As mayor, Bernie got stuff done while never losing his idealism

In, “As Mayor, Bernie Sanders Was More Pragmatist Than Socialist,” (11/25/15) Katharine Q. Seelye writes about the presidential candidate’s tenure as mayor through a distorted lens, raising questions about and undermining Senator Sanders’ reputation.

Her attacks are subtle, but effective.

Seelye begins by criticizing Sanders’ handling of 1985 antiwar protests, characterizing him as someone who might have “shouted about foreign affairs” but was “consumed with running the city,” choosing to protect “workers over blocking the making of weapons to fight leftists abroad.”

In reality, Sanders did not side with factory workers over protesters, but called for them to unite in the global, anti-war cause together. Seelye does not mention that Sanders said at the time,

“You cannot split the movement and push workers to one side and have peace activists on the other.”

Sanders recognized that letting 3,000 individuals lose their pay because of Washington’s foreign policy would be folly— the madness of crabs in a bucket attacking each other instead of the person who put them there.

Bernie never compromised his idealistic “ideology,” as Seelye writes— to the contrary, it guided him.

Seelye goes on to express surprise that Sanders “used a budget surplus not to experiment with a socialist concept like redistributing wealth but to fix the city’s deteriorating streets,” contributing to the unfounded fear stoked by Republicans that a President Sanders would seize all your money.

Bernie Sanders’ goal is not for every citizen to have equal assets, but to create a society where people may rise and fall based on their abilities instead of how much money they were born into.

He is demanding an end to the extreme poverty and child hunger in this country, calling for the United States to enforce a level playing field in the vein of FDR and Eisenhower, not Mao’s China or the Soviet Union.

Seelye strikes dishonest fear into people’s hearts by insinuating otherwise.

As Sanders said in 1976,

“I myself don’t use the word socialism, because people have been brainwashed into thinking socialism automatically means slave-labor camps, dictatorship and lack of freedom of speech.”

In Seelye’s history of Mayor Sanders, the right disliked him for being a radical socialist who took “trips to Nicaragua and the Soviet Union,” while the left viewed him as a corporate stooge who “compromised too much with business interests.”

But the truth was, once people understood his agenda, Sanders didn’t have many critics.

Conservatives admired him for his frugality, good-for-small-business policies, and ability to get things done, while liberals loved him for challenging the ruling class, standing up for the voiceless, keeping housing costs down, fighting for women, and organizing the people.

Sanders grew Burlington’s economy and attracted local business by creating trade associations, giving new entrepreneurs start-up funding, and offering technical assistance.

Allen Gear, member of the Board of Aldermen since 1979, praised him for doing,

“...things I don’t think we Republicans could have done… [Bernie’s] put a lot of modern accounting practices and money-management practices into place that are good Republican business practices.”

Some Republicans even say he managed to “out-Republican the Republicans.”

Despite these pro-business and fiscally responsible policies, hallmarks of the Republican philosophy, Sanders never alienated anyone on the left because he protected low-wage workers, financed training programs for women, implemented neighborhood planning assemblies (NPAs), and created organizations to empower the people, including a Youth Office, an Arts Council, and a Women’s Council.

Sanders even instituted higher business tax rates, a calling card of the progressive platform, but created such a thriving economic climate that business wanted to be there.

Seelye buries this fact in scorn, writing,

"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."

While continuing to level “socialist” as an accusation, Seelye somehow also paints Sanders as disliked for being pro-business.

Apparently he is a far-left socialist and a sell-out conservative, both. Quite a feat indeed.

In reality, he was a wildly popular mayor: pro-business and pro-people, a leader for conservatives and liberals.

As Seelye begrudgingly notes,

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

She goes on to write that “the number of families living in poverty grew” under Sanders, while neglecting to mention that these were the Reagan years and people across the country were struggling. By the end of the ‘80s, the middle-class incomes were "barely higher than they had been a decade before-- and the poverty rate had actually risen."

Sanders did not create poverty in Burlington, but opportunity and prosperity.

In an attempt to impugn Sanders’ management skills, Seelye quotes a political scientist as saying—

“Bernie Sanders couldn’t manage his way out of a paper bag,”

—when Sanders was, in fact, an excellent leader who managed his way much further than that.

He led the fight to stop housing complex owners from evicting low-income people, taking them to task, declaring,

“Over my dead body are you going to displace 336 working families. You are not going to convert Northgate into luxury housing.”

He passed ordinances to protect those families, helped create a Residents Association, and worked with the state and other politicians to successfully purchase and renovate the buildings. Because of his efforts, Northgate Apartments is now tenant-owned with "long-term restrictions to keep the buildings affordable for working families."

Seelye is also critical of Sanders’ role in opening up the Burlington lakefront, writing he sold “out to business interests,” when, to the contrary, he fought hard against them. The deal Sanders achieved did not “limit public access,” but provided “affordable housing,” “generous public access,” and “some commercial development.”

As Michael Monte, who worked on the waterfront project, recalls, “It was Bernie who set the tone that the waterfront wasn’t for sale.”

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

Burlington loved Sanders so much they elected people like him for years to come. His CEDO director, Peter Clavelle, was in power for 16 years and expanded upon what Bernie had accomplished.

In fact, "the coalition that coalesced around Sanders in 1981 governed Burlington for all but two of the next 31 years."

The foundation he created has never been uprooted.

Seelye’s is a Swiss cheese story, an article filled with holes, lacking context, and written as a narrative, not based on facts, but to support the author’s pre-determined conclusion.

Mayor Sanders was beloved, “one of America's best mayors,” a man who was an advocate for anyone who needed one: “the police, the elderly, most of the university faculty and students, the poor, the hip, and the upwardly mobile technocrats.”

He crossed party lines as an Independent, cobbling together the frugality of the conservatives with the populism of the liberals, along with an added dash of his own democratic socialism.

Mayor Sanders was a pragmatist and a democratic socialist both.

Katharine Q. Seelye does a disservice to her readers, as well as to the institution of journalism, by depicting it otherwise.