an increasing share of the vote.

On the conservative side, from The Nation/The Huffington Post—

Most of Burlington's [conservative] 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…

Republicans liked and respected him. They became his friends and allies.

[Tony] Pomerleau was then—and remains today, at 97—one of Burlington’s richest residents. A longtime Republican…, he has wielded considerable political influence [for decades], served as chair of the city’s police commission, and been its most generous philanthropist. “When [Sanders] first ran for mayor, he was running against guys like me,” Pomerleau recalled in a recent interview. Pomerleau, who voted against Sanders in 1981, knocked on his door the day after that election. “I said, ‘You’re the mayor, but it’s still my town,’” he recalled, ﻿Pomerleau wasn’t happy when Sanders opposed his waterfront development plan, but he gradually got to know the mayor and came to admire his pragmatism, his bulldog tenacity to get things done, and his support for the local police. “Bernie and I worked very well together for the betterment of the town,” Pomerleau said. “We were the odd couple.” Pomerleau voted for Sanders in his three successful bids for re-election. And Sanders frequently called Pomerleau to ask his advice. They stayed in close contact, even after Sanders was elected to Congress. Pomerleau expressed his pleasure that for the past 35 years Sanders has never missed one of his annual Christmas parties for underprivileged children. He also praised Sanders for being a stalwart supporter of America’s military veterans. “If more rich people were like me,” Pomerleau said, “Bernie would feel better about the wealthy.”

Yet instead of praising Bernie’s ability to reach across the aisle and forge unlikely friendships, Seelye characterizes this relationship as him making “alliances of convenience” and overlooking “the mogul’s status as a 1 percenter,” digs designed to out him as a non-liberal fraternizing with the wealthy.

In reality, Pomerleau was Burlington’s “most generous philanthropist”— not your classic “mogul” or “1 percenter.” He’s given out scholarships, funded projects for local schools, including one that named a building after him, and once, after a woman told him “residents were in danger of being kicked out of the mobile home park where” she lived, he bought the park, improved it, and then gave it back to the residents. And another time, after mobile home owners were flooded by storm Irene, he created a one million dollar fund to help them, saying,

"Their home is worth just as much as mine up on the hill.”

Bernie Sanders never sold out, as Seelye’s article implies.

Pomerleau was not a “big business” rich guy who didn’t care about the people. He was a giver, someone who truly helped the citizens; as he says, if more wealthy people were like him, Bernie would like more of them.

It says only good things that Bernie was able to work with people who opposed him, actually earning their respect, admiration, and friendship.

Yet Seelye portrays Bernie as rubbing elbows with the conservative rich, and, somehow at the same time, as being disliked by them for giving Burlington a “bad image.”

In reality, Republicans did not think, Bernie = “trips to Nicaragua or the Soviet Union.” They thought Bernie = an approachable, hard-working guy with a philosophy of pro-people and pro-small-business economic development.

For conservatives, Bernie was not some crazy socialist, but a leader with innovative ideas, willing to listen to all, and capable of making those ideas a reality.

From that same The Nation/The Huffington Post article,

“When Bernie first got elected, the local media said he was anti-business,” recalled Bruce Seifer, an architect of Sanders’ economic development efforts. “They called us the ‘Sanderistas.’” After Sanders’ 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… The Sanders administration provided new firms with seed funding, offered technical assistance, [and] helped businesses form trade associations (including the South End Arts and Business Association and the Vermont Convention Bureau)... When Sanders took office, Burlington had no supermarket in the downtown area. The major grocery chains told city officials that they would invest in a new store only if they could build a mega-market that residents believed was too large.

Seelye writes that Bernie was often “working with big business,” but, to the contrary, he was dedicated to growing small, local business. He was opposed to the mega-market (big business) that would have been “too large” for the downtown area, and, in a “risky” move, led the city to invest in a local food co-op, despite people’s doubts.

