Outsider in the White House (7 page)

Yet, to my surprise, to Mayor Paquette's shock, to the business community's alarm, and to the deep interest of Vermonters throughout the state, when the absentee votes were tallied in with the rest, I found myself elected mayor of Burlington—by a mere fourteen votes. For once, the old saying was really true: every vote had counted. So stunning was the upset that nine years later the state's largest newspaper would still be referring to it as “the story of the decade.”

But the evening did not end with our victory and my live appearance on late-night news, ferried to the state's largest television station by a reporter with a siren on the roof of his car. With such a close election there would be a recount, and City Hall had possession of all the ballots. After a great deal of legal mumbo jumbo among my lawyer friends, meeting in the midst of total chaos in somebody's office, it was decided that we should try to get the ballots out of City Hall.

So, in the middle of the night—at three o'clock in the morning to be precise—a lawyer and I traveled down a dirt road and woke up a judge to request that the election ballots be impounded. The judge granted our request. The next morning the ballots were moved to the state courthouse.

One month later, I was sworn in as mayor of Vermont's largest city, the only mayor in the entire country elected in opposition to the two major political parties. I would be reelected three times, and then move on to the U.S. House of Representatives, the first Independent in the Congress in four decades. But that March night in 1981 was the event which made possible all that came after.

We were a coalition of ordinary people, none of whom had any real access to power in the conventional scheme of things, but we had contested an important election—and we had won. If an independent progressive movement could win in America's most rural state—and until recently, one of America's most Republican—then it might be possible for progressives to do likewise anywhere in the nation.

“They're playing you for a fool and they've already taken away your right to representation in Congress. Who are ‘they'? The leftists, extreme liberals and radicals all over the country. From Berkeley, California to New York's Greenwich Village, thousands of these people, that's right, thousands of them, have been contributing to and working hard for the election of Bernard Sanders to Congress.”

This, from a fundraising letter widely distributed throughout Vermont, is the gist of Sweetser's campaign strategy: a slightly retooled version of '50s-style redbaiting. The people of Vermont have been duped. Bernie Sanders does not represent their interests. He owes his allegiance to left-wing “outsiders” who control him through their purse strings.

Every campaign has an official beginning. Mine was May 27, 1996, the day I made the formal announcement of my candidacy. The first of five such announcements scheduled for each region of Vermont took place in Burlington, my hometown and the state's largest city. Symbolically, we held the event in the Community Boathouse on the waterfront, one of the major accomplishments of my time as mayor. We organized the announcement as we had two years ago. The campaign staff—Tom Smith, John Gallagher, and Brendan Smith—brought together leading representatives of our various constituencies, the backbone of our support. Each of them spoke for a few moments about issues of importance to them and reasons why they wanted me reelected. Tom Smith, a former Progressive in the state legislature, emceed the event. We had a very good crowd, over 150 people at noon. It was a beautiful Vermont spring day.

Ron Pickering, the head of the Vermont AFL-CIO, was there, representing 20,000 union workers and retirees. So were Representative Bobby Starr, the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee and a leading voice for family farmers in the state legislature, and Sally Conrad, a former state senator and one of the strongest advocates for women and the poor. Stan LaFlamme, a disabled Vietnam veteran who was a member of my Veterans Council, delivered a very poignant speech. Ned Farquar of the Sierra Club spoke for the environmental community, Mira Fakiranada for the low-income community, and Alice Cook Bassett for senior citizens. We heard from Will Rapp, the owner of Gardener's Supply and a successful and environmentally conscious small businessman. Liz Ready, a progressive Democrat in the state senate, recalled her encounters with Susan Sweetser. And Peter Clavelle, who was director of economic development in my administration and was now in his third term as the Progressive mayor of Burlington, talked about my mayoral record.

These folks, many of them personal friends, represented the progressive coalition that we had worked hard over many years to bring together: workers, family farmers, women's advocates, low-income people, veterans, senior citizens, environmentalists, and small businesspeople. Together, they stood for the vast majority of the people in Vermont. Together, we would win this election.

I wrote my announcement speech the night before. As usual, when I was speaking my voice was hoarse and strained, and I had to stop a couple of times to down some water. In the speech, I tried to frame the central issues of the campaign. This is how it began:

Six years ago, I asked the people of Vermont to do something that had never been done before in the history of our state, and had not been done for forty years in the United States of America. And that is to send an Independent to Congress—someone not affiliated with the Republican Party or with the Democratic Party.

