Here's How Bernie Sanders May Be Changing Politics for Good

[NCTraveler]

Inside the wild-haired socialist's unlikely rise.

Sometime in the late 1970s, after he'd divorced his college sweetheart, had a kid with another woman, lost four statewide elections, and been evicted from his home on Maple Street in Burlington, Vermont, Bernie Sanders moved in with a friend named Richard Sugarman. Sanders, a restless political activist and armchair psychologist with a penchant for arguing his theories late into the night, found a sounding board in the young scholar, who taught philosophy at the nearby University of Vermont. At the time, Sanders was struggling to square his revolutionary zeal with his overwhelming rejection at the polls—and this was reflected in a regular ritual. Many mornings, Sanders greeted his roommate with a simple statement: "We're not crazy."

"I'd say, 'Bernard, maybe the first thing you should say is "Good morning" or something,'" Sugarman recalls. "But he'd say, 'We're. Not. Crazy.'"

Life under Bernie
What Would Life Under President Sanders Actually Look Like?

Sanders eventually got a place of his own, found his way, and in 1981 was elected mayor of Burlington, the state's largest city—the start of an improbable political career that led him to Congress, and soon, he hopes, the White House. In May, after more than three decades as an independent socialist, the septuagenarian senator launched his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in the Vermont city where this long, strange trip began.

The 2016 election is a homecoming for Sanders in another sense. He's returning to the role he embraced during his early years in politics—that of the long shot. In Hillary Clinton, with her lengthy CV, vast donor network, and unmatched name recognition, he could hardly have picked a tougher target. But those same qualities also position Sanders, a lifelong critic of war hawks, Wall Street, and the ruling class, to exploit the angst among progressives who spent much of the last year pining for Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to run instead.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/bernie-sanders-president-change-politics