Instead, the Sanders administration put its hopes in the local Onion River Cooperative. With 2,000 members in its former location, some thought it was a risky venture. It turned out to be a good investment, and under Sanders's successor it became City Market, a thriving enterprise with more than 9,000 members. Under Sanders, Burlington became a magnet for attracting and incubating locally owned businesses, many of which expanded into large enterprises. Burton, the nation's largest snowboard company, has its headquarters (as well as a snowboard museum) in Burlington. The city assisted Seventh Generation, a green cleaning-products firm, when it started in 1988. Today, with its downtown waterfront headquarters in a LEED-certified building and over $300 million in annual sales, it is one of Burlington's largest employers. With the city's help, Gardeners Supply Company, which sells environmentally friendly gardening products, moved to Burlington in 1983. Four years later, its founder, Will Raap, began the process of selling the firm to its workers. It now has over 250 employee-owners… And [he] lobbied the state government to promote business growth.

Contrary to what Seelye writes, Republicans weren’t critical of their “socialist mayor,” but impressed to find him a practical, good-for-small-business guy with concrete ways to make Burlington better. They didn’t think he gave their “city a bad image” or wasted “time on foreign affairs,” but that he worked hard to implement real change.

Republican leaders even praise him for doing what they could not.

From The Atlantic,

Allen Gear, a Republican member of the Board of Aldermen since 1979, looking back over Sanders’ tenure as mayor, says, “He’s done things I don’t think we Republicans could have done… He’s taken a lot of very Republican ideas and put them in place. Such as combining all of the garages of the various city departments and putting them into a single public-works department, initially a Republican proposal, to gain efficiency in handling city rolling stock ... He’s put a lot of modern accounting practices and money-management practices into place that are good Republican business practices…

He was pro-local-business and fiscally responsible, hallmarks of the Republican philosophy, but he never alienated anyone on the left because, from the same The Nation/HuffPost article—

[He] oppos[ed] projects that would hurt middle- and working-class neighborhoods or victimize low-wage workers… “Bernie realized that the economy doesn't have to be dominated by bad guys," explained Raap, a founder of the Burlington-based Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility, an alternative trade association with 750 members, including Ben & Jerry's. "He saw that and he fostered it." ...[He] focused attention on helping women become entrepreneurs [and] funded training programs to give women access to nontraditional jobs.

He fought for the working class, a fair economy, and women entrepreneurs— all firmly liberal policies.

And he (successfully) implemented another calling card of the progressive platform. As Seelye herself writes, albeit in a rather derisive way,

For all of his socialist oratory — his first speech to the local chamber of commerce denounced Washington’s support for “fascist dictatorships” in Latin America — Mr. Sanders turned out to be good for business. Even though he imposed new taxes, on hotels, restaurants and bars, businesses did not flee.

Bernie raised taxes on ‘em! He made law higher tax rates, but created such a wonderful, thriving economic climate that business wanted to be there.

People on the left didn’t say he “compromised too much with business interests,” as Seelye writes, but praised him for promoting business practices that helped local entrepreneurs, trained women, made sure workers were being treated fairly, and actually raised taxes.

The left was happy with Bernie Sanders—

From The Atlantic,

[Bernie] evok[ed] from his supporters a kind of passionate loyalty that a party machine or patronage can never generate. An ideology can generate that kind of self-sacrifice, however, and so can a remarkable personality. Sanders had both going for him. His record as a radical activist and his long association with the Liberty Union Party kept the leftist regulars out there on the hustings those cold months, knocking on doors, handing out leaflets, raising money with raffles and yard sales. But his personality brought out a commitment from many who normally regarded a politician as someone with a peculiar and slightly dangerous mental illness.

His people love him, and they love him for a reason. He does stuff.

He was a mayor who, from The Nation/Huff Post—

...encouraged grassroots organizing, adopted local laws to protect the vulnerable, challenged the city's business power brokers and worked collaboratively with other politicians to create a more livable city...

Can you imagine this happening on a national level? Kids and teenagers and adults all talking about and getting involved in what rules govern their lives, creating all sorts of agencies and councils to stay organized, aware, put pressure on government when needed, and have sweet new initiatives to help the people. Bernie made life rich and fun.

He created a liberal neighborhood planning program—

The Sanders administration carefully nurtured neighborhood planning assemblies (NPA) in each of the city's six wards, providing them with modest budgets to deliberate and advise on projects affecting their neighborhoods. The NPAs had a voice over the use of federal Community Development Block Grant funds in their neighborhoods. Today, Burlingtonians credit the NPAs with raising the level of resident participation and discussion in local politics.

