2016 elections - because it's never too early

[jimmy olsen]

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/02/donald-trump-2016-music-gop-213603#ixzz3zuT3ACtv

How Donald Trump Broke the GOP's Music Curse

Creative and bold use of pop music has bedevilled Republican pols for a generation—until The Donald.

By Tevi Troy

February 07, 2016

Donald Trump has been blowing up the traditional GOP certainties left and right, and this week he overturned another one. In what seemed like an embarrassing rebuke, on February 1, Adele told the Republican front-runner that he didn't have her permission to use her songs at his massive campaign events. Adele might just be the world's most popular singer at the moment, and any normal candidate would have folded his tent, chastened. Not Trump. At his rally in Little Rock, Arkansas, two days later, the crowd of thousands listened to Adele's "Skyfall" before Trump's helicopter landed. A day after that, in Exeter, New Hampshire, Adele's "Rolling In the Deep" could be heard blaring behind the candidate when he made his entrance.

The move was classic Donald Trump, shameless and defiant. And this bold handling of a music controversy, and Trump's creative use of music on the trail in general, marks a complete departure from typical Republican Party practice. Trump is a novel GOP candidate in many ways, but in finally making music work for him, he's managed to master a problem that has bedeviled the party's campaigns—from Ronald Reagan 1984 to Michele Bachmann 2012—for decades.

If you've been watching Trump rallies, you know The Donald grooms his soundtrack as carefully as he styles his hair. He makes lavish use of Andrew Lloyd Weber's musical numbers; he'll often open and close his events to the strains of Twisted Sister's 1984 hit, "We're Not Gonna Take It." He uses pop music in subtler ways as well. When Trump was pushing the issue of Ted Cruz's Canadian birthplace, he tauntingly played Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA." When warning of the dangers of Syrian refugees, he read aloud the lyrics of Al Wilson's 1968 song "The Snake," about a woman who nurses an injured snake, only to be bitten as a reward.

Some of this is wit; some is pure theater. And some is evidence of plain old deal making. The Twisted Sister, for instance: It might seem strange for a real-estate mogul in beautiful suits to rally the crowd with a party anthem sung by a campy hair-metal band from the '80s. But the real surprise is that he actually got permission: Dee Snider, the front man of Twisted Sister, liked Trump's confrontational spirit and gave him the OK.

And, perhaps more importantly, as the Adele incident this week shows, when he doesn't get the OK, he doesn't seem to care. This is all radical departure from the traditional GOP playbook. Typically—and this problem has plagued the party for more than a generation—a GOP candidate attempting to use a popular song risks receiving a snub from the artist, who not only rejects the candidate but then takes shots at his political stands. Republicans in the past have nearly always kowtowed to the artists' demands. It's awkward all around, and it has made GOP candidates gun shy about trying to use pop music at all, let alone inventively—until Trump.

***

The partisan cast of popular music began to emerge in Richard Nixon's administration. Pat Moynihan, a Democrat but also a Nixon White House aide, once wrote in a memo to White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman and Domestic Policy Adviser John Ehrlichman that cultural elites failed to support Republicans, and Nixon in particular: "No one writes articles for us, much less books, or plays, or folk songs." Nixon, ever the tactician, tried to develop his own allies in the music world, inviting Merle Haggard to the White House to sing his song, "Okie from Muskogee." The Nixon White House saw Haggard's song as an anthem for the so-called Silent Majority, since in the lyrics an Okie from Muskogee would not "smoke marijuana ... take no trips on LSD" nor "burn no draft cards down on Main Street."

The Republican struggle to connect with musicians hit the headlines in the 1980s, during Ronald Reagan's reelection campaign in 1984. He pursued a "Morning in America" strategy, highlighting a resurgent economy and a robust American stance in the Cold War. The Reagan team appropriated Bruce Springsteen's monster hit "Born in the USA" as a kind of Republican pep anthem. Reagan even went to New Jersey, the heart of Springsteen country, and told a crowd in Hammonton that "America's future rests in a thousand dreams inside our hearts. It rests in the message of hope in the songs of a man so many young Americans admire: New Jersey's own Bruce Springsteen."

