Sanders's 'Revolution' in Burlington: Working With Republicans, Business Eliza Collins 6 hrs ago
BURLINGTON, Vt. — Bernie Sanders says that if he is elected president, he will convince skeptics to support his agenda by building a movement so powerful that they will have no choice but to join him.
© Donna Light/Associated Press
It is the same thing he says happened when he was mayor here in the 1980s, his only experience as a chief executive to date. “Democrats, Republicans were not stupid,” Mr. Sanders said in an interview in his campaign office. “And they looked around and they said, ‘Oh my God, we thought this guy was a fluke, he’d come and he’d go, [instead he] is further transforming politics in this city’…. So they started working with us in a much more constructive way.”
Mr. Sanders says his opponents came to their senses and joined him. But a close examination of the Vermont lawmaker’s record as mayor shows that at times he also went to them, working with Republicans, police and business on key issues facing the community—sometimes to the frustration of his liberal allies.
“The city was run in the 1980s as a coalition between what you would now call the progressives and the Republicans,” said John Franco, assistant city attorney in the Sanders administration. “Bernie is a fiscal conservative. The saying in Vermont is he’s tighter than the bark on a tree.”
Click for Full Text!