Bernie Sanders has been noted, above all, for his consistency. He doesn’t change his mind. Ever. Except, maybe, a little bit on gun control. And this inflexibility is considered a virtue among politicians. Especially in this season, given his opposition.
Sanders has been advocating the same positions on the same issues with the same angry energy for more than forty years. But for all his political passion, there is something about the man that is suggestive of Lenin who, as Paul Johnson writes in Modern Times, “… had none of the customary blemishes of the politically ambitious: no vanity, no self-consciousness, no obvious relish for the exercise of authority. But his humanitarianism was a very abstract passion. It embraced humanity in general but he seems to have had little love for, or even interest in, humanity in particular. He saw the people with whom he dealt, his comrades, not as individuals but as receptacles for his ideas.”
So it is with Sanders, in his dealings with the press in Vermont, according to Mickey Hirten, a former editor of the Burlington Free Press who writes, in the Lansing CityPulse, that:
They weren’t. Sanders was always full of himself: pious, self-righteous and utterly humorless. Burdened by the cross of his socialist crusade, he was a scold whose counter-culture moralizing appealed to the state’s liberal sensibilities as well as its conservatives, who embraced his gun ownership stance, his defense of individual rights, an antipathy toward big corporations and, generally speaking, his stick-it-to-them approach to politics.
Hurter describes an episode during a Free Press editorial meeting when Sanders objected his line questioning and:
But:
Hirten isn’t the only member of the Vermont press who feels that way. As he writes:
“Bernie has no social skills, no sense of humor, and he’s quick to boil over. He’s the most unpolitical person in politics I’ve ever come across,”
And:
“They characterize the senator as rude, short-tempered and, occasionally, downright hostile. Though Sanders has spent much of his life fighting for working Vermonters, they say he mistreats the people working for him.”
Sanders is, it seems, as consistent in his dealings with people as he is in his political positions.