Besides the NPAs, he further involved the people—

Sanders jump-started the city's participatory energies in other ways as well. Early on he established a Youth Office, an Arts Council, and a Women's Council, whose first major initiative was an ordinance requiring 10 percent of all city-funded construction jobs to be filled by women.

He was, in fact, a wildly popular mayor.

As Seelye rather begrudgingly allows,

“Still, he was re-elected three times, each with an increasing share of the vote.”

Both sides liked him because, for conservatives, he was fiscally responsible and strengthened Burlington’s economy and, for liberals, he fought for the people and introduced numerous agencies, offices, deals, laws, and councils to make sure their standard of living and over-all engagement in their community increased.

"Bernie was never anti-growth, anti-development, or anti-business," explained Monte [who worked in the city’s planning agency]. "He just wanted businesses to be responsible toward their employees and the community. He wanted local entrepreneurs to thrive. He wanted people to have good jobs that pay a living wage. If you could deal with that, you could deal with Bernie and Bernie would deal with you."

He was a leader for everyone, cobbling together the frugality of the Republicans with the populism of the Democrats, with an added dash of his own democratic socialism.

Yet from reading the New York Times, you’d think Bernie Sanders was an “incrementalist” who schmoozed with the wealthy — “working with big business” — and received heat from the left for being “good for business” and not socialist enough.

Seelye doesn’t talk about the fact that he was, from The Atlantic,

...the candidate of the police, the elderly, most of the university faculty and students, the poor, the hip, and the upwardly mobile technocrats.

She drops in this line—

Over the span of his mayoralty, the number of families living in poverty grew — to 798 in 1990 from 563 in 1980, an increase of 42 percent.

—while conveniently leaving out the fact that these were the Reagan years and people across the country were struggling.

From The New York Times,

But while the rich got much richer, there was little sustained economic improvement for most Americans. By the late 1980s, middle-class incomes were barely higher than they had been a decade before — and the poverty rate had actually risen.

Contrary to what’s implied, it was not Bernie’s leadership or policies that increased poverty, but the economic situation of the entire country.

Bernie put into place policies that lowered housing costs, kept prices affordable for working families, and set up a system that citizens would reap benefits from for years to come.

From The Nation/HuffPost—

Burlington is now widely heralded as an environmentally friendly, lively and livable city with a thriving economy, including one of the lowest jobless rates in the country.

Seelye doesn’t seem to have a good grasp on what Bernie stands for. Later in the article, she expresses surprise that he—

used a budget surplus not to experiment with a socialist concept like redistributing wealth but to fix the city’s deteriorating streets.

—when investing in crumbling infrastructure is exactly what democratic socialism is all about. The words he uses to describe his world-view do not demonstrate how close he is to the Soviet Union or China, but how far the United States, including the Democratic Party, has swung to the right. He calls himself a democratic socialist when he’s actually a Teddy Roosevelt Republican.

Bernie Sanders is not, and never has been, about the socialist policies of redistributing wealth, but the democratic policies of making the rich pay into the system they benefit from, and using that money for the betterment of all.

She’s contributing to the fear people have when they hear the word “socialist,” a fear stoked by Republicans that Bernie’s going to take all your money and strangle the free market. This is terribly false, and terribly dangerous.

Seelye goes on to write—

Under his watch, Burlington, Vermont’s largest city, cropped up on lists of the best places to live. U.S. News and World Report named him one of the nation’s 20 top mayors in 1987, crediting him with preserving affordable housing, holding the line on property taxes and making a serious push for home rule in a state where cities had little autonomy.

—rather stingily acknowledging the truth of his political success, skimming through why people liked him and slanting it as the U.S. News and World Report “crediting him” with those accomplishments, instead of him actually, undeniably having those accomplishments. Of which he had many (just look at how long this article is already!).

Seelye goes on to quote a political scientist at the University of Vermont as saying,

“Bernie couldn’t manage his way out of a paper bag,” said Garrison Nelson... “But he brought on board an extremely talented group of people.”

Say what now?

Bernie was extremely effective as a manager and leader.

