"As presidential primary election results
stormed in from icy New Hampshire on Tuesday, my thoughts drifted back
to a similarly wintry evening 35 years ago. Along with fellow
journalists, clerks, and city officials, I crowded into the drafty
basement of City Hall in Burlington, Vermont, as that day’s election
results were counted.
The
local Irish and French Catholic politicos who tried to push me away
from the election counters’ table knew Burlington so well, they could
project final results from reading the totals on individual voting
machines. Their normally ruddy complexions faded first to pink, then
white, and then a sickly gray, as they realized that their Democratic
Party, whose grip on Burlington’s levers of power rivaled that of
storied political machines in Chicago and Albany, NY, was being voted
out of office.
To them, the unthinkable and unimaginable had
happened. Bernie Sanders, not only a “Flatlander,” Vermont parlance for a
non-native, but a newcomer to Burlington, a New Yorker, a socialist —
and a Jew — had won election as mayor by one-tenth of a percent.
The shocking outcome wasn’t as much of a
surprise to me as it was to the city’s veteran political operatives.
Perhaps my own status as an outsider made it easier to see the changes
under way in that Rust Belt city, changes in demographics and attitudes
that Sanders capitalized on to forge a winning coalition — the kind he
is building today on a vastly larger scale."
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