Bernie presents himself in a negative way, just like McGovern.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

13. I don't recall that McGovern had a negative vibe like Bernie.

His problem was that he made the Vietnam War his single issue, and he didn't give those voters who were still not strongly opposed to the war any other reason to vote for him. As a result, Nixon was easily able to associate him with dope-smoking hippies and violent demonstrators (and there were plenty of those). The "silent majority," as he called the nice middle-class white voters who hated the hippies and still thought the purpose of the war was to defeat the evils of Communism, wanted nothing to do with any aspect of the antiwar movement.

Bernie is negative, though, in the sense that he seems angry and he's always yelling. He's exciting his audiences by making them angry instead of by making them hopeful, like Obama did. He's making them angry about the billionaires (millionaires are apparently OK now since he became one) who are preventing them from getting free health care and free college - which he alone will be able to deliver, magically, with a stroke of his jabbing finger. He's playing on people's sense of outraged victimhood. Sound familiar?