It was not at all clear that Reagan listened to Springsteen himself, or was even a Springsteen fan. After a story came out that Reagan often listened to Springsteen, reporters asked a Reagan aide to identify specific songs. The aide was unable to name the president's favorite Springsteen song. It's not clear Reagan could have named one, either.

The far larger problem was that Springsteen himself was mortified, and pointed out that the president had embarrassingly misread his song. The Boss told Rolling Stone that "You see in the Reagan election ads on TV, you know, 'It's morning in America,' and you say, 'Well, it's not morning in Pittsburgh. It's not morning above 125th Street in New York.'" He also took a jab at the claim from Reagan aides that the Gipper was a fan, at one point wondering on stage which one of his albums might have been Reagan's favorite. Springsteen later called "Born in the USA" "the most misunderstood song since 'Louie, Louie.'"

Even if Reagan's team hadn't gotten the song wrong, Springsteen wasn't an apt choice: Four years earlier, the day after Reagan had beaten Jimmy Carter to win the White House, Springsteen told concert-goers at Arizona State University that "I don't know what you thought about what happened last night, but I thought it was pretty terrifying."

Subsequent GOP candidates haven't done much better. In the 1988 campaign, when George H.W. Bush was vying to succeed Reagan, he tried to use Bobby McFerrin's infectious "Don't Worry Be Happy" as an unofficial campaign theme, linking Bush to the economic success of the Reagan administration. McFerrin asked the Bush campaign not to use the song, and the campaign complied.

Legally speaking, this is voluntary: As long as the campaign or the venue has bought a "blanket license," which is standard practice, it can use any song from the music library of the organization granting the license. (Use of music for campaign commercials is more complicated and typically requires an artist's permission.) It's not the law that stops politicians from using certain songs; it's the embarrassment factor, which has been significant.

In the past few years, Republican campaigns have turned into a kind of low-level war between musicians and the candidates trying to use their material. Tom Petty objected to Minnesota Republican Michele Bachmann coming on stage to his "American Girl," as well as to George W. Bush's use of his "Don't Back Down"; John Mellencamp, Van Halen, Dave Grohl and Jackson Browne all complained about John McCain's use of some of their songs; Heart put out a blistering statement about Sarah Palin's use of the song "Barracuda": "Sarah Palin's views and values in no way represent us as American women," they wrote. Boston's Tom Scholz asked Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee to stop using "More Than a Feeling." One anonymous Internet wag summed up the situation by quipping that GOP politicians "can only use country music or dead people's music."

The 2016 race has offered more of the same. Last year, when GOP presidential candidate Scott Walker started using the Dropkick Murphys' "Shipping Up to Boston" at his political events, the band tweeted: "@ScottWalker @GovWalker please stop using our music in any way ... we literally hate you !!! Love, Dropkick Murphys." When Jeb Bush met and praised the rapper Ludacris at the Georgia State House, Ludacris did not return the favor. Asked which Bush was his favorite, Ludacris responded, "the one outside."

It's not that this hasn't happened to Donald Trump—and Adele isn't the first example. In October, Aerosmith front man Steven Tyler asked Trump to stop using the Aerosmith song "Dream On." Tyler's request was putatively made for business, not ideological, reasons, but it was still a "no." It came on the heels of more partisan entreaties, such as Neil Young insisting that Trump no longer use "Rockin' in the Free World," and R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe complaining about Trump's use of "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)." Stipe also went after Trump on Twitter and Facebook, calling Trump's effort "a moronic charade of a campaign."

The difference is that Trump, whose own celebrity eclipses that of a lot of pop musicians, doesn't seem to care. Rather than back away from using music, he just plows forward. Shortly after receiving Tyler's cease-and-desist letter, Trump took to Twitter to insult the song, writing: "Even though I have the legal right to use Steven Tyler's song, he asked me not to. Have better one to take its place!" And, being Trump, he made a deal: He called Twisted Sister front man Dee Snider, with whom he is friendly, to secure Snider's permission to use "We're Not Gonna Take It." (As Snider put it, "[Trump] didn't want a Neil Young situation.")

