bernie sanders

Hello.

michael barbaro

Hello.

bernie sanders

How are you?

michael barbaro

Senator, Michael Barbaro.

bernie sanders

Nice to see you, Michael.

michael barbaro

Great pleasure.

jessica cheung

Hi, Jessica Cheung.

bernie sanders

Jessica. Nice to see you. Where would you like me?

michael barbaro

Very nice to meet you, Michael Barbaro. So, Senator Sanders, my colleague Alex Burns told me that to understand your political career, and your presidential campaign today, we have to go back to the first time that you won elected office as mayor of Burlington in 1981. So that’s —

bernie sanders

The New York Times got it right. Every once in a while.

michael barbaro

So that’s what I want to ask you about.

bernie sanders

All right, there you go.

michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

archived recording Burlington is the largest city in Vermont. Situated as it is on Lake Champlain with the Adirondack Mountains view, it’s a lovely, lovely spot. We’d like you to meet its new mayor. Mayor Sanders got a lot of attention recently, not only with his ten vote victory, but mostly because he is a socialist.

michael barbaro

Part two in our series on pivotal moments in the lives of the top four Democratic candidates for president. Today —

archived recording (bernie sanders) The people who are living in all of the Burlington housing authority developments, both the senior citizen development and the low income housing projects are going to be receiving the lowest cable television bills in the state of Vermont.

michael barbaro

Bernie Sanders.

archived recording (bernie sanders) Ronald Reagan and his billionaire friends do not represent America, but we do. Lastly, I want to touch upon an issue that dear to my heart, and that is the issue of affordable health care. The people of Burlington voted overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly in support of Congress moving forward to establish a national health care system. I think that is exactly how this country is going to have to go on that issue.

michael barbaro

It’s Friday, December 6. Alex Burns, why this moment?

alex burns

Bernie Sanders is such an unusual character in American politics, as a lifelong socialist and left wing activist who has endured for decades as a major political figure, and who has become a leading presidential candidate. And to understand how he got from, really, the fringes of American politics to the absolute forefront, you have to go back to this moment in the early 1980s where he becomes mayor of Burlington, where he figures out how to take those ideas and actually win elections with them, and then govern. This is a period I’ve been spending a lot of time on in my own reporting because it’s just such a vital formative experience for Sanders. And so the story starts with the turn of the 1970s as Bernie Sanders arrives in Vermont with a whole lot of left wing ideas, not a whole lot of local connections, and links up with a new marginal political party called the Liberty Union.

bernie sanders

And that party had been formed around opposition to the war in Vietnam, and in the fight for economic justice. It’s a very small party in a very small state.

michael barbaro

Bernie Sanders starts showing up to Liberty Union meetings, and the party identifies him as the man they want to run for a U.S. Senate seat in 1971.

bernie sanders

And it was a very interesting campaign, and so forth, and so on. I got two percent of the vote.

michael barbaro

He loses that election, but then he has gotten the electoral bug.

bernie sanders

A year later, there was the general election. I ran for governor of the state, I got one percent.

michael barbaro

He loses again.

bernie sanders

Then I ran for Senate again against Pat Leahy, as Leahy often reminds me, and I got four percent.

michael barbaro

And again, he loses. I’m seeing a pattern here.

bernie sanders

Yes.

michael barbaro

It is loss, after loss, after loss. And while he’s running and losing, he has a series of odd jobs.

bernie sanders

I was doing some writing. I was banging nails, doing a little bit of carpentry work.

michael barbaro

He also had a job putting together newsreels and educational film strips about history for school kids.

bernie sanders

That’s before video. For younger people, there was a thing called film strips. I won’t go through what they were, photographs and sound. And I did most of the work myself, had a little bit of help, photography and so forth. It was lot of fun, actually.

michael barbaro

He sells these films to schools in the region, and he also spends time putting together a project that he’s personally quite invested in and proud of.

archived recording If you are the average American who watches television 40 hours a week, you have probably heard of such important people as Kojak and Wonder Woman. Strangely enough, however, nobody has told you about Eugene Debs, one of the most important Americans of the 20th century.

