A reporter, a road trip, and the beginning of Bernie Sanders’ surprising political ascent
Hillary Clinton was rolling out her newest attack on Bernie Sanders’ foreign policy credentials. But it was a tough sell in Phil Borden’s house on the Hill.
“I do not believe a vote in 2002 is a plan to defeat ISIS in 2016,” Clinton said, referring to Sanders’ vote against the Iraq War in 2002 – a war that Clinton supported as a senator from New York.
Beverly Cohen wasn’t buying it.
“It’s about judgment, Hillary, judgment,” the senior citizen from San Pedro yelled at the TV. “His judgment versus your judgment.”
Cohen was one of more than 25 Sanders supporters who had gathered in Borden’s magnificent house at the top of Rancho Palos Verdes to watch the Feb. 11 Democratic debate held two days after Bernie beat Clinton by more than 20 points in the New Hampshire primary. They came from San Pedro, from Wilmington, from Torrance, from Redondo – all over the South Bay.
Buoyed by Sanders’ stunning victory, the crowd was feeling feisty and frequently erupted into cheers, as when Bernie called for raising the $118,500 cap on income eligible for the social security tax. There was loud, knowing laughter when Bernie asked rhetorically “Why does Wall Street make huge donations? Just for the fun of it?” And there was even a little hissing when Clinton claimed that she had never asked anyone to vote for her because she is a woman.
The crowd reflected California’s diversity, spanning the spectrum from old to young, with black, Latino and Asian faces mixed in among the majority of white faces you would expect to find at an RPV house party. It was the kind of diversity Bernie will need to win the Democratic nomination.
As the crowd watched and reacted to Sanders’ raw populist appeals and Clinton’s more polished presentation – most media pundits said she won this particular debate – my mind drifted back, back, back to a late-spring morning more than 25 years ago. ..
Road trip with Bernie
I was waiting at the intersection of Ferry Road and Route 7 in Charlotte, Vermont, 10 miles south of Burlington, when a battered old brown Honda Civic with two men in front pulled up.
“Get in the back seat,” Bernie Sanders said in his brusque, Brooklyn-meets-Burlington accent as he cleared a space among a pile of old newspapers, Dunkin’ Donut coffee cups and Bernie for Congress bumper stickers. “That’s where reporters belong – in the back seat.”
Bernie didn’t laugh at his little joke and neither did I. It was only 8 in the morning and already I was feeling the Bern.
I was facing at least four hours in this crowded, messy little car with Bernie and his most trusted aide, Jeff Weaver, an equally serious, laser-focused guy. They were both obsessed with social justice and skeptical of all media, which they viewed as a necessary evil – shallow, superficial and corporate controlled – if you wanted to compete in the mainstream political process.
It was June 14, 1990, the obscure holiday known as Flag Day. Bernie was in political limbo, out of office for 15 months and looking for his next gig.
I was just looking for a good story.
Bernie was known statewide as the socialist former mayor of Burlington, Vermont’s largest city. He was so well known in Vermont that some of his bumper stickers simply said Bernie! – he was using the exclamation mark long before Jeb Bush — and headline writers often used the same shorthand reference.
If you read the fine print, you knew Bernie was actually a Scandinavian-style Democratic Socialist. That’s someone who believes in higher taxes on the rich so all citizens can have a safety net. He did not believe or advocate that government should take over the economy and control every aspect of manufacturing and distribution, which is the traditional definition of socialism.
I was the lead political reporter for Vermont’s largest newspaper, the Burlington Free Press, owned by Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain. Just working for The Man was enough to make me a suspicious character in Bernie’s eyes.
And the truth was we didn’t know each other very well before being thrown together in the crucible of the single most important election in Bernie’s 40-year political career – most important at least until this year’s presidential election.
After winning three straight Reporter of the Year awards from the Vermont Press Association, I had recently been hired away by the Free Press from the family owned, Pulitzer-Prize winning Rutland Herald, which covered the southern part of the state. I had covered Bernie for the Herald a few times when he ventured south during a 1988 run for Congress, but for the most part he stayed in Burlington and I stayed in the south so our paths rarely crossed.
This cross-state, north-to-south trip was the first big step in our near-daily dealings for the next four and a half months. I would hear his “the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer and the middle class is disappearing” mantra so often that I knew when it was coming before the words were out of his mouth. The tip-off: his up-raised hands would start their familiar chopping motion with the forefinger extended as if he were counting numbers on a blackboard.