When I first ran for Congress, I asked the people of Vermont to send me to Washington so that I could fight for those people who can't afford to attend $500-a-person fundraisers like the one my opponent recently held; and who can't afford to have well-paid lobbyists in Washington protecting their interests. That's the promise that I made, and that's the promise that I've kept.

I asked the people of Vermont to send me to Congress so that I could stand up to a Republican president when he was wrong, and a Democratic president when he was wrong; to stand up to a Democratically controlled Congress when they were wrong and a Republican controlled Congress when they were wrong. And that's what I've done.

Mostly, I asked the people of Vermont to send me to Congress so that I could fight for justice—a concept we don't hear too much about anymore. To fight for justice for working families and the middle class—80 percent of whom, since 1973, have experienced a decline in their standard of living or, at best, economic stagnation—while at the same time the people on the top have never had it so good.

During the 1980s, the top one percent of wealth holders in this country enjoyed two-thirds of all increases in financial wealth. The bottom 80 percent ended up with less real financial wealth in 1989 than in 1983—and that trend continues. Today, tragically, the United States has the most unfair distribution of wealth and income in the entire industrialized world.

Justice. An economy in which all people do well, not just the very rich. And that's what I've been fighting for.

I then described some of what I had seen in Vermont as I traveled around the state during the two preceding years.

I talked about the meeting I had with a woman in Danville, who told me that both she and her husband were working sixty hours a week in order to save money to send their daughters, excellent high school students, to college. But despite their back-breaking efforts, they didn't know if they would succeed—given the high cost of college and the enormous debt they would have to sustain.

I talked about the young farmer I had met in Troy. She and her husband go out milking at 5 a.m., seven days a week. But despite their hard work and their love of the land, they didn't know if they would be able to stay on the farm because of the collapse of milk prices.

I talked about the senior citizens I met throughout the state who, despite Medicare, were unable to afford their prescription drugs. And how some of them were forced to choose between adequately heating their homes in the winter or buying the food they needed.

And I talked about the young workers who had no health insurance and dead-end jobs.

My point was that while the economy might have been working well for the people on top, it was leaving many, many people far behind.

Next came my legislative achievements. For years my opponents had been telling Vermonters that as an Independent I couldn't pass major bills or amendments. It was important to set the record straight. In fact, I had an impressive legislative record.

I had helped lead the effort to raise the minimum wage and to pass the Northeast Dairy Compact, legislation of great importance to Vermont farmers. It was my amendment that passed the House and told the president that he couldn't put $50 billion at risk bailing out the Mexican economy on behalf of Wall Street investment banks. Another amendment of mine stopped an outrageous example of corporate welfare—a $31 million Pentagon bonus for the board of directors and CEO of Lockheed-Martin for merging their companies and laying off 17,000 workers. In Vermont it gets cold in the winter, very cold, so my office led the effort in the House to stop Gingrich's attempt to eliminate the fuel assistance program, LIHEAP, restoring almost full funding for it, as well as seeing through a major amendment for affordable housing. Further, I passed legislation that prevented insurance companies from discriminating against battered women, and an amendment stating that an HMO or insurance company could not force a woman and her newborn baby out of the hospital before they were ready to go. And there were other successful amendments and bills that I had authored. The important point was to show Vermonters that an Independent could pass legislation relevant to our state and to the nation.

But then came, perhaps, the most important point that I wanted to make. I continued:

What this election is about is whether Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, and the Republican Party are going to have another two years to push through the most reactionary, extremist agenda in the modern history of America—or whether we stop them cold right now and tell them that greed and bigotry and scapegoating are not what America is all about.

What this election is about is whether Gingrich and Armey and the Republican Party are going to be successful in slashing Medicare, Medicaid, education, environmental protection, veterans' programs, nutrition, affordable housing, and a dozen other programs impacting tens of millions of Americans—while at the same time they give huge tax breaks to the rich and large corporations, and build B-2 bombers and Star Wars gadgets that the Pentagon doesn't want.