michael barbaro

Which is a film about the life of the legendary American socialist leader, Eugene Debs.

bernie sanders

Debs was a very great American. He was one of the original founders of industrial unionism, socialist party candidate for president six times, somebody I admired a whole lot.

archived recording (eugene debs) The ruling class has always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war, and to have yourself slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world, you the people have never had a voice in declaring war.

michael barbaro

So throughout the 1970s, he is this activist educator who is running campaign after campaign, and losing every time. He’s not really developing a professional or political career for himself in Vermont. But in the city of Burlington —

bernie sanders

In 1980 or so, some friends of mine came up to me. And they said, you know, there’s going to be a mayor’s election coming up in ‘81. And you know what, we checked the records, and you did pretty well running as a Liberty Union candidate. You got actually 12 percent of the vote in some of the working class districts in Burlington.

michael barbaro

So two percent, or four percent, or six percent —

bernie sanders

That was statewide. But in Burlington, we did better.

michael barbaro

You were doing better.

bernie sanders

Yeah. So we got a bunch of people together, and they said, O.K., we’ll do it.

archived recording Bernie Sanders, a Brooklyn born self-described socialist running for mayor for the first time in 1981, running against a Democratic old guard that had run the city for a decade.

michael barbaro

When Sanders becomes a candidate for mayor, he is facing off against a powerful Democratic establishment. Burlington at this point, for decades has been essentially a one party town with a relatively conservative Democratic ruling clique that has just had a hammerlock on city politics. The incumbent mayor is not seen by anybody as vulnerable, to the point that the Republicans don’t even field a candidate against him. He’s also up against, just a culture of apathy when it comes to municipal elections. People generally don’t show up to vote for mayor, or for other city offices. So Bernie Sanders and this kind of ragtag group of academics and activists and intellectuals band together to try to figure out how to crack a city election in a place where nobody like them has ever won before.

bernie sanders

You would literally not believe if I told you how little we knew about politics. At the end of the day, I mean, real politics. It’s one thing to run for statewide office knowing you’re not going to win and get on our radio show and talk about issues, which I could do, but the nitty-gritty of politics.

michael barbaro

So as a newcomer to city politics, Bernie Sanders runs a different kind of campaign from the campaigns he’s run before. This isn’t about 30,000 foot ideological issues, like when he was a protest candidate for the Senate.

archived recording (bernie sanders) Ruth, you’re a volunteer worker at the old North end food co-op here in Burlington. archived recording Right. We’re on disability, social security. archived recording (bernie sanders) You got cut from $131 to — archived recording $48. archived recording (bernie sanders) And what was the justification for that? How do they expect you to live on the difference? archived recording They don’t care.

michael barbaro

This is a ground level campaign that’s waged over really concrete kitchen table issues that are relevant, he hopes, to a wide array of constituencies in the city that feel like they’ve been left out by the existing power structure.

bernie sanders

We had a lot of support in, for example, low income housing projects from people were getting a raw deal from the city that ran the projects. We had support from environmental groups. We had support from one group in the south end of the city. There was going to be a major highway going right through the neighborhood, and they said, we don’t like that.

michael barbaro

So Sanders is gaining some real support in this race. He’s not a trivial candidate, but still, the powers that be in Burlington do not see him as a threat to win this election. Let me talk about election night. What was the story of that night for you?

bernie sanders

Well, when I walked in on election day, I was of two opinions. Number one, that we would lose very heavily. And the newspapers, some guy, a newspaper writer was covering it, he said, the odds of Sanders winning are about 100 to one. That was literally what they wrote. So either we were doing something magical, or we would lose overwhelmingly. What I did not anticipate is that on election night, I think the results were, we were ahead by 14 votes. And after the recount, 10 votes. That, I did not expect.

archived recording Many people in Burlington are still in a state of shock following that city’s most stunning political upset in memory last night.

michael barbaro

The press reports from election night describe him as stunned, and then elated that he wins. And he wins by the absolute narrowest of margins, just ten votes.

