A Question I have for Bernie Sanders

[Otto Lidenbrock]

Bernie talks a lot about voter excitement. Getting young people into the political process. Valid points.

But I want to ask him when he was a young person why did he not cast a vote until it was for himself?



Bernie turned 21 in 1961. He first ran for office in 1972. Between those dates the Civil Rights movement was on the ballot in 1964. John Kennedy started the process, then Lyndon Johnson made it the promise of his presidency. Barry Goldwater wanted to do away with it.

Why did he not vote in '64?

Excitement is magical for a party in the campaign, but if you need to be 'excited' by a candidate just to vote when the stakes are that high and it's no ordinary election, you must be in a state of privilege.

[BlueMississippi]

1. Shows a self-centered trait. nt

[Hassin Bin Sober]

4. Yeah, because being interested in social justice and African American issues is self centered.

[BlueMississippi]

8. There is no independent proof that he was interested in it

But there is independent proof that he did not vote.

[Gothmog]

9. There are actual voting records that show when sanders voted

[BlueMississippi]

11. Precisely

and there are no actual records of what Sanders was thinking at the time. Relying on the essays from that time, I doubt it was social justice.

[HeartlandProgressive]

14. Why distort Sanders civil rights record? There is plenty of proof

Although Sanders did attend the 1963 March on Washington, at which Lewis spoke, most of his work was in and around Hyde Park, where he became involved with the campus chapter of CORE shortly after transferring from Brooklyn College in 1961. During Sanders’ first year in Chicago, a group of apartment-hunting white and black students had discovered that off-campus buildings owned by the university were refusing to rent to black students, in violation of the school’s policies. CORE organized a 15-day sit-in at the administration building, which Sanders helped lead. (James Farmer, who co-founded CORE and had been a Freedom Rider with Lewis, came to the University of Chicago that winter to praise the activists’ work.) The protest ended when George Beadle, the university’s president, agreed to form a commission to study the school’s housing policies.

Sanders was one of two students from CORE appointed to the commission, which included the neighborhood’s alderman and state representative, in addition to members of the administration. But not long afterward, Sanders blew up at the administration, accusing Beadle of reneging on his promise and refusing to answer questions from students on its integration plan. In an open letter in the student newspaper, the Chicago Maroon, Sanders vented about the double-cross:

That spring, with Sanders as its chairman, the university chapter of CORE merged with the university chapter of SNCC. Sanders announced plans to take the fight to the city of Chicago, and in the fall of 1962 he followed through, organizing picketers at a Howard Johnson in Cicero. Sanders told the Chicago Maroon, the student newspaper, that he wanted to keep the pressure on the restaurant chain after the arrest of 12 CORE demonstrators in North Carolina for trying to eat at a Howard Johnson there:

Sanders left his leadership role at the organization not long afterward; his grades suffered so much from his activism that a dean asked him to take some time off from school. (He didn’t take much interest in his studies, anyway.) But he continued his activism with CORE and SNCC. In August of 1963, not long after returning to Chicago from the March on Washington, Sanders was charged with resisting arrest after protesting segregation at a school on the city’s South Side. He was later fined $25, according to the Chicago Tribune:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/02/bernie-sanders-core-university-chicago/

that took 2 seconds to find on google. Why distort the man's record?

[Celerity]

17. actually there is independent proof that he was involved in civil rights back in the early 60's

Many legit ways to challenge Sanders, but making ludicrous, easily-debunked, false claims is not one (and I a NO Sanders fan, I think he would be a disaster in the general.)


Can Sanders' civil rights experience at U. of C. translate on campaign trail?

https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/ct-bernie-sanders-university-of-chicago-met-20150826-story.html



Bernie Sanders, right, a member of the Congress of Racial Equality steering committee, stands next to University of Chicago President George Beadle, who is speaking at a CORE meeting on housing sit-ins in 1962. (Special Collections Research Center / University of Chicago Library)


When Bernie Sanders attended the University of Chicago in the early 1960s, the campus was a bastion of political progressivism — one that nurtured the socialist positions the U.S. senator and presidential candidate now trumpets.

