Vermont’s junior senator is Bernie Sanders, a Socialist elected as an independent in 2006 but treated as a Democrat in the Senate. He is an ardent spokesman for the views of the political left.
Sanders grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, the son of a paint salesman who had emigrated from Poland; his mother died when he was a teenager. He became involved in radical leftist politics at the University of Chicago, and then moved to Vermont as part of the hippie migration of 1968 and worked as a carpenter. Four years later, he ran in a special U.S. Senate election to replace Republican Winston Prouty, who died in office in 1971. Sanders won just 2% of the vote as the candidate of the socialist Liberty Union Party. He went on to lose four more statewide races until his rumpled, tieless, sincere persona finally won over the people of Burlington, who elected him mayor in 1981 by just 10 votes.
In 1988, when Republican Rep. James Jeffords ran for the Senate, Sanders made a bid for the House but lost to Republican Peter Smith in a close, three-way race. Two years later, he ran again and reversed the result by capitalizing on Smith’s support of the 1990 budget agreement and his vote to ban semiautomatic weapons. The National Rifle Association came out against Smith, and Sanders’ opposition to gun control helped him carry 227 of Vermont’s 251 cities and towns, plus three gores and one grant, as unincorporated areas in Vermont are known. Sanders became only the third Socialist elected to the House, after Victor Berger of Milwaukee (1911-13, 1923-29) and Meyer London of Manhattan’s Lower East Side (1915-23). His views haven’t changed much since his first election.
As a senator, he initially settled with surprising ease into the Senate’s more structured ways, and grew more sensitive to his reputation as a troublemaker. Democrat Patrick Leahy, the state’s senior senator, told a Vermont reporter that other senators confided to him “what a pleasant surprise (Sanders) has turned out to be” with his willingness to forge legislative deals. With seats on committees that deal with energy and environmental issues, Sanders worked for deep cuts in industrial pollution in the global warming bill. He sought to promote new technology to reduce emissions in the automobile and energy industries. In 2007, the Senate passed his amendment to the energy bill to encourage universities to support energy-efficient projects. Sanders also resumed his opposition to international trade deals, blaming them for lowering domestic wages and shuttering U.S. factories.
As the congressional focus moved to the economy following President Barack Obama’s election, Sanders began showing signs of his older, feistier persona. When Obama renominated Ben Bernanke in 2009 as chairman of the Federal Reserve, Sanders bristled: “When the people voted for change in 2008, they did not vote to have one of the key architects of the Bush economy be reappointed.” In 2010, Sanders got a provision into the Senate version of the Dodd-Frank financial industry overhaul bill ordering a one-time audit of the Fed, far less than what he had sought. He also introduced a bill imposing a 10% “billionaire’s surtax” on inheritances worth more than $500 million per spouse. Sanders compared skeptics of human-caused global warming to those outside Germany who had denied the spread of Nazism before World War II. He was the Senate’s 38th most liberal member in 2009, but the next year was among those tied for first in National Journal’s annual rankings.
During October 2011, the new “Occupy Wall Street” protest movement energized an American left that was mostly subdued during the Republican rout year of 2010. Since Sanders had been a leading critic of large banks and financial institutions, he naturally endorsed the goals of the upstart movement. “I am very supportive of the protests because they are focusing attention on an issue that needs a lot of discussion: not only the greed of Wall Street and the reckless behavior that has caused this recession, but also the growing inequality in the United States,” Sanders told the Burlington Free Press.
None of Sanders’ efforts, though, drew as much attention as his apoplectic, marathon floor speech in December 2010 against extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, which lasted more than eight hours and cemented his reputation on the left. He made a list beforehand of 10 key points he wanted to make, but said he set no time limit for himself. He repeatedly mocked how the rich sought cuts to finance what he called their unnecessarily extravagant lifestyles at the expense of the middle class. “How can I get by on one house?” Sanders said sarcastically at one point. “I need five houses, 10 houses! I need three jet planes to take me all over the world! Sorry, American people. We’ve got the money, we’ve got the power, we’ve got the lobbyists here and on Wall Street. Tough luck.” The speech proved so popular that it temporarily shut down the Senate video server and put his name atop Twitter’s list of trending topics. In early 2011, it was sold as a book, The Speech: A Historic Filibuster on Corporate Greed and the Decline of Our Middle Class, with the proceeds going to Vermont charities. “There have been filibusters,” wrote columnist Stephen Herrington on the liberal Huffington Post website, “but not in the memory of any living American has such a rhyme to the ages and passion to justice been brought to the floor of the United States Senate.”
In the months following the speech, Sanders made the rounds of television shows ranging from MSNBC to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He also was picked as the keynote speaker at California’s Democratic Party convention. He inveighed against the fiscal 2011 budget deal that Obama reached with Republicans, calling it “Robin Hood in reverse.” He also released a list of 10 large corporations that he said had paid disproportionately low taxes, including GE, Exxon-Mobil and Bank of America. And, after a visit to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, where he learned that its miniature souvenir statues of U.S. presidents were made in China, he persuaded the museum to have one of its gift shops sell exclusively American-made products.