alex burns

Ten votes.

archived recording Bernard Sanders, one of the founders of the Liberty Union Party, and a consistent loser in previous quests for elective office, was now the big winner. Considered by many to be unelectable because of his so-called radical views, Mr. Sanders put together an unlikely coalition of supporters and edged the ten year incumbent Gordon Paquette.

michael barbaro

So your strategy had worked. When you take office, how did becoming an elected official, the day to day reality of it, match your expectations of the power of winning this office and being mayor?

bernie sanders

Well, we had a very unique experience.

alex burns

Bernie Sanders has pulled off an extraordinary feat. He has upended the city establishment, he has become a socialist mayor in the United States at the height of the Cold War. But what happens next is he runs into a brick wall of political opposition. There is a body in Burlington, the Board of Aldermen. We would call it a city council. There are 13 members, 11 of them are either Democrats or Republicans, but their party label matters less than the fact that they are opposed to Bernie Sanders. He comes in, the powerful Democrats and the powerful Republicans both essentially say, he should not be the mayor of the city, and he will not be the mayor of the city for very long. Because we’re going to make sure that he can’t get anything done.

michael barbaro

People were trying to sabotage you?

bernie sanders

Trying to sabotage me, yes. They were trying to sabotage me. The first thing they did was to fire my secretary.

michael barbaro

They have the power to fire your secretary?

bernie sanders

Yeah, they did.

michael barbaro

So they reject his secretary. They take it back pretty quickly, but the damage to the relationship is kind of done. Not only do the board of Aldermen mess with his ability to hire a secretary, they reject all of his nominees for the top jobs in the city, city clerk, city treasurer, city attorney.

bernie sanders

And they made me run the city for the first year with exactly the administration of the guy I had beaten. You know, it’s like —

michael barbaro

You’re being neutered.

bernie sanders

Yes. So it’s like, you know, Donald Trump running his administration with Barack Obama’s appointees.

alex burns

So for really his first full year as mayor, he has a somewhat ornamental role.

michael barbaro

How are how are you thinking about this challenge?

bernie sanders

Well, their attitude, what they had said, and one of their leaders said, well, look. Bernie Sanders is a fluke. That was the word they used, and they said —

michael barbaro

Your brand of politics, everything about you, they thought was just a fluke.

bernie sanders

Right, this is an accident that should never have happened. And we will stonewall him in the first year, people will see that he can’t accomplish anything, then we’ll go back to the old ways.

michael barbaro

They’re going to drive you from office.

bernie sanders

Yeah. Well, it was a brutal year. So what we had to do was literally form a parallel city government without any money. I mean, we didn’t, couldn’t pay anybody, but we brought together a group of strong supporters and we had them helping us working on legislation and ideas. And we did everything that we could while we were being absolutely opposed by the Democratic and Republicans on the board of Aldermen. So we organized at the grass-roots level, we mobilize people. Our job was to get people involved in the political process.

michael barbaro

How did you do that?

bernie sanders

Well, I’ll tell you how we did it. Even before I took office, we had meetings on issues that people were concerned about that had been ignored for a very long time. We said, we believe in arts. You know, a city has got to be vital and alive. What do we do about the arts? What do we do about economic development? What do we do about women’s rights? So we ended up storming a council on Arts, a council on women, a council on youth. We started what we called neighborhood planning associations, which meant we gave local neighborhoods, each ward had a certain amount of money and they spent it however they wanted. So we tried to democratize it, and we brought people into the process. So it wasn’t me saying, we’re going to do A, B and C. These were people who themselves were now empowered.

michael barbaro

So you’re finding a way to essentially circumvent these aldermen who think you’re a fluke, and think they can block you by literally tapping into —

bernie sanders

Right.

michael barbaro

More voters, more people. When did you know that this strategy was actually working?

bernie sanders

Well, when hundreds of people would show up at city council meetings and demand our agenda. We were fighting for an agenda, it was being blocked by the city council. So people were upset about it, and here’s the interesting thing: We have elections for mayor then every two years, but half the board of Aldermen comes up on the odd year.

michael barbaro

So in 1982, one year after Sanders becomes mayor, seven of the 13 members of the board of aldermen are up for re-election.

bernie sanders

Essentially, there was a referendum on my administration.

michael barbaro

These elections became a chance for Mayor Sanders to go directly to the voters and ask them to replace these intransigent members of the board of aldermen with people who are friendly to him and supportive of his ideas.