Bernie was the most relentlessly on-message politician I had ever seen – and still is. Bernie was quick on his feet verbally and very good at question-and-answer town hall-style sessions, willing to respond directly and candidly no matter how obscure or convoluted the question might be. And he even displayed an occasional sense of humor, usually Brooklyn-style sarcasm. But no matter how far afield his answers went he always circled back to the corrupt, broken political system, the rigged economy, and the terrible toll they were taking on America’s working classes. Then came the inevitable remedies to help level the playing field: universal, single-payer health care for all, eliminate the tax breaks for big corporations, and break up the big banks.
He was running as an Independent candidate for Congress against the perfect foil: Rep. Peter Smith, a Vermont version of Jeb Bush. Smith was a tall, blond-haired preppy, a Princeton-educated, son-of-a-Burlington-banker Republican who had beaten him by three percentage points in the 1988 race for Vermont’s one and only congressional seat. From the moment Bernie had conceded that race in November 1988, even before he left the mayor’s office in March 1989 after four wildly successful terms, he had begun gearing up for a rematch two years later.
Now the clock was ticking faster and faster towards Election Day. Every day had to be a productive day, the looming summer be damned. For Bernie and for the Vermont political class, this was by far the most important and competitive election that year. The Democratic Party, which Bernie consistently refused to join despite his natural affinity for the liberal wing, had cleared the field by nominating a no-name non-entity. As a result Bernie was supported by many Democrats, either overtly or covertly.
The consensus among Vermont’s media and political pundits was that if Bernie lost to Smith again he would be relegated to the status he had first achieved during the 1970’s when he ran for state-wide office on the Liberty Union party label and was repeatedly crushed with single digit percentages. Back then he was viewed as a Vermont version of Harold Stassen, the quirky, cranky perennial mid-century presidential candidate who became less and less credible each time he ran and lost.
Bernie’s historic, 10-vote victory in the March 1981 Burlington mayoral election over Gordie Paquette, a five-term Democratic mayor who had not taken him or his candidacy seriously, had altered that gadfly perception and changed Burlington’s destiny. Finally given the kind of political opportunity he had longed for during a decade in the electoral wilderness, Mayor Bernie took care of the basics: he made sure the buses ran on time and the roads got plowed after every snow storm during Vermont’s endless winters. But he also did much more: Burlington became the first city in the country to fund community-trust housing, he lured a minor-league baseball team – the wonderfully named Vermont Reds – to play there, and he sued the local cable TV franchise, winning reduced rates for customers. Oh, and he set up a Burlington youth office headed by Jane O’Meara, who also grew up in Brooklyn and met him the night he was first elected mayor. She later became his wife and today can be seen at his side, smiling and supportive, wherever he goes. Over the next eight years he also set up an arts council and a women’s council. He pushed police reform, increased street repairs and made sure low income people weren’t pushed out of the city by skyrocketing rents.
And he did it in the face of overwhelming skepticism and official opposition. The defeated Paquette immediately predicted Bernie would be a one-term mayor who would soon be forgotten, a blip on Burlington’s political history. And the board of aldermen, Democrats and Republicans alike, blocked every initiative he proposed during his first year. Bernie’s solution: he endorsed seven progressive candidates for the 1983 alderman elections and got enough of them elected to sustain his vetoes. Now the board of aldermen would have to do business with the fire-brand mayor trying to drag their beautiful city into the 20th century. While clearly a cultural liberal, he turned out to be fiscally conservative: he balanced the city’s books, cut taxes and built up reserves. “We’re going to out-Republican the Republicans,” he told his followers.
Despite his proud claim to be a Democratic Socialist and his constant criticism of an economy rigged by and for millionaires – a forerunner of his current criticism of an economy rigged by and for millionaires and billionaires — he forged a working relationship with the city’s economic and business elite. Most notably, he killed a rich developer’s plan to turn the city’s neglected, industrial-wasteland of a waterfront on Lake Champlain into expensive, high-rise condos, offices and hotels. Instead he passed a long-range plan to turn it into a people’s waterfront with a community boathouse, affordable restaurants, open space parks, a city sponsored sailing school, and a beautiful bike path that today rivals the one running from Redondo to Venice. His vote percentage in the 1983, 1985 and 1987 mayoral elections increased each time to the point where he could have been elected mayor-for-life. U.S. News and World Report even named him one of America’s 20 best mayors in 1987 and Burlington started showing up on lists of the best places to live in America.
