Blog : Way to go Bernie

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6/2/2015 1:29 pm

Way to go Bernie - Part two

From: Peter Dreier and Pierre Clavel

Sanders grew up in Brooklyn and attended the University of Chicago, where he was active in the civil rights movement. After a short stint living on an Israeli kibbutz, in 1964 he moved to Vermont, where he worked as a carpenter, filmmaker, writer, and researcher, and got involved in radical politics. In the 1970s, after joining the antiwar Liberty Union Party, Sanders ran for several statewide offices, including governor, US Senate, and the US House (Vermont has only one seat). He never garnered more than 4 percent of the vote, but he did better in Burlington than in Vermont’s rural areas, which gave him hope that he had a shot at winning office in the local government.

In 1981, Sanders ran for mayor of Burlington as an Independent and defeated six-term Democratic Party incumbent Gordon Paquette by ten votes in a four-way contest. Voters re-elected Sanders three times by increasingly wider margins: 52 percent in 1983, 55 percent in 1985, and 56 percent in 1987.

Burlington was no hippie counterculture enclave. Although the city attracted many young, educated people because of its natural beauty and the presence of the University of Vermont, it has always had a large working-class population (many of them from French Canadian stock) who, until Sanders came on the scene, tended to vote for moderate Democrats and Republicans. Each time he ran for mayor, Sanders attracted increasing support from the city’s blue-collar precincts.

In his first two years in office, the City Council refused to allow Sanders to hire more than a handful of staff, while the entrenched bureaucrats in City Hall sought to thwart his initiatives. Randy Kamerbeek, the city’s planning director, “tried to sabotage everything that Bernie proposed,” recalled Michael Monte, who worked in that agency. “He told us not to allow Bernie to have any visible successes. He figured Bernie would be out of office after his first term.”