Sanders has also been a steadfast opponent of proposals to privatize Social Security. Throughout his career, retired person groups have been Sanders’ leading industry campaign contributor, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. In March 2011, Sanders introduced a bill that would make it out of order in the Senate or House to consider any legislation that would increase the retirement age for Social Security eligibility. In August 2011, he made a public plea to lift the cap on payroll taxes that pay for Social Security (the program is paid for through taxes on incomes up to $106,800). When President Obama expressed a willingness to discuss entitlement reform as part of deficit talks, Sanders pointed out that Obama vowed not to cut Social Security during the 2008 presidential campaign. Sanders has been willing to attack Obama from a left flank, even saying that a primary challenge to the incumbent president in 2012 would be worth considering. Other progressives, such as Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., dismissed the idea.
The junior senator’s zealousness raised the ire of two former members of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Sanders, a fierce critic of energy speculators, posted information on his website from the CFTC that was marked “confidential.” James Newsome, a Republican and former chairman of the commission, and Fred Hatfield, a former commissioner and a Democrat, attacked Sanders for the ploy in a September 2011 Washington Post column.
After Hurricane Irene hit his state hard in the summer of 2011, Sanders led the way in attacking House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va. for suggesting that offsetting cuts should be made in conjunction with disaster relief funds being released to Vermont and other states hit by the storm. “This absurd logic means that whether it is Hurricane Irene today or any future disaster, we might have to cut nutrition programs, Medicare, Medicaid or education before we can rebuild a devastated community,” Sanders wrote in a USA Today op-ed.
During his years in the House (1991-2007), Sanders served as Vermont’s single, at-large member. Democrats initially balked at accepting a Socialist in their caucus, but they granted him seniority as a Democrat when he arrived in 1991. He amassed a heavily liberal voting record and formed a Progressive Caucus with a somewhat quixotic agenda: progressive tax reform, a Canada-style single-payer health care system, a 50% cut in military spending, a national energy policy, and—a Vermont touch—support for family farms.
He was at times a practical and successful legislator, gaining Republican allies in targeting so-called corporate welfare—government benefits to well-heeled companies. With Republican Chris Smith of New Jersey, he passed an amendment barring spending for defense contractor mergers. In 2001, he proposed a $300-per-person income tax rebate. It quickly became Democratic Party policy, and Republicans, in assembling majorities for the Bush tax cuts, included it in diluted form—a $300 rebate for income-tax-paying adults. Sanders and the Democrats noted ruefully that Bush took credit for a tax-cutting proposal that was initially theirs. As much as any member of Congress, Sanders made the cost of prescription drugs a national issue. Since the 1980s, he has called for government programs to pay for prescription drugs, and he was the first member of Congress to lead bus trips to Canada to buy drugs there. He has denounced “the insatiable greed that consumes this runaway (pharmaceutical) industry.” With other liberals, he was a staunch opponent of going to war in Iraq.
All of this played well with Vermont voters, and by the late 1990s, Sanders began winning by large margins. Democratic candidates failed to gain support from the state party, if they filed to run against Sanders at all. Sanders twice gave serious consideration to challenging Jeffords for his Senate seat. But in May 2001, Jeffords left the Republican Party, an event that gave Democrats a majority in the Senate for 19 months. Like Sanders in the House, Jeffords called himself an independent, but caucused with the Democrats. In April 2005, Jeffords announced he would not run for another term in 2006. Sanders became the early front-runner and quickly amassed endorsements from top Vermont Democrats, including former Gov. Phil Hoff, Burlington Mayor Peter Clavelle, Senate President Pro Tempore Peter Welch, and House Speaker Gaye Symington. Ever the loner, Sanders said he would neither seek nor accept the Democratic nomination. But with his consent, Democrats ran his name on the primary ballot anyway. He won 94% of the vote, though he formally declined the nomination and petitioned the state to list him on the general election ballot as an independent. Still, Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee and a former Vermont governor, declared, “A victory for Bernie Sanders is a win for Democrats.”
On the Republican side, Gov. Jim Douglas was considered the strongest Republican candidate, but he declined to run. Richard Tarrant, a multi-millionaire businessman and former high school basketball star, became the nominee. His ads sought to portray Sanders as an ineffective radical who was soft on sexual predators and drug dealers. The strategy might have worked elsewhere, but not in Vermont, where voters were well acquainted with Sanders and his iconoclastic ways. Despite the harsh attacks—or perhaps because of them—Tarrant was never able to close the gap in the polls. He outspent Sanders, but Sanders also proved to be well-funded. He raised and spent over $6 million, many times more than ever before and enough to make this the costliest race in state history. Sanders won easily, 65%-32%. He will be a formidable opponent in 2012 in a state where Obama has remained popular, and his growing national following won’t make defeating him any easier.