Snider in the past had told Paul Ryan that the song was off limits, but in this case he gave Trump the OK. It's hard to imagine a typical Republican using a song with lyrics like "Your life is trite and jaded / Boring and confiscated"—but Trump isn't a typical Republican, and the song's spirit of snarling, theatrical, slightly wry confrontation isn't a bad fit for the campaign. And as Trump makes his appeal to the frustration of the noncoastal elites who serve as his base, much of its message is right on point: "We'll fight the powers that be just/Don't pick our destiny 'cause/You don't know us, you don't belong."

Trump can make music work—whatever he manages to pick—because he's fundamentally a showman. Befitting a reality TV star, he benefits from readily identifiable theme music as he enters and exits the stage. He mixes in other songs to add to the festive mood of his rallies. He acts like a rock star with his audience, getting them to respond in chorus to fan favorites from his top issues. As the Pensacola News Journal's Carlos Gieska noted, when Trump asks who will pay for his wall, the audience knows how to reply: "Like fans who have memorized the lyrics to a favorite album, most of the 12,500 in attendance answered in unison, 'Mexico!'"

As with so many other aspects of the presidential campaign, Trump has taken decades of received wisdom about American politics and turned it on its head. Whatever else his impact on this race may be, he may have also given Republicans a road map for solving their pop music conundrum—or at least a swaggering example of how it's really done.

[derspiess]

Iran claims that Republican lawmakers attempted to put a hold on the release of hostages until after the US 2016 election: http://www.tasnimnews.com/en/news/2016/02/11/998130/us-republicans-had-urged-iran-to-delay-prisoner-swap-shamkhani-says

Doubtful. Obama would have crushed them in front of the media with that, and I can't imagine they could have kept it secret from his administration.

Dunno. The Tansim News Agency is usually pretty reliable. I get my NFL news there.

[Admiral Yi]

Republican lawmakers offered to buy Ali Shamkhani a new neck if he complied.

The claim is bizarre on so many different levels.

[Razgovory]

I find it hard to believe that Republicans would do that.  Not because I think they're too patriotic for that, but because it is very obvious that it can backfire very, very badly.

The Iranians have claimed the same thing before...

[jimmy olsen]

I think the bolded is pretty good advice.

https://www.yahoo.com/politics/there-is-only-one-way-1362390891388982.html

There is only one way forward for Clinton now

Matt Bai
National Political Columnist

February 11, 2016

In the days before Bernie Sanders positively obliterated Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, raising the very real specter that she could lose the nomination, I found myself thinking a lot about an exchange she had with voters during a CNN town hall in Derry.

A tired-looking man rose and told Clinton he had terminal colon cancer, and he wanted to know what she would do to help advance the conversation about end-of-life decisions. Clinton seemed visibly moved.

"I don't have an easy or glib answer for you," Clinton said candidly, adding that she needed to immerse herself in the ethical and scientific writings.

Not five minutes later, another voter asked Clinton how she would stand up to Republican attacks. She scoffed knowingly and let loose a recitation of how victimized she had been over the years, and how horrible it was to be the target of smear campaigns, and how she was still standing anyway. "It's unlike anything you've ever gone through," Clinton said.

I thought to myself: Tell that to the guy with colon cancer.

A better politician would have said yes, of course she'd have to deal with some attacks, but that's life in the arena and she feels lucky to serve. A great politician, like her husband in his prime, would have actually meant it.




But Hillary, truth be told, just isn't a very gifted politician. And while Sanders focuses relentlessly on the big themes that preoccupy voters, Clinton's campaign feels like it's all about her — her résumé, her mettle, her 25 years of suffering through the indignities of public service. "I'm with her" is the slogan for a campaign that seems to signify nothing beyond the joyless accretion of personal loyalties.