"The U. of C. had a reputation of radicalism during the 1950s. During the Red Scare, a number of U. of C. faculty members were accused of being communists," said Ray Gadke, a U. of C. librarian. "That was the generation before Bernie was here, but there was still that reputation of being a red school — a radical school — when he was here."

While some of Sanders' earliest political activism focused on civil rights issues plaguing black communities, he has stumbled during his presidential campaign when explaining his positions on the civil rights issues of the present. For some activists, Sanders' past organizing is not sufficient evidence that the Vermont senator best represents issues important in black communities. Sanders transferred to the U. of C. after a year at Brooklyn College and became involved in the school's chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality. He graduated in 1964 with a degree in political science and considerable experience in waging grass-roots campaigns.

As president of CORE, he spearheaded sit-ins, pickets and protests related to racial inequality, the most visible of which was two weeks of sit-ins at the office of university President George Beadle over segregationist policies at university-owned apartments in Hyde Park.

snip








Bernie Sanders's 1963 Protest Arrest (Video)

https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000004222567/bernie-sanderss-1963-protest-arrest.html

[HeartlandProgressive]

15. when does ignorance become distortion?

anyone can google "Sanders civil rights" and find so many articles detailing Sanders positions and actions.

Like this one:

Footage shows a young Bernie Sanders arrested during civil rights protest

Democratic presidential hopeful’s campaign confirms that it is the Vermont senator when he was 21 being arrested by two police officers in 1963

Footage has emerged that appears to show Bernie Sanders being arrested during a civil rights protest in Chicago in 1963.

A documentary company, Kartemquin Films, this week published footage online showing two police officers arresting a young student wearing thick-rimmed glasses, resembling those still worn by the Vermont senator and Democratic presidential candidate.

The Chicago Tribune then unearthed from its archive a photograph and a story that noted “Bernard Sanders, 21” as having been among the people arrested and fined at the protest.

“Bernie identified [the photograph] himself,” Tad Devine, a senior Sanders adviser, told the Tribune. “He looked at it, he actually has his student ID from the University of Chicago in his wallet, and he said, ‘Yes, that indeed is [me].”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/20/bernie-sanders-footage-arrest-civil-rights-protest

[Hassin Bin Sober]

22. That ship sailed a long time ago.

That’s why I won’t argue with the phony outrage Wurlitzer gang.

[Clash City Rocker]

2. Because no candidate in his lifetime was as awesome as him, I guess

Bernie has high standards, y’know.

[thesquanderer]

3. re: "if you need to be 'excited' by a candidate just to vote...you must be in a state of privilege"

Or young?

Maybe it's projection on his part (i.e. assuming other young people are like he was when he was young), or maybe he's right that there are a good number of young people who were just not sufficiently motivated to vote, now, or then. Did LBJ really electrify the youth and motivate them to vote? Probably not. But luckily he won anyway. But maybe Humphrey or McGovern would have done better if the young had found them more inspiring and exciting.

[Otto Lidenbrock]

5. LBJ had arguably the two most iconic ads in presidential campaign history

Goldwater also wanted to use nukes in Vietnam.

The second ad was recreated by Hillary Clinton's campaign with the same guy

[thesquanderer]

18. But did he target young voters?

That was perhaps the days before niche targeting. I don't know if LBJ campaigned at universities, for example... or necessarily how he'd have been received.

[LisaM]

6. He didn't vote until he was almost 40 years old?

I'm sorry, I'm just not comprehending why this would be. I was excited to vote when I was 18. I'd been working on campaigns for long before that, and getting the vote was important to me.

By his account, he was working on political causes AFTER he had the right to vote. The voting age was 21 when he became eligible, so you'd think he'd have been even more impatient to vote than I was, since he had to wait three years longer.

[Tom Rinaldo]

12. I think the Math computes to an age of 32 n/t

I'm 70, and I always voted once I was old enough to. But I knew plenty of radicals in the 60's who believed the changes needed "to the system" could not be done by using the system from the inside. Those were very different days. Lots of radicals voted but there were lots who didn't also, even though they were otherwise "activists".

