He's been at this for decades. He is an incredibly destructive and narcissistic opportunist.
For Sanders in the ’70s, Liberty Union wasn’t a chance to win—it was an opportunity to talk. And he talked a lot. He said to a reporter for United Press International that both major parties were “cowardly.” In an interview with the Valley Voice of Middlebury, Vermont, he said “there essentially is no difference” between them.
In ’81, when he was elected mayor of Burlington—by 10 votes, after a recount—the city’s Democrats tried to stonewall Sanders.
He had “an enormously contentious relationship” with them, said Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), then a state senator.
“Back in those days,” said Maurice Mahoney, the head of the Democratic Party in Burlington in the ’80s, “his goal was to destroy Democrats—certainly on the local level.”
“It was a Democratic town that he basically took from them,” said Bill Conroy, who wrote a dissertation on Sanders’ tenure as mayor.
Said Hamilton Davis, a longtime Vermont reporter and Sanders watcher: “They hated him, and he hated them—unreservedly.”
In ’86, he decided to run for governor, against Kunin, which bothered her—Sanders’ “daily diet consisted of vitriol,” she would write in her memoir—and worried many Vermont Democrats, who thought he might peel away enough votes to foil the reelection bid of the state’s first female governor.
Democrats, Welch recalled, were “extremely upset.”
Sanders responded by intensifying his invective.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/bernie-sanders-2016-democrats-121181#ixzz45wb3v4Ny
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