Clinton really should beat Sanders in the weeks ahead, but she has only one clear winning strategy here, near as I can tell. She has to stop allowing the campaign to become a referendum on her — and turn it, instead, into a referendum on the guy she wants to replace.

That won't be Clinton's instinct, of course. The first thing she's going to do now, apparently, is the thing the Clintons have generally done when backed against a wall: blame the staff.

Even before New Hampshire buried Clinton in bad news, handing her a 22-point defeat in which she even lost women by double digits, stories were circulating about a shakeup at the Brooklyn headquarters (where, you would think, Clinton's high command now feels like the Lost Battalion caught behind enemy lines, surrounded by turtleneck-wearing hipsters with "Bernie" signs in their windows).

All of which reminds me of what a scandal-damaged Gary Hart said in 1988 when his chief operative in Iowa, a young law student named Martin O'Malley, informed him that he had registered at zero percent in the caucuses and apologized for letting him down.

"Martin," Hart said dryly, "this was not an organizational problem."

Clinton doesn't have an organizational problem. Oh, sure, there are probably too many informal advisers, too much conflicting advice, no shortage of arrogance and infighting. But that's nothing new in the Clinton orbit. Only the cast of characters ever changes, and even then not much.

No, Clinton's problem is the moment and her inability to meet it. What happened in New Hampshire Tuesday wasn't just some ideological rebellion in both parties, a predictable insider-outsider conflict with less predictable results.



This was the shock wave of 2008 finally rising to the surface of our fractured politics. What Sanders and Donald Trump embody, each in his own strident way, is the disgust that's been building for the eight years since Lehman Brothers collapsed and took the markets with it — eight years in which the wealthy and their wholly owned political parties recovered fabulously while everyone else stagnated.

President Obama once told a roomful of bankers, in frustration, that he was the only thing standing between them and the pitchforks. Turns out he was right, and now that he's stepping aside, the pitchforks are overturning our politics.

Here's where Clinton finds herself in a real box. Having represented New York and its chief industry, finance, she's nowhere near a credible populist; the more she tries to sound like Sanders and tout her history as a progressive rebel who once worked for the Children's Defense Fund, the more she comes off as desperate and expedient.

But if instead Clinton tries to own her real convictions and make the case for a more pragmatic approach, she's seen as an ideological apostate, unwilling to take on the system. And so her choice is to be either a less genuine candidate than Sanders or a less progressive one — or some days both.

A supremely talented candidate might navigate a way out of this box, but as I said, that's not Clinton's superpower. Her team's strategy for beating back Sanders seems to rely, instead, on demographics. The coming states will feature more black and Latino voters, and Clinton is assuming they won't be as impressed as voters in New Hampshire were by the rumpled white guy from Vermont.




That's a pretty shaky assumption, if you ask me.

Remember, Bill Clinton, who once commanded the loyalty of African-American voters like no Democrat since Robert Kennedy, hasn't appeared on a ballot for 20 years. A lot of younger black and Latino voters don't even remember the Clinton years, and they're just as tired of the status quo as their white counterparts.

It won't be so easy for Hillary to convince minority and younger white voters, who soundly rejected her in New Hampshire this week, that somehow she represents real change and progressive ideals.

But they believe that still about Barack Obama, and this is where Sanders has left her an opening.

Because for the past few weeks, if you've been paying attention, Sanders has subtly extended his indictment of his party's timid status quo right to the door of the White House. I don't know what Obama said to Sanders when the two of them sat down to talk in January, but whatever it was, it left Sanders in an uncharitable mood.

Since then, he has said (in a string of angry tweets, no less) that real progressives can't be for trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He has said real progressives can't take money from Wall Street. Having apparently appointed himself Political Philosophy Czar, Sanders has said you can't call yourself both a moderate and a progressive at the same time.

Sanders has brushed aside the health care law that is Obama's signature achievement (and his most politically costly), calling for a single-payer system and castigating pharmaceutical companies as if "Obamacare" had never existed.