Again, I was always a voter while being an activist, it just made sense, but the times were different then with a number of folks believing at the time that America was building toward another (hopefully non violent) Revolution. Obviously I can't speak for Bernie.

[LisaM]

13. Well, I looked up and he ran for mayor of Burlington in 1980

He was born in 1941.

Maybe he ran for something else earlier, that's probably what it is. Still, that's 11 years without voting. I worked on campaigns in the 1960s and 70s, alongside my parents, and I vividly remember the get out the vote efforts.

Once I was 18, I also started working at the polls (which I really enjoyed, it still cheeses me off that we are all mail voting in Washington now, because that was a nice job for older people and students a few times a year). The party activists would come in and read who'd already voted and compare it to their own lists, then call or go get people who hadn't! Real grass roots stuff. Choosing not to vote would have seemed like insanity.

[Blue_true]

24. My first vote was for Jimmy Carter.

Hell yes I was excited to vote, chomping at the bit in fact.

[betsuni]

32. Me too!

I wasn't politically active at all but couldn't wait to vote to re-elect Carter.

[Blue_true]

35. I am older than you are. My first vote was to elect him.

Of course I voted to re-elect him also.

[emmaverybo]

7. We do not need another egoist in the presidency. Though Bernie is a strong fighter on behalf

of his own ideology and the policies that support it, he gets mired in vendettas he allows his surrogates to conduct on his behalf. His current campaign is affected by a long held obsession with the 2016 election campaigning and his need to protect against offenses he feels were done to him.

He must transcend his wounded ego to fully embrace the best interests of this country and to get
out an optimistic message that reaffirms our better angels and a vision of America post-Trump.

He created a fan-base among young college kids, predominantly white. Why does he lack support
with African Americans, specifically an older demographic who were on the battlefront during the
civil rights movement and for a generation after?

Does he honestly think he can win against Trump with a youth army? Well, they might be less inclined to skepticism about his economic promises.

[Gothmog]

10. I also would like to know the answer to this question

[aidbo]

16. Do you really expect an answer from Bernie?

I doubt he is aware of this blog.

If you actually want an answer to that question, you would post the question somewhere he is likely to see it.

Posting it here is obviously only going to engender negative posts from the other Bernie haters on this site. But I suspect that is exactly the reason you posted it here.

[nini]

27. It's a valid question and up for debate

You should wonder yourself.

[JackFrost]

19. Voting is a marginal form of political activism...

The idea that it takes more than walking into a voting booth to bring about lasting social change is more alien to some than martians landing on the White House lawn.

https://www.iww.org/history/library/MotherJones/autobiography/22

The Autobiography of Mother Jones

(Snip)

Five hundred women got up a dinner and asked me to speak. Most of the women were crazy about women suffrage. They thought that Kingdom-come would follow the enfranchisement of women.

“You must stand for free speech in the streets,” I told them.

“How can we,” piped a woman, “when we haven’t a vote?”

“I have never had a vote,” said I, “and I have raised hell all over this country! You don’t need a vote to raise hell! You need convictions and a voice!”

Some one meowed, “You’re an anti!”

“I am not an anti to anything which will bring freedom to my class,” said I. “But I am going to be honest with you sincere women who are working for votes for women. The women of Colorado have had the vote for two generations and the working men and women are in slavery. The state is in slavery, vassal to the Colorado Iron and Fuel Company and its subsidiary interests.

--Mary Harris (Mother Jones)

[JI7]

21. but he didn't walk into the voting booth at all until he ran and he wanted to vote for himself

[JackFrost]

23. Probably changed his political tactics and strategies...

Can't really get the whole picture from a snip like that in the OP. One used to attack Sanders as an opportunist scab obviously.

But... that's not the case...

"Not to use electoral politics in this country as a means to educate people is absolutely stupid. On the other hand, if someone says, “I believe in electoral politics, but I don’t believe in building a mass movement and a grassroots movement to deal with the basic social conflicts that exist in this country, well, you gotta be crazy not to understand the importance of that.” You move in every direction you can move in."

--Bernie Sanders

[George II]

36. Members of our military are deployed all over the world to defend Amercans' right to vote...

...millions of them have died defending that right. You call voting a "marginal form of political activism"?

