U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) (R) addresses a news conference in support of a proposed constitutional amendment for campaign finance reform, on Capitol Hill in Washington September 8, 2014. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst (UNITED STATES – Tags: POLITICS) – RTR45FDR
MONTPELIER, Vt.– Once a democratic socialist, always a democratic socialist. Once a scold of big money in politics, still a scold.
No one can accuse Bernie Sanders of flip-flopping over his four decades in public life. Rock steady, he’s inhabited the same ideological corner from which he now takes on Hillary Rodham Clinton in an improbable quest for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016.
Here he is in 1974, as the 32-year-old candidate for U.S. Senate of a fledgling leftist party in Vermont called Liberty Union: “A handful of banks and billionaires control the economic and political life of America. … America is becoming less and less of a democracy and more and more of an oligarchy.”
And now, in an Associated Press interview: “This is a rigged economy, which works for the rich and the powerful, and is not working for ordinary Americans. … You know this country just does not belong to a handful of billionaires.”
Some see him as a broken record, others as a person who has been telling the truth all along and just waiting for enough people to listen.
“The fascinating thing about Bernie right now is that the agenda has caught up with Bernie,” said Garrison Nelson, a University of Vermont political science professor and longtime Sanders watcher.
During Sanders’ near decade as mayor of Burlington in the 1980s, during his eight terms holding Vermont’s lone House seat and during his near decade in the Senate, the message has stayed the same: The rich are absconding with an immorally large part of the country’s wealth, and ordinary people have been getting the short end of the stick.
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