In other words, while he praises Obama in debates, Sanders is saying, unmistakably, that Obama hasn't been a progressive president and doesn't embody systemic change. And that's the cause — rather than her own long résumé — that Clinton, having played a pivotal role in the administration, should champion if she wants to get between Sanders and the voters she needs.

If I were Clinton right now, I'd be asking some pretty simple questions every chance I got in South Carolina and Nevada and Michigan.

Who gets to claim the mantle of change — the nation's first black president, who overturned the old order on health care and Wall Street regulation and Cuba and Iran, or a senator who's voted with the gun industry? How seriously can you take a candidate who doesn't think Obama represents a real departure from the status quo?

A vote for Clinton, at this point, has to be a vote of validation for Obama's legacy, too.

It's not a perfect strategy. You might point out that Obama himself once derided Clinton, eons ago, as shifty and calculating. You might point out, as I have, that elections are supposed to be about the future and not the past.

But here's the reality: To this point, Clinton has run a campaign that's all about her bona fides, and nobody's swooning. If she's still defending her Wall Street speeches and whining about the vast right-wing conspiracy a few weeks from now, the nomination could very well slip away from her, again.

Clinton's best move now is to lash herself tightly to the man who once beat her and hope it's enough to ride out the wave.

[jimmy olsen]

More socialist then many (fans or critics) would expect

http://www.thenation.com/article/bernies-burlington-city-sustainable-future/

 What Kind of Mayor Was Bernie Sanders?

In his eight years as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Bernie Sanders revitalized the economy and solidified support for progressive municipal policies.


By Peter Dreier and Pierre Clavel

 John Davis remembers a meeting in 1986 when Bernie Sanders, then the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, confronted the owners of the city's largest affordable-housing complex. The federal program that had subsidized the Northgate Apartments for 20 years had a loophole that allowed the landlords to convert the buildings into market rentals or luxury condos.

"Bernie pounded his fist on the conference table in his office and told the owners, 'Over my dead body are you going to displace 336 working families. You are not going to convert Northgate into luxury housing,'" recalled Davis, who was Sanders's key housing aide.

Under Sanders's leadership, the city adopted a number of laws to stifle the owners' plans. One ordinance required apartment owners to give residents two years' notice before a condo conversion. Others gave residents a pre-emptive right to buy the units and prohibited landlords from bulldozing buildings unless they replaced them with the same number of affordable units. (These measures lowered the selling price of the property.) Sanders then worked with the state government and Senator Patrick Leahy to get the $12 million needed to purchase and rehabilitate the buildings. The city allocated funds to help the tenants hire an organizer, form the Northgate Residents Association, and start the process of converting the complex to resident ownership. Today, Northgate Apartments is owned by the tenants and has long-term restrictions to keep the buildings affordable for working families.

The battle over Northgate Apartments illustrates Sanders's general approach to governing. In addressing this and many other issues, he encouraged grassroots organizing, adopted local laws to protect the vulnerable, challenged the city's business power brokers, and worked collaboratively with other politicians to create a more livable city.

Now that Sanders is running for president, the eight years he spent as Burlington's chief executive (1981–89) will be under close scrutiny. Although President Obama recently joked at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner that Sanders is a "pot-smoking socialist," he was actually a hardworking, pragmatic, effective mayor who helped transform Vermont's largest city (population: 38,000) into a thriving town.

Thanks to the enduring influence of the progressive climate that Sanders and his allies helped to create in Burlington, the city's largest housing development is now resident-owned, its largest supermarket is a consumer-owned cooperative, one of its largest private employers is worker-owned, and most of its people-oriented waterfront is publicly owned. Its publicly owned utility, the Burlington Electric Department, recently announced that Burlington is the first American city of any decent size to run entirely on renewable electricity.

 Sanders grew up in Brooklyn and attended the University of Chicago, where he was active in the civil-rights movement. After a short stint living on an Israeli kibbutz, in 1964 he moved to Vermont, where he worked as a carpenter, filmmaker, writer, and researcher, and got involved in radical politics. In the 1970s, after joining the antiwar Liberty Union Party, Sanders ran for several statewide offices, including governor, US Senate, and the US House (Vermont has only one seat). He never garnered more than 4 percent of the vote, but he did better in Burlington than in Vermont's rural areas, which gave him hope that he had a shot at winning office in the local government.