﻿John Davis remembers a meeting in 1986 when Bernie Sanders, then the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, confronted the owners of the city’s largest affordable-housing complex. The federal program... had a loophole that allowed the landlords to convert the buildings into market rentals or luxury condos. “Bernie pounded his fist on the conference table in his office and told the owners, ‘Over my dead body are you going to displace 336 working families.You are not going to convert Northgate into luxury housing,” recalled Davis, who was Sanders’ key housing aide. Under Sanders’ 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. The city allocated funds to help the tenants hire an organizer, form the Northgate Residents Association, and start the process of converting the complex to resident ownership. Today, Northgate Apartments is owned by the tenants and has long-term restrictions to keep the buildings affordable for working families.

Couldn’t manage his way out of a paper bag? Talk about leadership. He organized and mobilized Burlington’s government, working with the state and other politicians to get real results for working families.

And the fact that he brought on “extremely talented” people to work with him says worlds about his own intelligence. A strong mark of a good manager is someone who can choose a good team— if a leader cannot recognize the smart, effective, capable candidates from the lacking ones, it probably means s/he’s not swimming in those qualities him/herself. In other words, Bernie couldn’t manage, but he managed really well.

Sanders had the vision, and hired people who could and would and did help him, under his leadership, to make it a reality.

From The Atlantic—

On the local level, though, Sanders is considerably less controversial. He has proven to be an excellent administrator, appointing people who are in general younger, better educated and more capable than the people they have replaced. He has streamlined city government and has introduced procedural and financial reforms, many of which have been supported by Republican members of the 13-person Board of Aldermen, a body the Sanderistas now control, but that, in Sanders’ first year, when he had only two supporters on the Board, controlled him, even to the point of refusing to allow him to appoint his own secretary.

He worked his way up from winning by ten votes and battling with a Republican Board of Aldermen, to creating the foundation for Burlington to become, over the decades, a more vibrant, citizen-oriented, creative, environmentally sustainable, and prosperous city. He was an excellent leader, excellent manager, and excellent administrator, who set into place a liberal bedrock from which the citizens have reaped exponential benefits.

From The Huffington Post,

Burlingtonians give Sanders credit for steering the city in a new direction that, despite early skepticism, proved to be broadly popular with voters... Thanks to the enduring influence of the progressive climate that Sanders and his allies helped... create in Burlington, the city's largest housing development is now resident-owned, its largest supermarket is a consumer-owned cooperative, one of its largest private employers is worker-owned, and most of its people-oriented waterfront is publicly owned. Its publicly owned utility, the Burlington Electric Department, recently announced that Burlington is the first American city of any decent size to run entirely on renewable electricity.

His agency fostered a liberal urban farms initiative—

Eventually CEDO, Sanders's development agency, helped arrange the purchase of the area and provided the capital for irrigation systems, farm vehicles, and washing stations for vegetables. By the end of the 1990s, it was home to a dozen urban farms, annually producing over 500,000 pounds of food for local homes and stores. Today it generates over 10 percent of the food sold in Burlington.

Seelye quotes people who are dismissive of Sanders, and doesn’t expound upon how he fought for the poor, against the power structure, worked with other leaders, created agencies that would have a ripple effect, and made sure Burlington belonged to the people, for good.

Her ending is a lengthy caveat critical of Bernie Sanders’ role in opening up the Burlington lakefront,

While many on the left applauded his efforts on housing, they were more critical of Mr. Sanders’s stance during the yearslong, convoluted battle over development of the city’s spectacular waterfront along Lake Champlain. Mr. Sanders wanted to open up the lakefront, long marred by a decrepit rail yard, for public use. Eventually, that is what happened. But for a time he backed a private proposal to build a complex of high-end condos, hotel and commercial space that critics said would block views of the lake and limit public access. More deal maker than ideologue, Mr. Sanders later worked for a compromise that scaled back the proposal and added public amenities like green space. He said the compromise, supported by most of the aldermen, was the best he could get and that the development would expand the city’s tax base, bringing millions of dollars into city coffers. He then championed a $6 million bond issue to pay for the infrastructure and public amenities. But environmentalists and others accused Mr. Sanders of selling out to business interests. The dispute led to a highly contentious campaign over the bond issue. “We fought like hell,” recalled Sandy Baird, then part of the Green movement, now a professor at Burlington College. “We wanted that land open to the public.” Mr. Sanders’s side lost. In December 1985, the bond issue garnered 54 percent of the vote but not the two-thirds majority necessary to pass; many working-class areas voted against it. With the proposal dead, Mayor Sanders tacked again toward the pragmatic: The city and state revived a lawsuit to claim the waterfront for public use. After years of litigation, Vermont’s highest court ruled in their favor, clearing the way for the much-heralded public waterfront of today — free of large private high-end development along the shoreline. Now, the waterfront is Burlington’s most valuable asset. Residents and tourists flock to its leafy open spaces, public docks, restaurants and bike path. In May, it provided a picture-perfect backdrop for Mr. Sanders to announce that he was running for president.

