Bernard "Bernie" Sanders (born September 8, 1941) is an American politician and the junior United States Senator from Vermont. He is a candidate for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States in the 2016 election. A Democrat as of 2015,[2] Sanders had been the longest-serving independent in U.S. congressional history, though his caucusing with the Democrats entitled him to committee assignments and at times gave Democrats a majority. Sanders became the ranking minority member on the Senate Budget Committee in January 2015; he had previously served for two years as chair of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee. Sanders was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York City, and graduated from the University of Chicago in 1964. While a student he was an active civil rights protest organizer for the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. After settling in Vermont in 1968, Sanders ran unsuccessful third-party campaigns for governor and U.S. As an independent, he was elected mayor of Burlington—Vermont's most populous city—in 1981, where he was reelected three times. In 1990 he was elected to represent Vermont's at-large congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1991 Sanders co-founded the Congressional Progressive Caucus. He served as a congressman for 16 years before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2006. In 2012, he was reelected with 71% of the popular vote. Sanders rose to national prominence following his 2010 filibuster against the proposed extension of the Bush tax cuts. He favors policies similar to those of social democratic parties in Europe, particularly those instituted by the Nordic countries, and has built a reputation as a leading progressive voice on issues such as campaign finance reform, corporate welfare, global warming, income inequality, LGBT rights, parental leave, and universal healthcare. Sanders has long been critical of U.S. foreign policy and was an early and outspoken opponent of the Iraq War. He is also outspoken on civil liberties and civil rights, particularly criticizing racial discrimination in the criminal justice system as well as advocating for privacy rights against mass surveillance policies such as the USA PATRIOT Act and the NSA surveillance programs. Bernard Sanders was born on September 8, 1941, in Brooklyn, one of New York City's five boroughs.[3][4][5][6] His father, Elias Sanders, was born in Słopnice, Poland (then in the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia),[7][8] to a Jewish family; in 1927 he immigrated to the United States at the age of 17.[7][9][10] His mother, Dorothy Sanders (née Glassberg), was born in New York City on October 2, 1912,[11][12] to Jewish immigrant parents from Poland and Russia.[13][14] Many of Elias's relatives who remained in Poland were killed in the Holocaust.[12][15][16]
Sanders has said that he became interested in politics at an early age: "A guy named Adolf Hitler won an election in 1932. He won an election, and 50 million people died as a result of that election in World War II, including 6 million Jews. So what I learned as a little kid is that politics is, in fact, very important."[17][18][19]
Sanders lived on East 26th Street in Midwood, Brooklyn.[20] He attended elementary school at P.S. 197 in Brooklyn, where he won a borough championship on the basketball team.[21][22] He attended Hebrew school in the afternoons, and celebrated his bar mitzvah in 1954.[23] Bernie's older brother, Larry, said that during Bernie's childhood, the family never lacked for food or clothing, but major purchases, "like curtains or a rug," were difficult to afford.[24]
Sanders attended James Madison High School, also in Brooklyn, where he was captain of the track team and took third place in the New York City indoor one-mile race.[21] In high school, Sanders lost his first election, finishing last out of three candidates for the student body presidency. Shortly after his high school graduation, his mother died in June 1959 at the age of 46;[16] his father died three years later on August 4, 1962, at the age of 57.[8]
Sanders studied at Brooklyn College for a year in 1959–60[25] before transferring to the University of Chicago and graduating with a bachelor of arts degree in political science in 1964.[25] He then became a graduate student at the New School for Social Research in New York.[26] He has described himself as a mediocre college student because the classroom was "boring and irrelevant," while the community provided his most significant learning.[27]