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.

michael barbaro

He’s right, voter turnout really did rise in Burlington when Sanders got involved in city politics. And some of that is about him and his message and his political organization. Some of it is just having contested elections, elections where people file to run against the people who are already sitting in public office. When you have two choices rather than one, then yeah, more people show up to make a choice.

archived recording (bernie sanders) Good evening. We’re recording this on Friday, March 5th, and we’ve decided to get out of City Hall, get out of the office. And we’re here on the first floor the Burlington Square Mall.

michael barbaro

And he continues to engage and attempt to inspire voters in this same way, getting out in the community. He’s a highly visible mayor.

archived recording (bernie sanders) And I think what we’ll do is have some informal discussions with Vermonters as they walk past us, and as we can grab them. And we’ll see if we can get their views on some of the important issues of the day. But before we do —

michael barbaro

He creates a local television show called “Bernie Speaks With the Community,” where he is just out there and connected to your average voter.

archived recording (bernie sanders) Oops, oh, here we go. archived recording Hi, Shannon. archived recording (bernie sanders) Shannon, do you live in Burlington, Shannon? archived recording Yeah. archived recording (bernie sanders) O.K. So how are things going with you? archived recording Pretty good. I was just wondering, my mother had this idea for an indoor/outdoor amusement park by the waterfront, and she wanted — and I want to know if, is there anything going to be done about it? archived recording (bernie sanders) Well, I can’t say for sure that something will be done immediately. I think it is a good idea, and interestingly enough, your mother mentioned —

michael barbaro

It’s a highly unusual approach for a municipal politician, and especially in a city where the mayor had not been that kind of man about town previous.

archived recording (bernie sanders) O.K. The next person that we’ve kidnapped here off the streets for a few words is Jodie Baggerly. Jodie, welcome. archived recording (jodie baggerly) Well, thank you. One thing I want to appreciate, being a disabled person, is the little discount we get on our cable TVs, because I think it’s a positive point to have educational programs to be able to watch and fill our minds at periods when we are unable to get out. archived recording (bernie sanders) Let me just jump in and remind our viewers. What Jodie is talking about is, the city negotiated with the Mountain Cable Company —

michael barbaro

So Senator Sanders, in brief, what are the lessons of this moment for you?

bernie sanders

Lessons of this moment is that winning politics is grass-roots politics, that winning politics is developing coalitions of working people, of low income people, of women, of environmentalists. So coalition is, we do it from the bottom on up, and we ended up in my years as mayor taking on everybody.

michael barbaro

We’ll be right back.

[music]

michael barbaro

So Alex, in Sanders’s telling, in the face of total political opposition and stonewalling, his solution is to essentially do what got him political power in the first place, which is go to the people, talk to the people, always the people.

alex burns

That’s his political brand as mayor, much as it’s his political brand now. And in Burlington, it’s an approach that really works for him. It establishes him as a legitimate city executive with an independent power base who cannot just be treated as an interloper in City Hall. It’s also the first of a couple stages in Mayor Sanders’ campaign to reinvent Burlington city politics. And if the first part of that is about really engaging with city politics at the ground level, the next stage after he’s been mayor for a couple of years, is to look way beyond Burlington and take on big national and international political issues, and connect them back to the local level.

archived recording If I were the president of the largest bank in Burlington, I’d be real nervous about you. archived recording (bernie sanders) Well, they may be, they may be. But I think — and they are. But I think what we’ve often talked about also, is that my powers as mayor are in many ways limited. And I have my visions as to what life should be in Vermont, in Burlington, and in the United States, but we are going to speak out, though, on national and international issues which affect the city of Burlington. For example, obviously, we’re very concerned about Mr. Reagan’s policies which are impacting devastatingly on low income and working people. But we know what our powers are within the city of Burlington.

