Politics of the possible: The Sanders crusade

by GREG GUMA

If a psychic had predicted in the 1970s that Bernie Sanders would someday stand on the White House lawn in support of an embattled Democratic President, or become a Democrat himself, people who knew him would have considered it a poor joke. Sanders would have called it “totally outrageous.”

But the idea that he would one day run for president? Now, that was a pretty safe bet. The real questions were when and how.

From the start, Sanders had his eye on one high office or another. In January 1972, three years after moving to Vermont, he waged his first race for the US Senate. In a special election to replace deceased “native son” Winston Prouty, he got 2 percent of the vote as a Liberty Union Party candidate. Undaunted, he represented the state’s newest “third party” party again that fall, this time as its candidate for governor.

For Sanders, a key moment in that race came in September when he escorted Dr. Benjamin Spock, the famous and controversial pediatrician, during a Vermont visit. At the time Spock was running for President as the People’s Party candidate.

In two other statewide campaigns over the next four years, Sanders focused a righteous anger and his growing campaign abilities on monopoly capitalism, the superrich and their two henchmen – the major political parties. Running to replace retiring political icon George Aiken in 1974, he won his first union endorsements, but still only 4 percent of the vote. That race put Patrick Leahy, a young Chittenden County State’s Attorney, in the Senate.

Debating Republican businessman Richard Snelling and his Democratic opponent, Employment Commissioner Stella Hackel, on public television in 1976 in the race for governor, Sanders accused both of avoiding the real issues; his list included public ownership of utilities, doubling the corporate income tax, and eliminating the income tax for those earning less than $10,000. Decades before the Occupy movement, he foreshadowed its call: “the people of the State of Vermont have got to get off their knees and have got to stand up to the 2 or 3 percent who control the money.”

A year later, however, he sounded frustrated when announcing his resignation from Liberty Union. “Sad and tragic” was how he saw the five-year old party, yet offered little advice or encouragement before dropping out of sight. “I don’t know about my future,” he admitted. Despite decent press coverage, union endorsements, and performing well in debates, he couldn’t come close to winning.

But two decades later, only hours after the US House of Representatives voted to impeach a President for the second time in the nation’s history, there was Sanders, now a former Burlington mayor and Vermont’s only Congressman, lined up with Democratic notables behind Bill Clinton outside the White House. Ten years after that he backed Barack Obama for President from a seat in the US Senate. By then, he had effectively neutralized any Democratic opposition in Vermont – without officially joining the party.

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