 In 1981, Sanders ran for mayor of Burlington as an Independent and defeated six-term Democratic Party incumbent Gordon Paquette by ten votes in a four-way contest. Voters re-elected Sanders three times by increasingly wider margins: 52 percent in 1983, 55 percent in 1985, and 56 percent in 1987.

Burlington was no hippie counterculture enclave. Although the city attracted many young, educated people because of its natural beauty and the presence of the University of Vermont, it has always had a large working-class population (many of them from French Canadian stock) who, until Sanders came on the scene, tended to vote for moderate Democrats and Republicans. Each time he ran for mayor, Sanders attracted increasing support from the city's blue-collar precincts.

In his first two years in office, the City Council refused to allow Sanders to hire more than a handful of staff, while the entrenched bureaucrats in City Hall sought to thwart his initiatives. Randy Kamerbeek, the city's planning director, "tried to sabotage everything that Bernie proposed," recalled Michael Monte, who worked in that agency. "He told us not to allow Bernie to have any visible successes. He figured Bernie would be out of office after his first term."

After he was re-elected in 1983, and voters swept in a more progressive City Council, Sanders gained a stronger foothold in City Hall. With the support of local Republicans and business leaders, he created the Community and Economic Development Office (CEDO) to carry out his vision for more affordable housing, more locally owned small businesses, greater community engagement in planning, and job development.

When Sanders took office, Burlington's Lake Champlain waterfront was an industrial wasteland. Tony Pomerleau, an influential local businessman, planned a mega-project that included a 150-room hotel, retail space, a 100-slip marina, and 240 condominiums in 18-story buildings. In his first campaign, Sanders pledged to kill that plan. After Pomerleau withdrew his proposal, Sanders backed another waterfront plan that included some commercial development, affordable housing, and generous public access. But after voters defeated a bond measure for this proposal, Sanders went back to the drawing board to envision a "people's waterfront."

According to Monte, who worked on the waterfront project for Sanders and was CEDO director for 12 years, "Bernie wanted to make sure that it was a place with plenty of open space and public access, where ordinary people could rent a rowboat and buy a hot dog. That wasn't just for the elite. It was Bernie who set the tone that the waterfront wasn't for sale."

Thanks to Sanders, the Burlington waterfront now has a community boathouse and other facilities for small boats. There's also a sailing center and science center, a fishing pier, an eight-mile bike path, acres of parkland, and public beaches. The commercial development is modest and small-scale. On May 26, Sanders kicked off his presidential campaign with a rally at Waterfront Park. 

Most of Burlington's business leaders initially distrusted Sanders. They didn't know what a socialist would do once he held the reins of power. But even many of Sanders's early opponents came to respect and even admire his willingness to listen to their views and his efforts to adopt progressive municipal policies.

Pomerleau was then—and remains today, at 97—one of Burlington's richest residents. A longtime Republican, he made his money developing supermarkets, hotels, and shopping centers, and he owns much of Burlington's commercial real estate. For decades, he has wielded considerable political influence, served as chair of the city's police commission, and been its most generous philanthropist.

"When [Sanders] first ran for mayor, he was running against guys like me," Pomerleau recalled in a recent interview.

Pomerleau, who voted against Sanders in 1981, knocked on his door the day after that election. "I said, 'You're the mayor, but it's still my town,'" he recalled.

Pomerleau wasn't happy when Sanders opposed his waterfront development plan, but he gradually got to know the mayor and came to admire his pragmatism, his bulldog tenacity to get things done, and his support for the local police.

"Bernie and I worked very well together for the betterment of the town," Pomerleau said. "We were the odd couple."

Pomerleau voted for Sanders in his three successful bids for re-election. And Sanders frequently called Pomerleau to ask his advice. They stayed in close contact, even after Sanders was elected to Congress.

