Bernie Sanders’s Staffers Want Him to Be Less Grumpy

Grumpy has always been Bernie Sanders’s brand. But now that he’s running for president to win, his advisers keep pushing him to soften up.

The senator from Vermont fought his staff for weeks as they pushed him to get more personal, and be a little less gruff, as he launched his second presidential campaign. He didn’t think talking about himself was just stupid—he thought it risked undermining the mission.

But they finally convinced him that the mission was going to fail if he didn’t. So he spent the weekend in Brooklyn and Chicago launching his campaign with rallies meant to emphasize the experiences that made him who he is—the son of a paint salesman who fled from anti-Semitism in Poland, and the student at the University of Chicago whose activism led him to get on a bus in 1963 and travel to hear the “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C. Both