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Adventures with Bernie

By Dennis Gilbert, Professor of Sociology

My adventures with Bernie began in January 1989, when I received a letter from Bernard Sanders, Mayor of Burlington, Vermont, addressed to the “Chairperson, Sociology Department, Hamilton College.” I must have been acting chair of the department at the time. Mayor Sanders described himself as the only socialist mayor in America, explained that he had decided not to run for a fifth term and expressed interest in teaching at Hamilton in the coming academic year. “I believe,” he wrote, “that I could offer your students an unusual academic perspective.”

He had been elected to his first term as mayor in 1981 by a ten-vote margin and, despite his reputation as a wild-eyed radical, had been a remarkably effective mayor. While Sanders was in office, a picture of the socialist icon Eugene Debs hung in the mayor’s office and Burlington adopted a left-wing foreign policy—for example, supporting the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua. But social services were improved, Burlington’s wasteland waterfront was transformed into an attractive recreational area, the city’s anarchic administration was reformed, the middle class benefited from reduced property taxes and the city budget was balanced. Sanders was the kind of mayor who was out at 5 a.m. on snowy, New-England mornings to make sure the streets were plowed. Not surprisingly, he won three re-elections at successively higher margins against various combinations of Republicans and Democrats. In 1988, he ran for an open seat in Congress and lost to Republican Peter Smith by just 3 percentage points.

Our department hired Sanders to teach two courses for which he was well qualified: The Problems and Potential of Urban Life (SOC 335) and Democracy & Socialism (SOC 235). Students were enthusiastic about the courses, which were well enrolled. Burlington’s former mayor took his SOC 335 class to meet the mayor of Utica and learn about the practical problems a mayor faces. Professor Sanders did not force his ideas on students but he delighted in challenging their preconceptions. He did the same with faculty. I even recall his questioning a psychology colleague, over lunch, about his notions of human nature.

I got to know Bernie well during his 1990 spring semester at Hamilton. We had lunch together several days a week. I cannot now recall any of our conversations, but they must have made an impression on me because when he decided to take another shot at the Congressional seat, I felt this was my one opportunity to work for a candidate who deserved my support and who might just win. Like some kid who runs away with the circus, I followed Bernie back to Vermont and became a full-time campaign worker.

I had dual responsibilities in the campaign: polling and issue research. We found that we could do reliable polls using volunteers to call people randomly selected out of the phonebook (a method I don’t think would work in 2015). I would design the questionnaires and then analyze the results. Our last poll, conducted shortly before the election, predicted the outcome within one percent. Issue research was another matter. I enjoyed researching issues from taxation to U.S. policy in the Middle East and would produce well-supported, tightly written, three-page white papers reflecting Bernie’s views on the topic of the week. Then Bernie would read what I had done and insert some line where it didn’t belong, messing up my elegant prose. The paper would be distributed at a press conference on the issue, and you can probably guess which line got quoted in the morning newspapers.

Bernie had two advantages over Republican Representative Peter Smith, the incumbent who had won the 1988 contest. Burlington, Vermont’s largest city with a population of 125,000 at the time, is the state’s biggest media market, whose newspapers and broadcasters reach across of the state. As a result, the city’s long-serving, notably successful mayor was well known to most Vermonters. That is particularly important because since Vermont has just one Congressional seat, candidates must compete in the entire state. I saw this advantage early in the campaign during a period when I substituted for Bernie’s usual driver. At the Franklin County Dairy Fair, a fat woman came out from behind her counter to give Bernie a hug. A local Democratic leader pressed $10 into his hand – “gas money,” he said. In town, small kids jumped up and down screaming “Bernie! Bernie!” when he approached. Perhaps his unruly white hair reminded them of Santa Claus. People felt they knew Bernie because they saw him so often on TV.

Our other advantage over Smith had to do with the issue of gun control, whose influence on the 1990 campaign is poorly understood by national reporters writing on Bernie today. In 1988, Smith had taken money from the National Rifle Association and had signed a pledge to oppose gun-control legislation. Then he went to Washington and did just what he promised not to do. The gun guys were outraged and many of them probably voted for Bernie as a result. But our polling showed that gun control, pro or con, was a minor issue to most Vermonters in 1990. Besides, there was no difference in the two candidates’ current positions on gun policy. Nonetheless, the issue played to Bernie’s great strength, according to our polls. People saw Bernie as someone who meant what he said, in contrast to Smith, whom they described as a “flip flopper,” someone who couldn’t be trusted because of his switch on guns.

In July, I went to Washington to do some issue research. One day on Capitol Hill, I found myself in line behind Congressman Smith in the Longworth cafeteria. According to my campaign diary, While I fussed with my coffee — trying first one lid and then another— Smith whined to the little man in front of him about not having his ideas get fair play and about how there are one or two key reporters who really have it in for him. Back in Vermont later that summer, I heard him complain at a public forum that “it’s hard to run against a celebrity.” It was nice to hear these things, but I knew that the campaign was stuck in a dead heat, as our own polls and the occasional media polls demonstrated. Through the summer and into early October, the difference between Smith and Bernie in successive polls fluctuated but seldom exceeded the statistical margin of error.