michael barbaro

So Senator Sanders, during this period you start talking about national issues. You start talking about President Reagan, his economic policy. You start talking about foreign policy. You send letters to the leaders of Japan expressing regret for the two bombs that were dropped on that country by the U.S. What was your thinking? As you’re building this coalition locally, you start talking about issues beyond the borders of Burlington. And what is your thinking —

bernie sanders

Well, let’s be clear. 90 plus percent of our energy was dealing with local issues like reforming the police department and paving the streets. We brought a minor league baseball team into Burlington, Vermont. 95, 98 percent of our work was locally, doing what mayors are supposed to do. But as part of empowering people, what we also believed is it was important to think globally and act locally. So if we were spending a whole lot of money in Washington under Reagan, investing in military spending, or giving tax breaks to the rich, that impacted the city of Burlington. We are mayors, we need money to help us with housing. We need money to help us with roads and infrastructure, and yet Washington is spending this money on the military, or they’re busy invading another country, or whatever they’re doing. We should be speaking up on those issues.

archived recording (bernie sanders) The question is whether we use the incredible wealth and natural resources and intelligence of our society to create a decent standard of living, a decent life for all of our people in this country and abroad, or do we develop the greatest military machine for killing in the history of the world. That’s what the choice is.

bernie sanders

This was in the middle of the Cold War, and we started a sister-city program. I know the, some of the right wing media misinterprets this. But what we did is, I took a group of about a dozen people from Burlington to Yaroslavl in the old Soviet Union.

archived recording [SINGING]

bernie sanders

We had hockey teams coming out, we had doctors coming in and out, we had kids coming in and out. It really — I love the idea of sister-city programs, and it worked phenomenally well.

archived recording [SINGING] This land is your land, this land is my land —

bernie sanders

And it involved a lot of people. So the kids began to learn about Russia, and I happened to believe then, and I believe now, that if we’re going to bring peace to the world, we need a lot of cultural exchanges, we need a lot of youth exchanges. In fact, I recently proposed taking one-tenth of one percent of the military budget and putting it into cultural exchanges, which I think is a very good investment.

archived recording [SINGING] Your land, this land is my land. From California to the New York islands. From the red wood forests — archived recording (bernie sanders) I had an experience this last summer, I was invited by the government of Nicaragua to attend the sixth anniversary of their revolution. And they must have had four or 500,000 people out there listening to speeches, and the horrible thought that I had really sunk my stomach, was that kids in my own city, young kids, working class kids, might be asked by this president to go to Nicaragua to kill and get killed. And it was a horrible thought.

michael barbaro

Some of these endeavors were relatively bold. At a certain point, you go to Nicaragua. You end up meeting with the leader of the Sandinistas. And I — oh, no. I’m not worried about any —

bernie sanders

No, I’m just —

michael barbaro

Oh, you’re worried about time?

bernie sanders

Yeah, we’re running. Yes, we are running — how are we doing on time?

michael barbaro

Five more minutes?

bernie sanders

I think we’re probably going to have to end it right now.

michael barbaro

Oh. No, no, no. This is not a — don’t end it on this question if that’s the issue.

bernie sanders

Well, you know, the issue is —

michael barbaro

Trust me, this is not — all I was going to asking you was, how do events like that connect to voters in Burlington? In your mind —

bernie sanders

Good, absolutely. Very good question. Well, I’ll tell you why —

michael barbaro

How does meeting with an international leader like that —

bernie sanders

I’ll tell you why it does. Because I believe we have to empower people. One of the things we did is, we said to people, speak out on national and international issues. Yes, the mayor of the city of Burlington can’t determine the defense budget. But if we rally people all over the country speaking out on these issues, then the members of Congress and U.S. senators will hear that. So to answer your question, this is just another mechanism that we had to say to people, you have a voice. Do you think we should be spending more money on nuclear weapons? Vote on it. Talk about it. So all of this has to do with empowering people to understand that in a democracy, they can determine the future.

