Free Outsider in the White House by Bernie Sanders, Huck Gutman

paper absentee ballots in that one Democratically controlled ward remained to be counted. We waited anxiously.
    What seemed like an interminable amount of time passed, and still there was no word from Ward 3. Finally, surrounded by lawyers and supporters, I marched into the ward polling place to see what was going on. A few minutes later, a group of ward functionaries came out from behind a closed door, where they had been counting the ballots. Even though I had won the ward by two to one on the voting machines, it seems I had lost the absentee ballot count by the same amount.
    Yet, to my surprise, to Mayor Paquette’s shock, to the business community’s alarm, and to the deep interest of Vermonters throughout the state, when the absentee votes were tallied in with the rest, I found myself elected mayor of Burlington—by a mere fourteen votes. For once, the old saying was really true: every vote had counted. So stunning was the upset that nine years later the state’s largest newspaper would still be referring to it as “the story of the decade.”
    But the evening did not end with our victory and my live appearance on late-night news, ferried to the state’s largest television station by a reporter with a siren on the roof of his car. With such a close election there would be a recount, and City Hall had possession of all the ballots. After a great deal of legal mumbo jumbo among my lawyer friends, meeting in the midst of total chaos in somebody’s office, it was decided that we should try to get the ballots out of City Hall.
    So, in the middle of the night—at three o’clock in the morning to be precise—a lawyer and I traveled down a dirt road and woke up a judge to request that the election ballots be impounded. The judge granted our request. The next morning the ballots were moved to the state courthouse.
    One month later, I was sworn in as mayor of Vermont’s largest city, the only mayor in the entire country elected in opposition to the two major political parties. I would be reelected three times, and then move on to the U.S. House of Representatives, the first Independent in the Congress in four decades. But that March night in 1981 was the event which made possible all that came after.
    We were a coalition of ordinary people, none of whom had any real access to power in the conventional scheme of things, but we had contested an important election—and we had won. If an independent progressive movement could win in America’s most rural state—and until recently, one of America’s most Republican—then it might be possible for progressives to do likewise anywhere in the nation.

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Socialism in One City
    â€œThey’re playing you for a fool and they’ve already taken away your right to representation in Congress. Who are ‘they’? The leftists, extreme liberals and radicals all over the country. From Berkeley, California to New York’s Greenwich Village, thousands of these people, that’s right, thousands of them, have been contributing to and working hard for the election of Bernard Sanders to Congress.”
    This, from a fundraising letter widely distributed throughout Vermont, is the gist of Sweetser’s campaign strategy: a slightly retooled version of ’50s-style redbaiting. The people of Vermont have been duped. Bernie Sanders does not represent their interests. He owes his allegiance to left-wing “outsiders” who control him through their purse strings.
    Every campaign has an official beginning. Mine was May 27, 1996, the day I made the formal announcement of my candidacy. The first of five such announcements scheduled for each region of Vermont took place in Burlington, my hometown and the state’s largest city. Symbolically, we held the event in the Community Boathouse on the waterfront, one of the major accomplishments of my time as mayor. We organized the announcement as we had two years ago. The