We passed through a tough period in early August, when our campaign finance disclosure came out and the Republican state chairman called a press conference to announce that Bernie was not paying payroll taxes for campaign workers, who were all classified as “consultants.” How could he talk about making the rich pay their taxes when Bernie was himself a “tax-dodger”? The law on this was unclear and Smith had apparently done the same in the past. None of us were campaign professionals. Those of us who were paid got small stipends to keep us going until we went back to our real jobs. But Bernie, who felt his integrity was being questioned, kept the issue alive by loudly and repeatedly complaining that the accusation was unfair. A staffer made things worse by pressing the wrong button on the fax machine, thus sending some innocuous legal documents in the matter to a reporter, and then demanding that the reporter return them.

For a while, dealing with Bernie was painful. He was, according to my campaign diary, unfocused, impatient, contemptuous and, according to his wife Jane, under terrible stress. He finally relented, asked state and federal authorities to examine our records, and paid a few hundred dollars in back taxes. Bernie later publicly admitted that he had “over-reacted” and handled the matter “poorly.”

Our big break came in early October. High-level negotiations in Washington had produced a bipartisan budget that was, as I noted in my diary, “regressive beyond what I would have imagined possible. Its victims are the old, the sick, the farmer and the middle class; the rich are untouched.” Smith immediately announced his support for the measure. We were thrilled. Here was our chance. “It seems,” I wrote, “as if all the ‘lies’ we’ve been telling all summer have suddenly come true. (Plot for Sci-fi thriller: demagogic candidate makes up crazy things about the world and by some mysterious mechanism they all come true).” The biggest issue was cuts to Medicare, which Bernie had been describing for weeks as endangered. Though he avoided personal attacks on his opponent, for the rest of the campaign Bernie was relentless in denouncing Smith’s regressive budget votes.

On Oct. 14, we did a statewide poll and found to our amazement that we were suddenly ten points ahead, a result we kept to ourselves but that Smith would inevitably soon discover. Now the campaign jumped into a new orbit. The TV-radio airwaves war had begun. An early Smith advertisement showed ordinary Vermonters explaining why they were not voting for Bernie; one man said that Bernie complained about unfair taxation, but didn’t pay his own taxes. Smith warned Vermonters that Bernie would bring Swedish style socialism to the U.S. and noted that the price of bread in Sweden was $4 a loaf, which wasn’t quite true. I wasted a day on the phone with the Swedish embassy and the head of Hamilton’s Swedish program, collecting information on prices and public policy in Sweden. The price of bread in Sweden proved to be a weak issue—in fact, a laughable one in some quarters. One old lady told The Burlington Free Press that she was more concerned with the price of medical care in the U.S. and trusted Bernie to deal with that.

The Smith campaign was growing desperate. They released a red-baiting ad that associated Bernie with Fidel Castro. The ad included material that the Vermont press described as untrue or distorted. The papers quoted negative reactions to the ad from around the state. Bernie faced a critical decision: how to respond? A media strategy meeting split along gender lines, with the women, including Jane, favoring a soft approach and the men urging a hard counterattack. One participant in the discussion later described the first position as the “estrogen tendency” and the second as the “testosterone tendency.” Estrogen won; Bernie made a subdued ad in which he said that the country was facing serious problems and “it saddens me that my opponent chooses to attack me in a way that is deceptive and misleading,” instead of focusing on the issues.

This was exactly the right choice. Our last poll included an item that asked respondents if they had recently learned anything about either candidate that would affect their opinions. The answers revealed a powerful rejection of Smith’s tactics, which Vermonters described as “smut,” “a smear campaign—pretty disgusting,” and “mudslinging.” On the other hand, Bernie’s measured response evoked admiration. “Not his usual, loudmouth self,” ventured a middle-aged woman who said she would be voting for Bernie.

What struck me talking to people was an attitude both admirable and self-righteous: Here in Vermont we don’t do things like that. We don’t like sleazy campaign ads.

Bernie beat Smith by 16 points, exactly as the last poll predicted. We carried every county in the state but one, which we lost by a hair. We took the most urban and the most rural parts of the state. We carried trailer parks, urban slums and the wealthiest suburbs.

One morning, several days after the election and after the victory celebrations and after the many media post-mortems on the campaign, I woke up in an apartment littered with dirty clothes, old newspapers and gigantic dustballs. There was nothing in the refrigerator and for the first time in many weeks, nothing about us in the morning paper or on TV. It was like looking in the mirror and seeing no one there. I realized that for five months we’d lived a life bigger than life. We’d lived up to the campaign’s motto, “Making History in Vermont.” And we had won, with an unorthodox candidate, who was anxious to talk about issues like national health care, progressive taxation and radical cuts to the defense budget, backed by campaign staff of amateurs and volunteers, who sometimes seemed like the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. It was one of the great experiences of my life.

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