michael barbaro

Alex, what do you make of that?

alex burns

That is really the essence of the Bernie Sanders approach to politics, that the most important thing a political leader can do is give voice to people’s deepest concerns and frustrations, and encourage people to give voice to it themselves. And if there is a gap between what that political leader is expressing or channeling, and what he can actually accomplish, it’s almost irrelevant, that the act of expression and engagement is the most important thing. And what happens when you draw people in on an issue like climate change, or the Reagan administration’s policies in Central America, is they become politically activated in a way that then transforms politics closer to home at the local level.

michael barbaro

And Sanders did eventually articulate what you’re describing, but not before he got frustrated with me and seemed to indicate he might end the interview when I mentioned Nicaragua. What do you think that that’s about?

alex burns

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.

michael barbaro

So that there’s no misunderstanding, those who listen and ask about Nicaragua, I want to give you a chance to make sure that there’s no confusion for any listener who’s casually checking in.

bernie sanders

All right —

michael barbaro

The question is, was there anything about Daniel Ortega that —

bernie sanders

Let me just say this.

michael barbaro

You knew at the time that gave you pause.

bernie sanders

Well, what gave me pause was that the United States at that time, as you may recall. I don’t know, do you remember —

michael barbaro

I was a student.

bernie sanders

Who the president was before Ortega? A dictator named Somoza who was a dictator, a very bad guy supported by the United States of America. Then Ortega came to power, the Sandinistas came to power, and the United States intended to do what it had done in many instances. You are aware the United States has a habit of overthrowing governments in Latin America.

michael barbaro

Yes.

bernie sanders

I didn’t think that was a good idea. Didn’t think it was a good idea then, and I didn’t think it was a good idea now. So we worked against American intervention. So we went there to say, as part of a national movement, that the United States should not be involved.

michael barbaro

Right.

bernie sanders

About overthrowing small governments.

michael barbaro

And for the record, in ‘85, were you aware of any human rights issues or abuses by Ortega?

bernie sanders

Well, we were aware that this was a very controversial moment, having taken over from a dictatorship. We were also aware that the United States at that time was supporting many governments in Latin America who were much more brutal than Ortega was.

alex burns

What you hear there is such an evasiveness about assessing the Ortega government on its own merits, that he really wants to talk about his advocacy around Nicaragua exclusively as a repudiation of Reagan, and not as an endorsement of what was going on there. And if you look at his comments and activities at the time, that’s not quite right. He was more explicitly supportive of what the Sandinistas were doing then just going there as a sort of anti-interventionist advocate. But in fairness to Sanders, this was not a fringe position at the time. Support for the Sandinistas has obviously not necessarily aged as well as Bernie Sanders might have expected it to politically, and that’s I think where you hear his real discomfort talking about it in the context of this campaign.

michael barbaro

But in taking this trip and talking about it the way he does, he is living his creed, essentially.

alex burns

Exactly. It is using all the levers of his power and public influence as an elected official to weigh in on this subject that is about as distant, literally, from Burlington as you can get.

[music]

michael barbaro

As this strategy is being deployed, you’re winning your fourth term as mayor. And you go on, successfully this time, to run for statewide office. The House, the Senate, and then, of course, you run for president 2016, now again in 2020. In each of these campaigns and each of these moments, you’re building larger and more powerful coalitions of voters. And given that history and your success in doing that, what do you think is the big lesson from this early phase? Why do you think it is that when we went to Alex Burns and asked him this question, and he said, you have to go back to ‘81, you have to go back to Burlington to understand Senator Sanders and this campaign and this moment. Why is he right, why do we have to go back to that race and that moment?

