The hopeful little utopia that Bernie Sanders built hugs the eastern bank of Lake Champlain, which may be the only bank he approves of.
It is in Burlington, population 42,000, where Bernie’s Subaru Outback is parked in the driveway of a handsome yet not ostentatious home on Van Patten Parkway, while an unmarked SUV staffed by two unsmiling plainclothesmen idles on the avenue outside. (“Secret Service?” “Yup.”) It is here that Sanders’s portrait adorns a civic mural that also features Vermont’s two previous presidents: Chester A. Arthur, and Calvin Coolidge.
It is here that you can see quotations from Nelson Mandela posted in the airport, watch Progressives Today on television, and get locally sourced organic cheddar curds on your poutine. But it also is here that you can visit a drop-in centre that aids thousands of recovering drug addicts every month, and view the ravages of hundreds of Vermont winters on some of the oldest housing stock in the United States.
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“When Bernie became mayor,” says Gretchen Bailey, Sanders’s deputy at Burlington City Hall and later his congressional aide in Washington, “it was a shock to the local establishment that he won. At that point, I’m not sure that Bernie even knew himself what he was aspiring to, except he knew that poor people in town weren’t getting anywhere, and he wanted to help them.
“In the city, it was, ‘fix my sidewalk.’ It was, ‘I can’t pay my rent.’ Whatever Bernie’s vision was on a higher level, he wanted this stuff fixed. Without Bernie, this city would be so far behind where it is today,” says Bailey. “The waterfront, the parks: they wouldn’t be there. The people wouldn’t care so much.”