I checked YouTube the other day to see what Sanders likes to tell people about his early life.

[highplainsdem]

I was particularly interested in what he's said about all the years he spent campaigning for the Liberty Union Party in the 1970s, but I didn't find anything on that.

I did find the video below, released by his campaign last March, entitled "I Know Where I Came From."

It stresses that his parents, though not desperately poor, weren't well off.

He talks about how hard his father worked -- doing well enough, apparently, that his mother didn't need to work, though the family was never able to move out of their rent-controlled apartment and own a home of their own.

He says that "lack of money was always a point of stress in our family" and that "powerfully influenced" his life and values.

But while he knows where he came from, there isn't a single word about his own son.

He suggests it was terrible for him that his parents didn't have as much money as they wished, despite his father working hard.

There's nothing about his own son, growing up when Sanders didn't get any sort of steady work while he campaigned endlessly for offices he had no chance at all of winning.

There's nothing about the potential impact on a child of having a father so unconcerned about making a living that his electricity was sometimes turned off, and a mother who was on welfare and having trouble finding a place to rent as a single mother on welfare.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/1287580341

It's hard for me to feel any sympathy for little Bernie Sanders, with his not-wealthy-but-still-pretty-stable childhood, knowing what we know now about how he failed to provide for his own family when he was in his 30s, with a college degree from a good university, so he could easily have found work that paid well. Honestly, I don't understand how anyone who thought his childhood was hard could have decided that running for office as a Liberty Union candidate was more important than supporting his son and giving him a stable, comfortable home.

It's likely Sanders will try to use the same "my parents weren't well off enough to live stress-free" story of childhood hardship if he gets the nomination.

But if you think the GOP won't point out how much more stable and comfortable his childhood was than his son's was, you're kidding yourself.

[oldsoftie]

1. If thats his angle, he should be backing Bloomberg!

[msongs]

3. Bernie sells cartoon balloons in town, His family business thrives (Levi) blows up balloons all day

Sits on the porch swing watching them fly (with apologies to bernie taupin and elton john)