In reality, Bernie did not sell “out to business interests,” but fought hard against them.

From the HuffPost/Nation article,

When Sanders took office, Burlington's Lake Champlain waterfront was an industrial wasteland. Tony Pomerleau, an influential local businessman, planned a mega-project that included a 150-room hotel, retail space, a 100-slip marina, and 240 condominiums in 18-story buildings. In his first campaign, Sanders pledged to kill that plan. After Pomerleau withdrew his proposal, Sanders backed another waterfront plan that included some commercial development, affordable housing, and generous public access. But after voters defeated a bond measure for this proposal, Sanders went back to the drawing board to envision a "people's waterfront."

Bernie backed a deal that had “some” development, “affordable housing,” and “generous public access.” Remember Pomerleau not being “happy when Sanders opposed his waterfront development plan?” Bernie made business leaders mad! He wasn’t “limit[ing] public access” or “selling out.”

He was compromising, a quality essential to productive leadership. If you want to get anything done, you’ve got to work with your opponents. The fact that Bernie was able to come together with the other side and create a proposal with all those good aspects, as well as “some commercial development” is a positive in his favor, not a negative.

And when voters rejected the proposal, his side hadn’t “lost,” but been given leverage to make business come even further towards the people.

It’s exactly what he wanted, what he’d been fighting for since the beginning—

According to Monte, who worked on the waterfront project for Sanders and was CEDO director for 12 years, "Bernie wanted to make sure that it was a place with plenty of open space and public access, where ordinary people could rent a rowboat and buy a hot dog. That wasn't just for the elite. It was Bernie who set the tone that the waterfront wasn't for sale." Thanks to Sanders, the Burlington waterfront now has a community boathouse and other facilities for small boats. There's also a sailing center and science center, a fishing pier, an eight-mile bike path, acres of parkland, and public beaches. The commercial development is modest and small-scale.

Bernie didn’t have as many critics as Seelye makes out. Burlington loved Bernie, so much so they elected people like him for years to come.

From the HuffPost/Nation article,

Sanders's track record as mayor was so successful that Burlington voters elected his CEDO director, Peter Clavelle, to succeed him in 1989. (He was voted out in 1993 but re-elected in 1995, and served until 2006.) During his 16 years in the mayor's office, Clavelle expanded Sanders's agenda… In 2012, for the first time since Sanders's first campaign in 1981, Burlington elected a Democrat — Miro Weinberger — to serve as mayor. Although more conservative than Sanders, Clavelle, and Kiss, he has been reluctant to reverse their policies because they've been so popular. Burlington's progressives have not only held on to their main policy achievements but, after the most recent election, have gained seats on the City Council and catapulted Progressive Party member Jane Knodell into the presidency of that body. The coalition that coalesced around Sanders in 1981 governed Burlington for all but two of the next 31 years.

Bernie created lasting change in the city of Burlington. He transformed that city from one controlled by Republican Aldermen, to one controlled by the people. The foundation he created has never been uprooted.

What [we] can learn from Sanders is that good ideas are not sufficient. Creating more livable cities requires nurturing a core of activist organizations that can build long-term support for progressive municipal policies.

He really did make a vast difference in Burlington.

And they loved him for it. There are so many stories to tell, stories that Seelye leaves out.

