African American
In reply to the discussion: I'm really annoyed that someone people have JUST discovered the consequence of gutting the VRA [View all]pnwmom
(108,980 posts)He's not as pure as his supporters believe.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-the-nra-helped-put-bernie-sanders-in-congress/2015/07/19/ed1be26c-2bfe-11e5-bd33-395c05608059_story.html
BURLINGTON, Vt. A few days before Election Day in 1990, the National Rifle Association sent a letter to its 12,000 members in Vermont, with an urgent message about the race for the states single House seat.
Vote for the socialist, the gun rights group said. Its important.
Bernie Sanders is a more honorable choice for Vermont sportsmen than Peter Smith, wrote Wayne LaPierre, who was and still is a top official at the national NRA, backing Sanders over the Republican incumbent.
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As a candidate in 1990, Sanders won over gun rights groups by promising to oppose one bill they hated a measure that would establish a waiting period for handgun sales. In Congress, he kept that promise. The dynamic served as an early demonstration that, despite his pure-leftist persona, Sanders was at his core a pragmatic politician, calculating that he couldnt win in rural Vermont without doing something for gun owners.
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Either way, Nelson said, the 1990 race was another step in the evolution of Sanders, who had risen from the leftist fringe by embracing allies and tactics that the fringe would not. In Burlington, he had made allies out of the police and worked out an uneasy relationship with big business. Later, in Congress, he would join the Democratic caucus, attaching himself to the partys seniority system, after decades of railing against the Democratic Partys politics as weak-kneed.
In the 1990 race, he made a tacit ally out of the NRA, a powerful Washington lobby that has become a chief nemesis of the left and a fierce obstacle to gun control efforts in Congress and state capitals across the country. The alliance allowed the group to bash an opponent whose positions were almost identical to Sanderss own.
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