Washington Post: Sanders' Most Radical Move

[Empowerer]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2016/02/05/his-most-radical-move/

This article provides an interesting, 360 degree view of Sanders. Among other things, it presents him as much more cunning and pragmatic than many people realize.

He was the mayor and congressman who had remained a proud independent, gleefully calling the Democratic and Republican parties “Tweedledee and Tweedledum” for what he considered selling out to “the billionaire class.” He was the cranky outsider who hammered a plaque honoring the socialist icon Eugene V. Debs to the wall of his Senate office. Even his hair was independent — an unruly white mass evoking a man too consumed with political revolution to bother with a comb ... But now that the time had come to put his name on the presidential ballot, Sanders had made a decision that reveals a less-celebrated dimension of his political identity: He is also a pragmatist who likes to win. And so the first step in the Sanders revolution was also its most conventional.

The cranky outsider became a Democrat.
...
{H}is three terms as mayor were marked more by practicality than ideology. He reached compromises with developers to increase affordable housing. He tried to reduce cable TV rates. Sanders even had some of his old lefty allies arrested when they tried to block a General Electric plant that made military guns, deciding that jobs were more important than the abstraction of world peace.
...
“He’s idealistic and pragmatic,” said his friend Jim Rader, who drove Sanders to the fateful Liberty Union meeting in 1971. “I don’t think he sees any conflict in those two sides of him.”
...
But from the start, Sanders made it clear that he wanted to caucus with the Democrats even if he would not become one of them. He had little choice, since doing so would be the only way to get committee assignments. The proposition was initially rejected by conservative Democrats afraid of election-year ads accusing them of cozying up with a socialist. But a deal was struck, and soon fears that Sanders was going to be a socialist-size headache receded.

He slipped into the inner-party sanctum, where he has remained a relatively uncontroversial lawmaker.

[Armstead]

1. And?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/12511173810