Sanders For Senate

This is the closest I will ever get to endorsing a specific candidate for any US political post on this blog. That's a promise.

But I just had to mention Bernie Sanders, the man I proposed with a certain amount of tongue in cheek as a third party Presidential candidate on this blog some time back. In his eighth term in the U.S. House, the independent socialist has carved out a career in Congress as a Congress-basher. Now he is setting his sights on the Senate, and everyone agrees he is the man to beat for the seat now held by the retiring Jim Jeffords.

His most likely GOP challengers are Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie and Richard Tarrant, chairman of IDX, a medical software company. In early May, a poll for WCAX-TV put Sanders ahead of Dubie, 59 percent to 23 percent, and ahead of Tarrant, 62 percent to 18 percent.

So far, no Democrat has moved to run against him.

Sanders remains a socialist, although not a member of the Socialist Party.

"What does it mean to me? I want government to stand up for working people, for the middle class, rather than representing, as is currently the case in the United States, multinational corporations and wealthy people.

"I also believe that as citizens in a democratic society people are entitled to certain inherent rights — and those rights include the right to health care, the right to form a union, the right to breathe good air, the right to send your child to college.

"There is something fundamentally wrong and very dangerous about a society in which so few have so much and so many have so little," he said.

If Bernie can do in the Senate what he has done in Congress - been a goad and a nuisance to the vested interests of corporations, lobbyists and the pork-barrel hegemony - then he may well become the Senate's MVP in very short order.

Good luck, Bernie.

Solidarinosc.