Pomerleau expressed his pleasure that for the past 35 years Sanders has never missed one of his annual Christmas parties for underprivileged children. He also praised Sanders for being a stalwart supporter of America's military veterans.

"If more rich people were like me," Pomerleau said, "Bernie would feel better about the wealthy."

* * *

"When Bernie first got elected, the local media said he was anti-business," recalled Bruce Seifer, an architect of Sanders's economic development efforts. "They called us the 'Sanderistas.'"

After Sanders's re-election victory in 1983, business groups concluded they could not defeat him and thus had to work with him. But many businesspeople also saw that Sanders shared their interest in "development"—what he saw as "good development"—while opposing projects that would hurt middle- and working-class neighborhoods or victimize low-wage workers.

"Bernie was never anti-growth, anti-development, or anti-business," explained Monte. "He just wanted businesses to be responsible toward their employees and the community. He wanted local entrepreneurs to thrive. He wanted people to have good jobs that pay a living wage. If you could deal with that, you could deal with Bernie and Bernie would deal with you."

The Sanders administration provided new firms with seed funding, offered technical assistance, helped businesses form trade associations (including the South End Arts and Business Association and the Vermont Convention Bureau), focused attention on helping women become entrepreneurs, funded training programs to give women access to nontraditional jobs, and lobbied the state government to promote business growth.

When Sanders took office, Burlington had no supermarket in the downtown area. The major grocery chains told city officials that they would invest in a new store only if they could build a mega-market that residents believed was too large. Instead, the Sanders administration put its hopes in the local Onion River Cooperative. With 2,000 members in its former location, some thought it was a risky venture. It turned out to be a good investment, and under Sanders's successor it became City Market, a thriving enterprise with more than 9,000 members.

Under Sanders, Burlington became a magnet for attracting and incubating locally owned businesses, many of which expanded into large enterprises. Burton, the nation's largest snowboard company, has its headquarters (as well as a snowboard museum) in Burlington. The city assisted Seventh Generation, a green cleaning-products firm, when it started in 1988. Today, with its downtown waterfront headquarters in a LEED-certified building and over $300 million in annual sales, it is one of Burlington's largest employers. With the city's help, Gardeners Supply Company, which sells environmentally friendly gardening products, moved to Burlington in 1983. Four years later, its founder, Will Raap, began the process of selling the firm to its workers. It now has over 250 employee-owners.

As he was transitioning Gardeners Supply to employee ownership, Raap also began organizing volunteers to clean up a largely derelict floodplain north of the store. Eventually CEDO, Sanders's development agency, helped arrange the purchase of the area and provided the capital for irrigation systems, farm vehicles, and washing stations for vegetables. By the end of the 1990s, it was home to a dozen urban farms, annually producing over 500,000 pounds of food for local homes and stores. Today it generates over 10 percent of the food sold in Burlington.

"Bernie realized that the economy doesn't have to be dominated by bad guys," explained Raap, a founder of the 750-member Burlington-based Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility, an alternative trade association. "He saw that and he fostered it."

Burlington's strong economy and population growth put pressure on the city's housing supply, threatening to displace low- and middle-income families. Under Sanders, the city adopted policies to create permanently affordable housing. The city channeled a large portion of its federal block grant funds to nonprofits committed to that goal, and cultivated a constituency of these small development organizations. The first key move was support for the Burlington Community Land Trust with an initial $200,000 grant. Now named the Champlain Housing Trust, the nonprofit has over $290 million in assets; manages a portfolio of 2,800 price-controlled houses, condos, co-ops, and rentals; and owns over 120,000 square feet of commercial space and nonprofit facilities.

To provide funding for new housing initiatives, the Sanders-led city created a housing trust fund, capitalized in part by a 1 percent increase in property taxes. A year after Sanders left office, the coalition he built successfully pushed the City Council to enact an inclusionary zoning law. Market-rate residential projects were required to set aside 10–25 percent of the units at rents and prices affordable to families with modest incomes and to keep them affordable for 99 years.
 