But Bernie wanted more than mayor-for-life. He wanted a way in to the big political game, the long game, the national game played in Washington, D.C. Vermont’s two senators – James Jeffords and Patrick Leahy – were both beloved figures that could hold their offices as long as they wanted. Leahy is still in office today and Bernie was elected to the Senate when Jeffords retired in 2006. But back in 1990 the congressional seat was Bernie’s only opening and he was determined to take it.
Many of his Progressive Coalition followers – Progs, in the Vermont parlance – urged him to stay home and run for governor, arguing that his prickly, take-charge personality made him better suited for an executive position like governor than it did to be a member of a deliberative body like Congress, where he would be one of 435. Like many people focused on a mission they passionately believe in, Bernie had little time for fools — and there are plenty of fools in Congress.
But Bernie was determined to launch a do-or-die race against an incumbent congressman who had already beaten him once. Ironically, he faced a similar argument from Smith: that Bernie might have been a good mayor but he was unsuited to Congress and would be a lone wolf, a party-of-one who couldn’t get anything done for Vermont. That turned out not to be true – he voted with the Democrats 96 percent of the time and in return got the committee assignments he wanted — but at the time it sounded like a plausible argument.
Framing the Election His Way
That day a quarter century ago we were on our way from Burlington in the northern tip of the state to Bennington in the southern tip, a two and a half-hour ride each way that I wasn’t looking forward to. But walking the streets and watching Bernie interacting with blue-collar voters – now that was something I was looking forward to. Burlington was home to five liberal arts colleges and a politically conscious working class that provided fertile territory for his progressive message. So I was anxious to see him in action away from the candles-and-sandals voters that had first carried him to victory in what was derisively known as the People’s Republic of Burlington.
I wanted to see how he interacted with hard-core Vermonters, low-to-moderate income folks who hunted, fished and farmed, people who couldn’t tell you the difference between a Democratic Socialist and a 1950’s-style red scare communist.
With Weaver – now Bernie’s presidential campaign manager — driving the Honda, Bernie settled back in his shotgun seat and told me how my predecessor at the Free Press, political reporter David Karvelas, had screwed him while covering the 1988 congressional election. His proof: two days after Smith won, he hired Karvelas as his press secretary, immediately damaging the Free Press’s credibility and throwing into question its entire coverage of the Smith-Sanders battle.
We flew through the bright, blooming countryside as Vermont’s soft green mountains and rolling farmland awoke from yet another loooong winter. I listened intently to Bernie’s bitter tale of media bias, said I would look into the situation, and, if I could gather enough evidence, write a story about it. Bernie expressed extreme skepticism that the Free Press would ever allow me to write a story that questioned its journalistic integrity.
When we got to Bennington we stopped at the first gas station we saw. I interviewed the guy who pumped the gas, John Carlson. He admitted he was a Republican who never would have even contemplated voting for Bernie in the past.
But now, after watching and hearing about Bernie’s success for eight years as Burlington’s mayor he said he was willing to give Bernie a fair hearing. And Bernie seized the opportunity.
“If you like what’s happening in Washington right now, then vote for Peter Smith,” he told him. “But if you don’t like what’s happening and think it’s time for a change, then please consider voting for me.” I must have heard that same sly way of framing the election 50 times that day, and it was a very effective sales pitch. After all, who in their right mind liked what was happening in Washington? Carlson shook Bernie’s hand and promised to give him serious consideration.
After a full day of vote hustling at coffee shops and factories and walking down Main Street where Bernie approached voters one-on-one – his big black glasses and Julius Caesar-style haircut of silver curls framing a large bald forehead made him instantly recognizable to many — the sun set as we headed back to Burlington.
The next day I called politically connected people around the state for quotes to flesh out the story. Four days later my story reporting that Bernie was attracting voters up and down the state who had never voted for him before ran above the fold on the front page of the Sunday Free Press, which had a circulation of more than 75,000.
That night I got a call from Bernie thanking me for the story and challenging me – again — to write the story of Karvelas’ double-dealing and hidden agenda in the 1988 election.
Two weeks later the dean of the national political reporters, David Broder of the Washington Post, was the featured speaker at the annual meeting of the Vermont Press Association. Holding my story up – but not mentioning my name – Broder said Bernie had been able to pull the wool over some local reporter’s eyes but that realistically there was no way Vermont – until very recently a rock-ribbed Republican bastion – would ever elect a Socialist to Congress.
