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11/16/2005:

"The Bernie Bashers Gear Up"

Perhaps the most exciting Senate candidate in the nation is the independent, Socialist Congressman from Vermont, Bernie Sanders.

Sanders is the real thing. A champion of his low-income, rural constituents--the dairy farmers and working poor of Vermont--and a star among Burlington progressives, Sanders has a compellingly straightforward way of talking about politics. And he has been tackling the problems that affect working families in a no-nonsense way. He was the first member of Congress to take a busload of constituents across the border to buy drugs in Canada, and he has had frequent, confrontational debates with Alan Greenspan when the former chairman of the Federal Reserve appeared before Congress.

When I interviewed Sanders recently for The Progressive, he warned that the Republicans' mounting troubles do not spell easy victory for the Democrats, who need to become more of a real opposition. As for the left, he urged liberals and progressives of all stripes to get out and talk to people who don't already agree with us. "We are right on the issues," he said, but the social and cultural divide is ours to bridge.

Of the Republican campaign against him, which was then just shaping up, Sanders said: "If you look at what they did to Max Cleland and what they did to John Kerry, we have a pretty good idea of what they can do. It’s the politics of personal destruction. They are incapable of debating issues, because their positions on all of the issues are horrendous. Their style has always been to try to personally destroy whom they run against. So we expect a great deal of negativity."
commondreams.org