The senator from Vermont fought his staff for weeks as they pushed him to get more personal, and be a little less gruff, as he launched his second presidential campaign. He didn’t think talking about himself was just stupid—he thought it risked undermining the mission. But they finally convinced him that the mission was going to fail if he didn’t. So he spent the weekend in Brooklyn and Chicago launching his campaign with rallies meant to emphasize the experiences that made him who he is—the son of a paint salesman who fled from anti-Semitism in Poland, and the student at the University of Chicago whose activism led him to get on a bus in 1963 and travel to hear the “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C.

They're trying to Clintonize the old-line socialist, making him into an oleaginous snake-oil salesman, in a bid to get him more votes.

Good luck with that one on Sanders, because it amounts to a denial of "who he is."

The reality is, Sanders is a socialist. He's not one of these new socialists, who barely know the meaning of the term, he's a real socialist dating back from the days when the word 'socialism' stunk. Socialism itself is an inhuman philosophy at war with human nature and it always attracts hard, cold inhuman people, think of the Soviet commissars. That's no bug of socialism, it's feature. Sanders didn't care then what dissenters thought of him, and he sure as heck doesn't care now. This is a man who spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union, undisturbed by the grayness and lines and shortages and Wendy's fashion shows. You recall, of course, that in the latter case, that back in 2015, he complained about American grocery stores stocking too many kinds of deodorant and tennis shoes. Wendy's Russian fashion show was what he liked.

It's cold-blooded, it's icy, it's the image of a commissar and the show-trial lists he has with him. The aides' efforts are not unlike trying to charm-school Leonid Brezhnev or Alexei Kosygin into seeming human. It's what socialism always looks like, up close.

What's more, Sanders hasn't changed any, all that's changed is that Millennials (a lot of them, anyway) view him as the cuddly grumpy grandpa they never had. They don't notice the coldness, the ends-justify-the-means philosophy, the hard stances. Someone like Sanders could put you in a Gulag no problem were he ever to win enough power to do it.

Now the aide are trying to pretty the man up, repackaging him as a nice guy, someone who's normal. He's never been normal. Socialism is his pole star and Commissar Bernie is no different from any other socialist viewed worldwide.

Image credit: Gage Skidmore, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0