The Sanders administration carefully nurtured neighborhood planning assemblies (NPA) in each of the city's six wards, providing them with modest budgets to deliberate and advise on projects affecting their neighborhoods. The NPAs had a voice over the use of federal Community Development Block Grant funds in their neighborhoods. Today, Burlingtonians credit the NPAs with raising the level of resident participation and discussion in local politics.

Sanders jump-started the city's participatory energies in other ways as well. Early on he established a Youth Office, an Arts Council, and a Women's Council, whose first major initiative was an ordinance requiring 10 percent of all city-funded construction jobs to be filled by women.

* * *

Sanders's track record as mayor was so successful that Burlington voters elected his CEDO director, Peter Clavelle, to succeed him in 1989. (He was voted out in 1993 but re-elected in 1995, and served until 2006.) During his 16 years in the mayor's office, Clavelle expanded Sanders's agenda. A Republican held the office from 1993 to 1995, and another independent progressive, Bob Kiss, served from 2006 through 2012. After a controversy erupted over the city-owned Burlington Telecom, Kiss declined to run for re-election.

In 2012, for the first time since Sanders's first campaign in 1981, Burlington elected a Democrat—Miro Weinberger—to serve as mayor. Although more conservative than Sanders, Clavelle, and Kiss, he has been reluctant to reverse their policies because they've been so popular. Burlington's progressives have not only held on to their main policy achievements but, after the most recent election, have gained seats on the City Council and catapulted Progressive Party member Jane Knodell into the presidency of that body.

In the 1970s and '80s, Sanders was one of a handful of mayors—including Paul Soglin of Madison, Wisconsin; Gus Newport of Berkeley, California; Ruth Goldway of Santa Monica, California; Chicago's Harold Washington; and Boston's Ray Flynn—who sought to use the levers of local government to adopt enlightened progressive policies. More than in any other city, Burlington's progressives consolidated those reforms over the long haul. The coalition that coalesced around Sanders in 1981 governed Burlington for all but two of the next 31 years.

Burlington is now widely heralded as an environmentally friendly, lively, and livable city with a thriving economy, including one of the lowest jobless rates in the country. Burlingtonians give Sanders credit for steering the city in a new direction that, despite early skepticism, proved to be broadly popular with voters.

A growing number of cities—including Seattle, New York, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Newark, and others—are now led by progressive mayors. They are adopting municipal minimum wage laws, requiring developers to build mixed-income housing, strengthening regulations against corporate polluters, and enacting other policies to address the nation's growing economic inequality and environmental crises.

What they can learn from Sanders is that good ideas are not sufficient. Creating more livable cities requires nurturing a core of activist organizations that can build long-term support for progressive municipal policies. •

[Razgovory]

I have no idea why Hillary felt the need to the wear a rain slicker to the debate.  And Sanders going on about Kissinger?

[DGuller]

Wait, was there a debate tonight?

[Razgovory]

I saw one, but that doesn't mean that there actually was one.

[Valmy]

On the other hand, I googled the vote on GWI, and it was actually not as lop-sided as i had thought.

Different times. The shadow of Vietnam loomed large.

[Martinus]

Thanks to the enduring influence of the progressive climate that Sanders and his allies helped to create in Burlington, the city's largest housing development is now resident-owned, its largest supermarket is a consumer-owned cooperative, one of its largest private employers is worker-owned, and most of its people-oriented waterfront is publicly owned. Its publicly owned utility, the Burlington Electric Department, recently announced that Burlington is the first American city of any decent size to run entirely on renewable electricity.

Tim, I am not sure if you were being sarcastic, but just in case you weren't, this is the opposite of socialist. 

[Martinus]

I saw one, but that doesn't mean that there actually was one.

I know. I really hate it too when Hillary's second head devours a journalist during a debate and then it turns out it was a hallucination noone else saw.

[11B4V]

Hideous outfit. Looks like she's trying to be a chinawoman. Seedy should get off on that.

[Razgovory]

The woman has never had any fashion sense.

[Phillip V]

I will now vote for Sanders if Kasich does not get the nomination.