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Being Married to Bernie
From the stage at the first Democratic presidential debate, nearly all the candidates opened with talk about their families...
Bernie Sanders, however, didn’t pause to sketch a family portrait. In fact, he was the only one onstage who didn’t give a bio of any kind. He started right in with the “series of unprecedented national crises” that prompted his candidacy, and he never spoke of his 27-year marriage, nor the blended group of five children he and his wife consider theirs.
Sitting in the audience with two of those children, Jane O’Meara Driscoll Sanders was not the least bit surprised. Accomplished in her own right — she is, among other things, a former president of a Vermont college — she is the people person to his curmudgeon, the one who lives on the ground while he lives in his head. As her husband makes a strong national showing in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, she remains his closest adviser, and part of her advice, on debate night as always, was that he stay focused on why he decided to run this race in the first place.
“Why should it be about me or about our family?” she said in a long and candid interview in her husband’s tiny Washington, D.C., campaign headquarters recently, dressed, as always, in casual flowing pants and blouse, her blue eyes framed by her long strawberry blond hair. “It’s about the issues. We’ve always been about the issues.”
Their meet-cute was also a meet-political. In 1981, Jane O’Meara Driscoll, a recently divorced transplanted New Yorker, went to a meeting where the then mayor of Burlington was discussing a proposed tax hike that many thought would hurt low-income residents. Jane took the floor to ask some pointed questions, and when she sat down the person next to her said, “You sound like Bernie Sanders.”
“Who’s Bernie Sanders?” she asked.
He was the candidate opposing this six-term incumbent mayor, she was told, and Jane was soon working to organize a debate between the two. “He was so inspiring,” she says of her now husband at that event. “He embodied everything I believed in.”
She’d brought her then 6-year-old daughter, Carina, along, and a favorite family story is about how the little girl was the only one in the room who didn’t join in the standing ovation for her future stepfather.
“It was very clear from that night that Bernie was an astonishing person,” Carina remembers, stopping in briefly to chat during this interview. “He had the ability to really move people, and that was what drew my mother to him long before they were a couple.”
Well, not very long before. Jane and Bernie didn’t technically meet that night. She worked for his election, and they were introduced at his victory party 10 days later, after he won the race by 10 votes. Within months they were a couple.
“That was the beginning of forever,” she has said...
read more: http://news.gnom.es/news/being-married-to-bernie
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