Bernie Sanders Has a Secret [View all]

[Autumn]

Vermont, his son and the hungry early years that made him the surging socialist he is today.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/bernie-sanders-vermont-119927.html#.VZ_Fcl9Viko

On Wednesday, I sent Michael Briggs, Sanders’ spokesman, an email with a list of questions, including personal questions about the parts of his past that to this point have gone largely unknown or unchecked. Knowing his opinions about the media and recalling the Sweetser incident, I expected at least a lecture.
Sanders has criticized the press his entire political career.
“The question of who decides what’s important and what’s not important is really the most important issue,” he said at a forum on the media in Burlington in 1988, “and the media does not have a habit of focusing on what’s important.”
Something like that.

Briggs called me a little more than an hour after I sent my questions. He said he had talked with Sanders and had answers. He ticked them off one by one.
He told me where Sanders met and married his first wife and how the marriage ended. “She got a Mexican divorce, is what I was told,” Briggs said. He explained the origin of the money Sanders used to buy the Middlesex land and the carpentry he did on the sugar shack. He said Sanders received unemployment, “for a few months,” in 1971, though Sanders can’t remember what the job was that qualified him for the benefits. He told me where Sanders had met Mott and where they lived together. He confirmed she was the mother of Sanders’ son, in spite of previous news accounts. “Whatever has been reported,” he said, “what you have is accurate.”

The last question I had sent him was whether there was anything else he thought I should know.
“Yes,” Briggs said.
“The middle class is collapsing. Income and wealth inequality is greater now than it has been at any point since before the Great Depression. The American people are working longer hours for lower wages, and they’re angry. Those kinds of things, you should know.”

A long read but a fascinating glimpse into the man.