While at the University of Chicago, Sanders joined the Young People's Socialist League (the youth affiliate of the Socialist Party of America),[29] and was active in the Civil Rights Movement as a student organizer for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.[15][30] Under Sanders's chairmanship, the university chapter of CORE merged with the university chapter of SNCC.[31] In January 1962, Sanders led a rally at the University of Chicago administration building to protest university president George Wells Beadle's segregated campus housing policy. "We feel it is an intolerable situation when Negro and white students of the university cannot live together in university-owned apartments," Sanders said at the protest. Sanders and 32 other students then entered the building and camped outside the president's office, performing the first civil rights sit-in in Chicago history.[32][33] After weeks of sit-ins, Beadle and the university formed a commission to investigate discrimination.[34] Sanders once spent a day putting up fliers protesting against police brutality, only to eventually notice that a Chicago police car was shadowing him and taking them all down.[35]
Sanders attended the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech.[15][35][36] That summer, he was convicted of resisting arrest during a demonstration against segregation in Chicago's public schools and was fined $25.[28][37]
In addition to his civil rights activism during the 1960s and 1970s,[citation needed] Sanders was active in several peace and antiwar movements. He was a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Student Peace Union while attending the University of Chicago. Sanders applied for conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War; his application was eventually turned down, by which point he was too old to be drafted. Although he opposed the war, Sanders never criticized those who fought and has been a strong supporter of veterans' benefits.[38][39]
After graduating from college, Sanders returned to New York City, where he initially worked in a variety of jobs, including Head Start teacher, psychiatric aide, and carpenter.[27] In 1968, Sanders moved to Vermont because he had been "captivated by rural life." After his arrival there he worked as a carpenter, filmmaker, and writer[40] who created and sold "radical film strips" and other educational materials to schools.[41]
Liberty Union campaigns
Sanders began his electoral political career in 1971 as a member of the Liberty Union Party, which originated in the anti-war movement and the People's Party. He ran as the Liberty Union candidate for governor of Vermont in 1972 and 1976 and as a candidate for U.S. senator in 1972 and 1974.[42] In the 1974 senatorial race, Sanders finished third (5,901 votes; 4.1%), behind 33-year-old Chittenden County State's Attorney Patrick Leahy (D, VI; 70,629 votes; 49.4%) and two-term incumbent U.S. Representative Dick Mallary (R; 66,223 votes; 46.3%).[43][44]
The 1976 campaign proved to be the zenith of Liberty Union's influence, with Sanders collecting 11,000 votes for governor and the party. This forced the races for lieutenant governor and secretary of state to be decided by the state legislature when its vote total prevented either the Republican or Democratic candidates for those offices from garnering a majority of votes.[45] The campaign drained the finances and energy of the Liberty Union, however, and in October 1977—less than a year after the conclusion of the 1976 campaign—Sanders and the Liberty Union candidate for attorney general, Nancy Kaufman, announced their retirement from the party.[46]
Following his resignation from Liberty Union, Sanders worked as a writer and the director of the nonprofit American People's Historical Society (APHS).[47] While with the APHS, he made a 30-minute documentary about American Socialist leader and presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs.[29][48]
In 1980, at the suggestion of his close friend and political confidante Richard Sugarman, a professor of religion at the University of Vermont, Sanders ran for mayor of Burlington, Vermont. The 39-year-old Sanders ran against incumbent Democratic mayor Gordon "Gordie" Paquette, a five-term mayor who had served as a member of the Burlington City Council for 13 years before that, building extensive community ties and a willingness to cooperate with Republican leaders in controlling appointments to various commissions.[49] Republicans had found Paquette so unobjectionable that they failed to field a candidate in the March 1981 race against him, leaving Sanders as his principal opponent.[50]
Sanders' effort was further aided by the decision of the candidate of the Citizens Party, Greg Guma, to exit the race so as not to split the progressive vote.[51] Two other candidates in the race, independents Richard Bove and Joe McGrath, proved to be essentially non-factors in the campaign, with the battle coming down to Paquette and Sanders.[52]
Sanders castigated the pro-development incumbent as an ally of prominent shopping center developer Antonio Pomerleau, while Paquette warned of ruin for Burlington if Sanders was elected.[53] The Sanders campaign was bolstered by a wave of optimistic volunteers as well as
