Bernie Sanders Makes The Run Of His Life.

Mother Jones give us a brief history of Rep. Bernie Sanders as he prepares to run for the Vermont Senate seat that will be vacated by Independent Sen. Jim Jeffords in 2006. Michael Scherer of Mother Jones calls Bernie Sanders a man apart.

Only one Congressman hangs an engraved portrait of Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party's candidate for president in 1920, at the entrance to his Capitol Hill office. And no other House member can boast of performing in Brechtian puppet pageants with a Marxist acting troop in his native Northeast Kingdom. But then Rep. Bernie Sanders has always been a man apart.

Michael Scherer assert in this profile of Bernie Sander that the Congressman entire career has been leading to this race for Vermont Senate seat.

In many ways, Sanders' entire career has been leading to this race. He first entered politics three decades ago on a fluke run for the same Senate seat he now seeks. In 1971, he had followed a friend to the meeting of the Liberty Union Party, a liberal, anti-war group, in Plainfield, Vermont. "When I arrived, I soon discovered that the purpose of this meeting was to nominate candidates for the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives," he wrote in his memoir, Outsider in the House. The son of a paint seller from Brooklyn, he had graduated seven years earlier from the University of Chicago, where, a poor student by his own admission, he'd spent much of his time as an activist for peace, racial equality and proliferation of nuclear weapons. By the time he left the meeting in Plainfield, he had accepted the nomination for his first political race. Several months later he would win 2 percent of the statewide vote.
It took three more state races as a Liberty Union candidate, before Sanders entered the first political contest he actually had a chance to win. By a margin of 10 votes he defeated the Democratic incumbent to become mayor of Burlington in 1981. The national media cheered him as a curiosity -- he didn't even own a suit at the time -- as the "socialist mayor" in the "People's Republic of Burlington." Doonesbury ran a cartoon to commemorate the victory.

Rep. Bernie Sanders is going to run on same liberal themes that have carried him through eight statewide election victories civil liberties, environmental stewardship, economic justice, and media reform.

Go read the whole Mother Jones profile of Rep. Bernie Sanders.

If you have some time check out Bernie Sanders post over TPMCafe..

Watch What They Do, Not What They Say

The Right's Consolidation of the Media

The Decline of the American Middle Class is THE Issue

I am a progressive because that is what I believe at my core. It is not some position of convenience to be shed the next time some Washington wonk decides it's more advantageous to be a centrist. And in my experience, voters are much more sophisticated in being able to spot insincerity than those inside the Beltway give them credit for. When American people believe someone is truly fighting for them and their families, they respond.

The Fight to Preserve American Democracy