[JackFrost]

40. I think my point on voting with the two posts I made in this thread is pretty clear no ?

Again...this is not hard to grasp and yes I subscribe to the sentiment put forth by Sanders below.

"Not to use electoral politics in this country as a means to educate people is absolutely stupid. On the other hand, if someone says, “I believe in electoral politics, but I don’t believe in building a mass movement and a grassroots movement to deal with the basic social conflicts that exist in this country, well, you gotta be crazy not to understand the importance of that.” You move in every direction you can move in."

--Bernie Sanders

Voting as the be all and end all vehicle for social change is not the answer. Voting in a system that is controlled from top to bottom by big Capital and the owners can only get so far. This even with the best of intentioned program that advances the cause of the working class. What's much more important is which side one is on rather than who one votes for. We have two basic classes in this country. A ruling class and a working class. One can't be advancing and defending the causes of one and claim to be for the other. Which side one is on in that equation is pretty easy to decipher in short order.

As far as your commentary on the military. Many on the left are anti-war and don't subscribe to your view of the military as a staunch advocate in the defense of rights. Let me make it clear...

https://fas.org/man/smedley.htm

(Snip)

I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."

-- Major General Smedley Butler, USMC.

[JI7]

20. maybe for the same reason he did nothing to help Vermont's democratic gov get single payer

[Blue_true]

26. Exactly. Bernie said that it was essentially a Vermont issue. Can you imagine that? nt

[George II]

37. So speaks "the most popular politician in the country"!

[Blue_true]

38. Senator Sander's behavior as Governor Shumlin struggled to get Single Payer in Vermont

is seared into my brain like a hot branding iron was put to my skull. He just totally disowned what was happening in Vermont and made zero effort to help. I can only guess that he was concerned that if Shumlin and the then heavily democratic Legistlature succeeded, one day one of them would run for his seat.

The result of Shumlin trying so hard is that his political career in Vermont was damaged enough that he either did not run for reelection or was defeated (I forget which), it resulted in a republican governor and more republicans in the Legistlature.

That fiasco is why I became a virulent Bernie Sanders phobe. I didn't know of some of the other things that have come out about what he is like, but all I needed was that Single Payer incident. Vermont tried to be first, and if they had succeeded, we may be having a vastly different discussion about healthcare today (just like Hillary's try in the 90s, an effort which House member Sanders weighed down with demands, then did lukewarm support for - how many people died because of a lack of adequate healthcare coverage between 1994 and 2010?)

[betsuni]

25. He says that when he saw a JFK/Nixon debate, what JFK said about the Cuban revolution

nauseated him. "Seeing through Kennedy, and what liberalism was, was probably a significant step for me to understand conventional politics or liberalism was not what was relevant."

Because Bernie believed both parties are the same and everyone's corrupt from that time on, I guess that's why he didn't vote.

[emmaverybo]

29. He did not know that liberalism was not communism? Kennedy was hawkish on communism,

but then it wasn’t abstract to him.

[betsuni]

30. I rarely understand what Bernie means when he says things.

[emmaverybo]

31. That's because he's a visionary, ahead of us all.

[betsuni]

33. Yes, my centrist establishment Third Way corporatist status quo brains cannot deal

with the radical visionary transformational new ideas of Bernie, wherein by adding "grassroots" and "FDR" and "MLK" makes everything old new again.

[roody]

28. You can send him your question at

[e-mail]

[TreasonousBastard]

34. Truth is, I don't really care why he didn't vote back then...

I knew lots of radicals then who thought voting was passe' and useless for "the revolution". Your parents voted-- you had better things to do.

Turns out most of them ended up useless for the revolution and disappeared from view. Or became conservatives. It was an ego boost more than anything else, and they found other things to amuse them.

This is NOT to demean the race warriors. Jim Crow and lynchings were real and evil and had to be stopped. We have come a long way since then, thanks to them, but still have a ways to go.

[aikoaiko]

39. A lot of people, both privileged and not privileged, become disenchanted with or

disenfranchised from the electoral process.

Its really not about privilege.

Do you think GOTV efforts are aimed at the privileged?