Road to 2020: The roots of Bernie’s revolution
It was a quixotic bid from the start. Bernie Sanders was what Vermonters derisively call a “flatlander” – someone who moved to the state after growing up elsewhere, in this case New York City.
True, Mr. Sanders had quickly immersed himself in the rural and rustic ways of Vermont. He lived his early years in a converted maple sugarhouse with no running water. He bathed in a cold stream outside. The ritziest thing on his property was a new outhouse.
He had no political experience. Although he had run for the U.S. Senate on the little-known Liberty Union Party ticket in 1972, he garnered only 2% of the vote. Four years later, he would run for governor, capturing a reed-thin 6% of the vote.
Yet here he was again, in 1981, at the age of 39, seeking the mayorship of Burlington, the state’s largest city. A friend had convinced him that there was a reservoir of support for him in the city’s working-class neighborhoods. So he went door to door as an independent.
His competition was hardly intimidated. “All Bernie wants to talk about is Vietnam and the Third World,” said Mayor Gordon Paquette, the five-term Democratic incumbent. Mr. Paquette miscalculated, however. When the ballots were counted, and recounted, Mr. Sanders had won by 10 votes.
The mayor took out a yellow legal pad and scribbled out his inauguration address. It is, more or less, the same speech he has been giving ever since – and offers clues to his popularity 40 years later as he emerges as a front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president, capping one of the most improbable rises in modern American politics.
For decades, the man from Vermont with the self-described democratic socialist ideas was just as likely to be the subject of a punchline than a headline. Then came 2016. No one predicted that Mr. Sanders would almost topple a presumptive heiress to the Democratic throne. Now he’s back, an instant top-tier presidential contender, the leader of a broad-based progressive movement that seems remarkably less
