Bernie at the Bridge

Crossing from Vermont into New Hampshire, you get a feel for what is driving the improbable Bernie Sanders campaign.


www.weeklystandard.com

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And here is a video guaranteed to make any NH/VT Hillary supporter switch to Bernie.

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Audio: Debbie Bartholomew of Springfield, Vermont has an altogether different choice.

THE MAGAZINE: From the January 18 Issue Bernie at the Bridge The red whirlwind comes to New Hampshire JAN 18, 2016 | By GEOFFREY NORMAN Manchester, N.H. -- Crossing from Vermont into New Hampshire, you get a feel for what is driving the improbable Bernie Sanders campaign. The two states are separated by the Connecticut River valley, where the American industrial revolution could be said to have begun. The river supplied power for the mills, and the small towns and farms were a source of eager labor. The American system of manufacturing was born here. Even the British, who ordinarily thought they had all the answers, came to study the way things were done in the Connecticut River valley. Downstream, in Massachusetts, the factories turned out guns; far upstream, the Fairchild Company supplied industrial scales to the world. There was enough work to attract immigrants and create fortunes, and a sense that prosperity was just part of the natural order of things. Today, most of those old, red-brick factory buildings are empty. The mills have long been closed. The factory jobs that could once pay wages ample enough to support a family are scarce to nonexistent. There is an old, tired, and depressed feeling in the air of towns like Springfield, Vermont, and Claremont, New Hampshire. New England is no longer a vital region. The population of Maine is the oldest, per capita, in the nation. Vermont is a close second and losing population. New Hampshire, stuck between the two, is doing somewhat better but is still fertile ground for the Sanders message, which is a new kind of socialism. The old kind of socialism was the spawn of industrialization. The state would own the means of production and ameliorate the great gaps in wealth between those who worked in the factories and those who owned them. This is a little harder to imagine when the factories have shut down and the jobs have gone away. Hard, also, to imagine government ownership and management of, say, Apple—or even of General Motors, which the government bailed out and could have taken over but did not, even with Barack Obama in charge of things. Government ownership of the means of production is an idea whose time came and passed. No one wants the same government that runs the Veterans Administration put in charge of General Electric or Microsoft. But the distance between the rich and everyone else is still here and, in the view of Sanders, wider and more unjust than ever. The "millionaires and billionaires" are the "malefactors of great wealth" of his political universe—the "one-tenth of one percent" that controls almost as much wealth as the 90 percent at the bottom. His form of "democratic socialism" will, he promises, close the gap by making college education free, by investing in a vast rebuilding of the country's infrastructure, by increasing the minimum wage and Social Security benefits, by taking on global warming, and so on and so forth. He has come a long way since he first began making noises about a possible presidential campaign. Last winter, the conventional wisdom was that if there was to be a challenge to Hillary Clinton from the left, the challenger would be Elizabeth Warren. This was, far and away, the preferred scenario among the cognoscenti. Warren had what, if she were an athlete, would be called the "intangibles." She was good copy. And wouldn't a fight between two formidable women for the nomination be fun? Sanders? He was the old, grumpy, white-haired guy from Vermont, one of those candidates who live out on the borderline between kooky and conventional, feeding on scraps of media coverage and pitifully small campaign contributions. Sanders himself began making noises about a possible campaign. He would explore the possibility, he said, but he would not run unless he could do it right. Which, to most minds, meant that he wouldn't be doing it.