The making of Bernie Sanders: How a hitchhiking campaigner pushed a vision that remains ...

[Donkees]

...remarkably unchanged

By Nathan McDermott, Andrew Kaczynski and Gregory Krieg, CNN
Updated 8:02 PM ET, Tue May 7, 2019


'Why doesn't television reflect the real suffering and misery of life?'

Excerpt:

In the 1970s, Bernie Sanders, then in his 30s, ran -- over and over again in Vermont -- and lost repeatedly, never cracking double digits. In a series of quixotic bids at statewide office as a member of the self-described "radical" Liberty Union Party, he railed against corporate titans and promised to eliminate laws regulating drugs, homosexuality and, before the Supreme Court stepped in, abortion.

He campaigned in a local prison and spoke forcefully about racial disparities in the criminal justice system. The government, he said during a talk about desegregation busing, "doesn't give a sh** about black people."

Unlike so many other public figures with long careers or winding arcs, Sanders did not arrive at this moment of national reckoning through a personal or political "evolution." He broke through, instead, with an uncompromising, insistent vision of radical upheaval -- and a taste for conflict with the forces determined to keep him on the fringes.

The consistency of Sanders' message over time has become a cornerstone of his presidential pitch. This account, which spans parts of seven years in the 1970s, was drawn from a CNN KFile review of thousands of pages of archived Liberty Union Party files and newspaper articles newly available online, as well as interviews with longtime acquaintances and onlookers.

Many of the speeches, editorials and interviews featured here are nearly indistinguishable from what Sanders might have said just the other day, out on the presidential hustings, although the sharper edges of his message have slightly softened over time. He is still fighting, as the 2020 primaries near, many of the same battles he first joined during his early campaigns as a member of the Liberty Union Party in the 1970s.



https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/07/politics/kfile-bernie-sanders-vermont-1970s/index.html

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

1. Thanks for these posts Donx... says SO much about Bernie the man.

Bernie & Elizabeth 2020!!!
Welcome to the revolution!!!