HOW DO YOU DO, FELLOW KIDS? That Time Bernie Sanders Interviewed Some Punk-Rock Kids in a Mall.
Bernie Sanders had his own TV program from 1986 to 1988, back when the socialist senator was mayor of Burlington, Vermont. The show was called Bernie Speaks, it aired on public access TV, and Politico just had the full run digitized. As Sanders makes his second bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, those digitized episodes have now been posted on the cable access channel’s website, where anyone with an internet connection can explore them.
“Over the past few weeks, I watched them all,” Holly Otterbein writes in Politico. “The production values are so low that they’re sometimes hard to hear and see, which makes them feel more valuable, like an archive of lost secrets.” The show’s topics, she reports, “include Plato, Ronald Reagan, Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign, the ‘immorality’ of the war in Nicaragua, the ‘stupid’ property tax, the effects of the looming nuclear apocalypse on children, Burlington’s waterfront, Burlington’s trash dump, Burlington’s snowplow operation, the ‘incredible increase’ in crime, the close-fisted state Legislature, the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer and the reasons that punk rockers wear black.”
Right around the same time that he took a ten day “honeymoon” in the Soviet Union:
As he stood on Soviet soil, Sanders, then 46 years old, criticized the cost of housing and health care in the United States, while lauding the lower prices — but not the quality — of that available in the Soviet Union. Then, at a banquet attended by about 100 people, Sanders blasted the way the United States had intervened in other countries, stunning one of those who had accompanied him.
“I got really upset and walked out,” said David F. Kelley, who had helped arrange the trip and was the only Republican in Sanders’s entourage. “When you are a critic of your country, you can say anything you want on home soil. At that point, the Cold War wasn’t over, the arms race wasn’t over, and I just wasn’t comfortable with it.”
Sanders had visited Nicaragua in 1985 and hailed the revolution led by Daniel Ortega, which President Ronald Reagan opposed. “I was impressed,” Sanders said then of Ortega, while allowing that “I will be attacked by every editorial writer for being a dumb dope.” At the same time, Sanders voiced admiration for the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro, whom Reagan and many others in both parties routinely denounced.
Sanders, in turn, said Americans dismissed socialist and communist regimes because they didn’t understand the poverty faced by many in Third World countries. “The American people, many of us, are intellectually lazy,” Sanders said in a 1985 interview with a Burlington television station.
As Jim Geraghty adds, “You can tell a lot about a man by what he chooses to praise and what he chooses to criticize.”