Finally, I concluded by emphasizing what is too frequently ignored in politics: that despite all of the problems and pettiness that take place every day in the political world, it is imperative for progressives to maintain a vision—a vision that has been carried forth generation after generation after generation—a vision that cries out for social justice and the attainment of the true potential that this country can become.

I ended my remarks by stating:

It is vitally important to the future of this country and our state that we defeat the Republican agenda, and that we prevent the Republicans from recapturing the Congress and taking the White House. That is enormously important. But it is even more important that we as progressives and as Vermonters hold on to that special vision that has propelled us forward for so many years.

A vision which says that in this richest of all nations all of our people, and not just the wealthy, should enjoy the fruits of their labor with decent jobs and benefits that allow them to live in dignity. That we cannot continue to have the highest rate of childhood poverty in the world, while the number of millionaires and billionaires continues to increase. A vision which says that every man, woman, and child in this country is entitled to health care as a right of citizenship, and that the United States must join the rest of the industrialized world by enacting a national health care system, a single-payer health care system. A vision which says that lifelong quality education is the essence of what being alive is about, and that all of our citizens, no matter what their incomes, should be able to receive a higher education.

A vision which says that we respect the struggles that women have been waging for so many years, and that the very personal decision of abortion must be decided by the woman herself—and not Newt Gingrich or the United States government. A vision which says that we judge people not by their color, their gender, their sexual orientation, their nation of birth—but by the quality of their character, and that we will never accept sexism, racism, or homophobia.

A vision which says that there is no conflict between respect for the environment and job growth, and that, in fact, our economy improves when we stop environmental degradation. A vision which says that a society is ultimately judged by how we treat the weakest and most vulnerable among us—the children, the elderly, the sick, the disabled. And that we do not cut back on programs which help the weak and the powerless, in order to give tax breaks to the rich and the powerful.

The announcement event in Burlington was a terrific success. It was great to see so many of my old friends again, people who had been part of our efforts in Burlington when I was mayor, people who had worked with me for years. I was honored and humbled to be part of a coalition of such good, decent, and down-to-earth people. It was a completely different world from the backbiting of Washington. I was very proud to be a Vermonter.

But the warm feelings lasted only until the evening news was broadcast. We were then reminded very pointedly that in politics there's reality, and there's perception of reality as portrayed on television. The official campaign had just begun, and voters were forming their first impressions. And what they saw on TV was very different from what had actually taken place.

My Republican opponent, Susan Sweetser, held a press conference immediately after my announcement. Her attack on me for attacking her (which I didn't—I never even mentioned her) dominated the news. She was particularly successful at turning our announcement to her advantage on the largest television station in the state, WCAX-TV, which gave as much time to Sweetser's response as to my speech. In the midst of their coverage, they felt it necessary to report, incorrectly, that I had spent almost $200,000 more than my Republican opponent in the
last
election—they simply “forgot” to mention the independent expenditures made on his behalf by the Republican Party, including money paid to WCAX.

Stuart “Red” Martin, the conservative Republican who owns WCAX, had already contributed $2,000, the maximum amount allowed by law, to the Sweetser campaign. Recently Peter Freyne, a columnist on the Vermont weekly newspaper
Seven Days
, quoted Martin as saying that he wanted “to chip in as much as I can … I feel I'm doing a public service if we remove Bernie Sanders.” From the beginning, we had worried about how WCAX would cover this campaign. Now we knew. We were off to a very bad start.

In effect, my opening announcement on TV became a pro-Sweetser promotion. The strategy of her campaign handlers is the essence of modern TV-oriented campaigning: when your opponent makes a speech, respond very quickly so that the television report focuses more on the response than on the original statement. In general, soundbite television likes the idea of “conflict” more than the simple reporting of information. This works especially well when a TV station is sympathetic to a particular point of view.

Increasingly, both with regard to the campaign and my congressional duties, I worry about the role of television “news” in the life of our country—regardless of the political orientation of the station. The simple fact of the matter is that no one, not Bill Clinton, not Bob Dole, not Bernie Sanders, can deal with complex issues in a seven-second sound bite. The rapid pace of TV “action news” makes it virtually impossible for there to be serious reflection on important issues. Further, there is little sense of proportion in the coverage given to issues. TV news wants
new
developments, and smart press secretaries cater to this craving by concocting gimmicks and photo ops—anything to get their bosses on the tube.