Bernie’s bio
The next big story I wrote was one half of the standard campaign coverage of a major race: a lengthy profile of Bernie, to be followed by a lengthy profile of Smith. Bernie’s big-picture bio – his journey from the loud, crowded streets of Brooklyn to the quietude of a back-to-the-earth shack in Vermont, with a stop at the University of Chicago in between – was pretty well known. My job now was to fill in the details for the non-political junkies who hadn’t followed Bernie’s Burlington years.
As political bios go, it was pretty inspiring, complete with immigrant parents chasing the American dream and working hard to make a better life for their kids. Bernie’s father Eli Sanders had emigrated from Poland to Brooklyn in 1921 at the age of 17. There he met Bernie’s mother, Dorothy Glassberg, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia.
Bernie was born in 1941 and grew up in the projects, where his height and natural athleticism made him a leader in the baseball and basketball games played all day long in the streets and deep into summer nights. His political instincts were first aroused by the family stories of how Hitler had taken over Germany by winning an election and then targeting Jews, finally killing more than six million during the Holocaust. “I learned that politics is, in fact, very important,” Bernie later said.
After attending P.S. 197 followed by Hebrew School in the afternoon, he went to James Madison High School in Brooklyn where he was a track star and member of the basketball team. True to his later pattern, he lost his first try for office when he finished last out of three candidates for Student Body President.
His family was no worse off than its neighbors, but he has admitted that there was frequently tension in the household over a lack of money for anything beyond the bare basics of food and shelter. His mother died at age 46, the year he graduated high school, and his father died at age 57 three years later.
In Chicago Bernie joined the Young People’s Socialists League and was an organizer in the black civil rights movement. He attended the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom where Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” Speech. Back at college he organized a sit-in at the president’s office, demanding that black students be allowed to room with white students. Bernie was arrested – a picture of his arrest was published by the Chicago Tribune last week — but the college eventually changed its policy of segregated housing.
It was during this time that Bernie began to focus on the life and career of his first political hero, Eugene Debs, who died at age 71 in 1926. Debs was an American union leader and five times ran for US President as the candidate of the Socialist Party of America. Debs was a Democrat while he worked as a union organizer, but was jailed for six months while leading a railroad union strike and emerged from jail as a socialist. Bernie had the opposite trajectory: he started as a socialist and only signed up as a Democrat last year in anticipation of his run for the Democratic Presidential nomination. To this day, his Senate office has a plaque on the wall honoring Debs.
After graduating in 1964 with a degree in political science he avoided going to Vietnam by applying for Conscientious Objector status, which was eventually denied. By the time the issue was adjudicated he was too old for the draft. Out of guilt, perhaps, Bernie has always gone out of his way to be supportive of military veterans, fighting hard for their medical care and financial benefits. Given his left-wing, anti-war rhetoric, it’s one of the surprising parts of his record. He voted against the Iraq War in 2002 but says he has the highest respect for the men and women who fought in that controversial war.
After college Bernie found his way to Vermont as part of the urban migration to the wilds of New England states like Maine and New Hampshire. There he had an out-of-wedlock son, Levi, with his college sweetheart and began to put the political and organizing skills he had learned in college into practice when he joined the Liberty Union party in the early 1970s. He started running for statewide offices but never got more than 10 percent of the vote. Finally, at the suggestion of a friend who taught religion at the University of Vermont, he ran for mayor of Burlington, shocked the world with his 10-vote victory, and was off and running on a 40-year political career.
Echoes of Yesterday
One of the most fascinating parts about watching Bernie run for president is the way it harkens back to the 1990 election and the various issues that were raised then. I first noticed this pattern months ago when Clinton began to contrast her strong support for gun control versus Bernie’s somewhat weaker record.
What Hillary probably didn’t know was that Bernie’s strong support for gun control in the 1988 race against Smith was a key factor in his bitter defeat that year. The National Rifle Association enthusiastically endorsed Smith in 1988, and Bernie was cast as a typical gun-hating lefty liberal. In a state that still had a lot of hunters and backwoods type guys who loved their guns and rifles, that was a tough hurdle to overcome.
I flashed back to a visit I had made with Bernie to a gun store in Underhill, a small town northeast of Burlington, in September 1990. The shop’s owner told me that he had supported Smith in 1988 but was now supporting Bernie. Why the surprising switch? Because, he said, the NRA had denounced Smith for some votes he had cast in his first Congressional term. And, he admitted, because Bernie had backed off some of the more stringent gun control measures he had advocated two years ago.
