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The political education of Bernie Sanders
an interview, from the U of Chicago alumni magazine:
http://mag.uchicago.edu/law-policy-society/political-education?msource=MAG10&auid=15169871
.
. .his entire remarkable political adventure began at the University of Chicago in January 1962.
Sanders was born in Flatbush, Brooklyn, in 1941. His father had been the only member of his family to escape the Holocaust. In high school Sanders ran for student body president on a platform to provide scholarships to war orphans in Korea. Transferring to the University of Chicago from Brooklyn College after his mother died, he arrived at a campus busy waking up from the political somnolence of the 1950s. “Even in the ’50s, the U of C was known as a hotbed of radicalism,” remembers Sally Cook, AB’66 (Class of 1965), who entered the College in 1961. “Some of my friends’ parents were shocked that my parents would let me go.” . . .
. . .
“Do you think Bernie has a Brooklyn accent?” Yes, he does, I agree with my interlocutor, Robin Kaufman, AB’65, a Hyde Park neighborhood activist who has kept in touch with Sanders since they met at the College. “This is like 2 percent of the accent he had then. It was so thick you could cut it. And it was really kind of weird in the context of Chicago. Even though the University of Chicago had a lot of New Yorkers. But Bernie’s Brooklyn accent was something else.”
In Sanders’s office in the Dirksen Senate Office Building one day this past summer, the Brooklyn accent is very much in evidence. Another Sanders trademark, not so much. Mark Leibovich wrote in the New York Times Magazine in 2007, after Sanders beat his Republican opponent for senator by 33 points, “Journalistic convention in Vermont mandates that every Sanders story remark on his unruly hair as early on as possible. It also stipulates that every piece of his clothing be described as ‘rumpled.’” He’s not as rumpled now.
. . Yes, he’s still Capitol Hill’s socialist gadfly. But he’s also become a player. Befitting that role, his suit is veritably crisp. (Last time I visited him, in his House office in 1998, he was wearing a ratty blue sweater.) And at his talk at the Institute of Politics, he connected so skillfully with his audience—first asking every questioner’s name, then addressing them by those names with eye contact—that, waiting to see him in his office, I compliment his staff on the strides their boss has made in dialing down his famous irascibility. They beam with an almost filial pride.
. . .“I was very impressed by Richard J. Daley’s Chicago machine,” Sanders says, singling out how Daley’s patronage machine maintained “a city worker for every 200 voters.” Call it a political education, Chicago-style. Though the idealistic Sanders might never admit it, when he was elected mayor of Burlington in 1981 by 10 votes after a decade spent unsuccessfully running for various state offices in Vermont, something in the Daley lesson must have taken. There are certain things about how a machine like Daley’s amasses power that are useful to learn for any municipal politician. Namely, that you have to deliver the goods. “What’s inherently wrong with the word ‘politician,’” Daley once asked, “if the fellow has devoted his life to holding public office and trying to do something for his people?” It’s the dirty, gritty business of giving voters something for their votes—making the system work for people. . . For Burlington in the 1980s it was bike paths, preservation of the Lake Champlain waterfront (control of which Sanders won from railroad interests in an aggressive lawsuit), and an affordable housing trust fund. He did all this while keeping property taxes low—and was reelected three times. True, a certain nerdish flair never left him. In the National Journal last June, Simon van Zuylen-Wood wrote that before one press conference, an aide asked what to tell reporters inquiring what the subject was to be. “Sanders grew flustered and shouted, ‘The human condition!’” A University of Chicago kind of guy? A little bit.
The socialist proved a good politician. Elected to Congress in 1990, he cofounded the House Progressive Caucus. Though he was the House’s only member unaffiliated with the Democrats or Republicans, after the Democrats lost control of the body in the 1994 election he proved enormously useful as a leading spokesman against what they saw as the ravages of Newt Gingrich’s Republican revolutionaries. . .
Sanders was born in Flatbush, Brooklyn, in 1941. His father had been the only member of his family to escape the Holocaust. In high school Sanders ran for student body president on a platform to provide scholarships to war orphans in Korea. Transferring to the University of Chicago from Brooklyn College after his mother died, he arrived at a campus busy waking up from the political somnolence of the 1950s. “Even in the ’50s, the U of C was known as a hotbed of radicalism,” remembers Sally Cook, AB’66 (Class of 1965), who entered the College in 1961. “Some of my friends’ parents were shocked that my parents would let me go.” . . .
. . .
“Do you think Bernie has a Brooklyn accent?” Yes, he does, I agree with my interlocutor, Robin Kaufman, AB’65, a Hyde Park neighborhood activist who has kept in touch with Sanders since they met at the College. “This is like 2 percent of the accent he had then. It was so thick you could cut it. And it was really kind of weird in the context of Chicago. Even though the University of Chicago had a lot of New Yorkers. But Bernie’s Brooklyn accent was something else.”
In Sanders’s office in the Dirksen Senate Office Building one day this past summer, the Brooklyn accent is very much in evidence. Another Sanders trademark, not so much. Mark Leibovich wrote in the New York Times Magazine in 2007, after Sanders beat his Republican opponent for senator by 33 points, “Journalistic convention in Vermont mandates that every Sanders story remark on his unruly hair as early on as possible. It also stipulates that every piece of his clothing be described as ‘rumpled.’” He’s not as rumpled now.
. . Yes, he’s still Capitol Hill’s socialist gadfly. But he’s also become a player. Befitting that role, his suit is veritably crisp. (Last time I visited him, in his House office in 1998, he was wearing a ratty blue sweater.) And at his talk at the Institute of Politics, he connected so skillfully with his audience—first asking every questioner’s name, then addressing them by those names with eye contact—that, waiting to see him in his office, I compliment his staff on the strides their boss has made in dialing down his famous irascibility. They beam with an almost filial pride.
. . .“I was very impressed by Richard J. Daley’s Chicago machine,” Sanders says, singling out how Daley’s patronage machine maintained “a city worker for every 200 voters.” Call it a political education, Chicago-style. Though the idealistic Sanders might never admit it, when he was elected mayor of Burlington in 1981 by 10 votes after a decade spent unsuccessfully running for various state offices in Vermont, something in the Daley lesson must have taken. There are certain things about how a machine like Daley’s amasses power that are useful to learn for any municipal politician. Namely, that you have to deliver the goods. “What’s inherently wrong with the word ‘politician,’” Daley once asked, “if the fellow has devoted his life to holding public office and trying to do something for his people?” It’s the dirty, gritty business of giving voters something for their votes—making the system work for people. . . For Burlington in the 1980s it was bike paths, preservation of the Lake Champlain waterfront (control of which Sanders won from railroad interests in an aggressive lawsuit), and an affordable housing trust fund. He did all this while keeping property taxes low—and was reelected three times. True, a certain nerdish flair never left him. In the National Journal last June, Simon van Zuylen-Wood wrote that before one press conference, an aide asked what to tell reporters inquiring what the subject was to be. “Sanders grew flustered and shouted, ‘The human condition!’” A University of Chicago kind of guy? A little bit.
The socialist proved a good politician. Elected to Congress in 1990, he cofounded the House Progressive Caucus. Though he was the House’s only member unaffiliated with the Democrats or Republicans, after the Democrats lost control of the body in the 1994 election he proved enormously useful as a leading spokesman against what they saw as the ravages of Newt Gingrich’s Republican revolutionaries. . .