From The Atlantic,

“[Bernie] started talking about how much he liked poetry, how much it had always meant to him, like we all expected him to do, and then, before we knew it, he was reading a couple of his own poems, which weren’t really all that great, but they had a passionate Beat Generation kind of intensity to them, about the poor, of course, and the evils of capitalism. Then, suddenly, there he was reciting from memory “Do Not Go Gentle”, by Dylan Thomas, reciting this rich, rolling Welchman’s poem in a heavy Brooklyn accent. And it was kind of wonderful, you know? He was loving the poem, letting us see him love it, and reading it totally unselfconsciously in this utterly inappropriate accent, and I felt then for the first time how great it would be to have a guy like that as mayor of my city.”

Bernie Sanders is a beautiful soul. He’s full of poetry and energy. A human who loves his fellow people, connecting and speaking with them, making life better for them.

Sanders has this effect on a lot of people. His supporters and the members of his administration are called Sanderistas, originally a pejorative tag that is worn now with good-humored pride, like the T-shirts that have “Welcome to the People’s Republic of Burlington” printed on them, a slogan generated by a remark attributed to Sanders by the cartoonist Gary Trudeau in a “Doonesbury” strip run shortly after Sanders’ first election victory. Trudeau portrays Sanders as a guest on the Tom Snyder’s “Tomorrow” show. Snyder says, “Mr. Mayor, let’s be candid, okay? You’re a socialist. You’re a Jew. You’re from New York. So how the heck’d you get elected?” Sanders answers, “The people of Burlington wanted a change. They decided to send the capitalist system a clear message.”

We need a change, too. We need to send the capitalist system a clear message, too.

We need Bernie Sanders.

He is passionate, raw, empathetic. He’s real.

From The Atlantic,

It’s more a private than a public occasion, but Sanders’ intensity, heating up as he speaks, is unmodulated... He’s on a roll now and moves to a rapid-fire discussion of the Burlington Airport and how he wants the city to get a part of the money the airport is making and that now goes instead to the state. Then, abruptly, he shuts up and for a few minutes lets the people blow off steam, just as he’s been doing, and they gripe about the condition of North Street, parking regulations, beach litter. Sanders handles each complaint with sympathy and provides detailed answers. Suddenly, he interrupts himself to announce that the University of Vermont and the Medical Center pay no taxes. “How would people feel,” Sanders asks, “If we put pressure on them?” Everyone smiles broadly. He has his answer. A small, sinewy mustachioed man... puts down his bottle of beer and says, “Bernie, whaddaya say, you ready to run for governor?” ...“It’d sure shake them up over in Montpelier, wouldn’t it?” Bernie says, and he grins. It’s the mischievous grin of a deliberate non-conformist, a kid who refuses to join cliques. The small man grins back. “You got my vote, Bernie.”

They call him Robin Hood, a man of the people. Tax the rich to feed the poor!

Yet the NYT article portrays him as having many critics, being a sell-out for big business interests, not being an effective manager, and having little role in making Burlington’s waterfront what it is today.

It’s a swiss cheese story, filled with holes. Not factual, but a narrative being fed to us, the facts twisted to suit the author’s pre-determined conclusion.

In truth, Bernie Sanders was an wonderful mayor, a pragmatist and an idealist both. Never sacrificing his principles, but always working to institute concrete policy that would change lives.

As the local papers write,

His legacy in Burlington remains largely in place today, and helped to propel him to his current seat in the US Senate in 2006.

And he’s been an excellent Senator, beloved by his constituents more than any other Senator in the country.

This Halloween in Burlington, children and adults alike came to see the man himself—

Many of those who trick-or-treated on this block didn't have their eyes on sweets... They sought the chance to meet the Vermonter with his sights set on becoming president in 2016. "Trick or treat!" children chanted as the Sen. came to the door. "Hey guys how are you?" Sanders greets them... He and his wife Jane greeted at least a couple of Bernie look-a-likes this Halloween. They gave away candy freely, but a personal touch represented the real treat for most. "Thanks for all the good work you do, thank you very much," said one visitor. “I gotta shake your hand!" said another. "It was great enthusiasm to just shake his hand and get to talk to him. Hopefully he'll become the future president," said trick-or-treater Wondu Summa. "My parents won't believe me until they see me on TV," said Grant Moody. The sweetest moment of the night for the candidate surely arrived when he got the chance to spend some increasingly precious time with costume clad family.