I called the NRA headquarters and learned that while they were not officially endorsing Bernie because he still supported some gun controls, they were indeed targeting Smith for defeat because they felt he had betrayed them. Soon Burlington was littered with signs saying “Smith&Wesson – Yes, Smith&Congress – No.”
That one-hour visit to an obscure gun store led to another front-page story laying out the new-found support for Bernie among gun owners and the fervent desire by the NRA to teach Smith a lesson about loyalty and the price of betrayal. Who knew that Bernie’s flip-flop on this relatively minor issue, which he spun as being more responsive to his rural constituent’s concerns, would be raised 25 years later in a presidential election?
“He’s a hypocrite”
Bernie kept asking me when I was going to write the story about the Free Press reporter David Karvelas being hired as Smith’s press secretary days after he had spent six months covering the Smith-Sanders 1988 race. At his most primal level Bernie was driven by a need to protect victims of bullies and to correct injustices. In this case he clearly regarded himself as the victim of a massive media injustice that had quite possibly cost him a close election.
In my spare time I started to interview all the other candidates who had run in 1988 before it got down to Smith and Sanders, and there was just enough on-the-record evidence to write a compelling story that Bernie had indeed been badly treated by Karvelas and the Free Press. But my editor insisted that I broaden the story to include other instances of Vermont reporters jumping back and forth between newspapers, TV stations and the political campaigns they were supposed to be covering with an impartial approach. There were just enough examples to make it clear that this was an unsavory practice that hurt the credibility of every media outlet and reporter who engaged in it.
Despite the inclusion of other examples, the Free Press coverage of the 1988 election was still the focus of the story, and Bernie quickly pronounced himself happy with the result. From that day forward he treated me more as a tough but fair reporter and less as a lackey of the corporate media determined to keep him down. The story pissed off my Free Press editors and cost me some newsroom capital but I felt it was important to set the record straight about what had happened in the 1988 election.
Thus it’s hard to overstate the sense of frustration I felt when, less than a year later, Bernie hired Debbie Bookchin, the Rutland Herald reporter who had covered the 1990 election, to replace the press secretary he had hired right after the election. I called Smith, now working as an educational consultant, for a reaction.
“That’s the kind of thing Bernie Sanders does,” Smith said. “He’s a hypocrite.”
Going negative
Bernie has always prided himself on not running negative ads against his opponent, and he stuck to that policy all through the increasingly bitter 1990 election. Although Smith’s supporters routinely called Bernie a socialist and even a communist – just as Fox’s Bill O’Reilly does almost every night and Donald Trump did last month – Smith reluctantly followed the same policy. While Bernie’s ads talked about economic inequality and the mess in Washington, Smith’s ads warned that Bernie would not be effective in Washington but refrained from overtly personal attacks.
But as the race approached its climax in late October, with Bernie consistently leading the polls by three to five points – within the margin of error – Smith finally decided to let loose with an old-fashioned red-baiting ad that ran on TV stations around the state.
The ad tried to link Bernie with Cuban leader Fidel Castro and claimed that Bernie had not been upset when President John F. Kennedy was killed in 1963. The reaction around the state was swift and overwhelming: even media outlets that supported Smith condemned the ad and accused Smith of resorting to desperation tactics as he saw his congressional seat slipping away.
A few days later Bernie was elected with 56 percent of the vote to Smith’s 40 percent. The negative ad’s impact was clear: it had backfired on Smith in a big way. Vermonters knew Bernie too well to believe that he was a communist who welcomed JFK’s assassination.
On election night, as the Bernie landslide became clear, thousands of his supporters gathered in the Memorial Auditorium in downtown Burlington. The sense of joy was overwhelming, as well as the sense that Vermont, through Bernie, was going to shake up a Washington political class that needed a real housecleaning.
As I left the celebration to return to the nearby Free Press newsroom to write my story, I spotted Garrison Nelson, a University of Vermont political science professor who was the state’s leading political pundit.
I asked him if he thought Bernie was ready for Washington.
“That’s not the right question,” Nelson replied. “The real question is whether Washington is ready for Bernie?”
A quarter century later, we’re finally going to get an answer.
Contact: teetor.paul@gmail.com
Follow: @paulteetor ER