bernie sanders

Politics in America has been very much from the top on down. You still read articles in The New York Times where wealthy donors gathered today at a hotel to express concern about the Democratic candidates. Who cares about wealthy donors? We have over 1.1 million Americans who have made donations to our campaign. And they’re not wealthy, these are working class people. They’re teachers, they’re workers at Amazon, they’re workers at Walmart. What I believe then and what I believe now, the way you transform society is from the bottom on up. You talk about issues that are relevant to working people, issues that are relevant to low income people, issues that are relevant to young people, and you grow the voter base. So what I pointed out to you, maybe the most important thing that we did, is from 1979 to 1983, we doubled, doubled the number of people voting. And what we’re trying to do in this campaign right now —

michael barbaro

Is parallel.

bernie sanders

Is to significantly increase the voter turnout by talking to people who don’t vote. In Burlington, what happened is low income and working class people saw that government could work for them. And they said, oh my God, I never knew that. My kids now have a program, we have an after school program they didn’t have. We have a child care center we didn’t have. Our streets are getting paved, snow is getting moved. I didn’t know that — we’re going to go out, we’re going to support Bernie, and we’re going to support the candidates that he wants for Board of Aldermen. And now what we have to do in this country, which has one of the lowest voter turnout rates of any major country on earth, is to reach out to those working people, reach out to those young people. And when they start participating in the political process, that is the political revolution.

michael barbaro

If you become president, the question will be, sure, you talked about national and international issues when you were mayor, but there was no real expectation that you could change the course of events as a single mayor of a town in Burlington. If you become president, that expectation will be real and urgent and present. So are we to understand that if you run into political obstacles as president, that your strategy will be to call upon the expanded electorate that you have created and turned that into a political force that you would then, all of what you did in Burlington with the Board of Aldermen?

bernie sanders

Yes. Well, it’s not an if. That is exactly what is going to happen. When we talk about the need to join the rest of the industrialized world and guarantee health care to every person through a Medicare for all, single-payer program, the only way that’s going to happen is when millions of people stand up and take on the insurance companies and the drug companies. When we talk about transforming our energy system to save the planet from the devastation, absolute devastation of the global crisis regarding climate change, the only way that happens is when millions of people stand up to take on the fossil fuel industry. So on all of the issues we are talking about, that’s what the political revolution is about. It’s saying that we’re going to mobilize millions of people to stand up for an agenda that works for working families. And when they do that, there will be no stopping them. We will be able to create a government and an economy that works for all, not just the one percent.

michael barbaro

Alex, what do you think of that theory?

alex burns

Well, the coalition that he’s trying to build as a presidential candidate is such an echo of what he accomplished in Burlington. And his theory is, they are going to show up for him in a way they wouldn’t show up for any other candidate because he is speaking to their concerns directly. And Sanders has plenty of reason to expect that might really be the case. He has charted this remarkable ascent as a national political figure on the strength of this coalition and mainstreamed a set of socialist and quasi-socialist ideas that were seen as really outside the mainstream when he started campaigning on them decades ago, into the center of one of the country’s two major political parties. The question for someone like Bernie Sanders is, does that theory work in a general election on a national scale? Can you really bring in that many new people into the political process where there already are a whole lot of people who vote, and who have pretty vested interests in the context of an American election? Can you speak in the way he does to the concerns of working class people without alienating millions of people who already vote for the Democratic Party, and don’t necessarily share that world view? And could you, as the president, use that exact same playbook, that exact same coalition to master Washington and break a Republican Senate in the same way that he transformed Burlington and broke a city council?

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michael barbaro

Alex, thank you.

alex burns

Thank you.

bernie sanders

Thank you very much.

michael barbaro

I wish you the best. Thank you very much for your time.

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michael barbaro

“The Daily” is made by Theo Balcomb, Andy Mills, Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Annie Brown, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Wendy Dorr, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Alexandra Leigh Young, Jonathan Wolfe, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, Adizah Eghan, Kelly Prime, Julia Longoria, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Jazmín Aguilera, M.J. Davis Lin, Austin Mitchell, Sayre Quevedo, Monika Evstatieva, Neena Pathak, Dave Shaw and Dan Powell. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Mikayla Bouchard, Stella Tan, Lauren Jackson and Julia Simon.

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