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

campaign staff—Tom Smith, John Gallagher, and Brendan Smith—brought together leading representatives of our various constituencies, the backbone of our support. Each of them spoke for a few moments about issues of importance to them and reasons why they wanted me reelected. Tom Smith, a former Progressive in the state legislature, emceed the event. We had a very good crowd, over 150 people at noon. It was a beautiful Vermont spring day.
    Ron Pickering, the head of the Vermont AFL-CIO, was there, representing 20,000 union workers and retirees. So were Representative Bobby Starr, the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee and a leading voice for family farmers in the state legislature, and Sally Conrad, a former state senator and one of the strongest advocates for women and the poor. Stan LaFlamme, a disabled Vietnam veteran who was a member of my Veterans Council, delivered a very poignant speech. Ned Farquar of the Sierra Club spoke for the environmental community, Mira Fakiranada for the low-income community, and Alice Cook Bassett for senior citizens. We heard from Will Rapp, the owner of Gardener’s Supply and a successful and environmentally conscious small businessman. Liz Ready, a progressive Democrat in the state senate, recalled her encounters with Susan Sweetser. And Peter Clavelle, who was director of economic development in my administration and was now in his third term as the Progressive mayor of Burlington, talked about my mayoral record.
    These folks, many of them personal friends, represented the progressive coalition that we had worked hard over many years to bring together: workers, family farmers, women’s advocates, low-income people, veterans, senior citizens, environmentalists, and small businesspeople. Together, they stood for the vast majority of the people in Vermont. Together, we would win this election.
    I wrote my announcement speech the night before. As usual, when I was speaking my voice was hoarse and strained, and I had to stop a couple of times to down some water. In the speech, I tried to frame the central issues of the campaign. This is how it began:
Six years ago, I asked the people of Vermont to do something that had never been done before in the history of our state, and had not been done for forty years in the United States of America. And that is to send an Independent to Congress—someone not affiliated with the Republican Party or with the Democratic Party.
    When I first ran for Congress, I asked the people of Vermont to send me to Washington so that I could fight for those people who can’t afford to attend $500-a-person fundraisers like the one my opponent recently held; and who can’t afford to have well-paid lobbyists in Washington protecting their interests. That’s the promise that I made, and that’s the promise that I’ve kept.
    I asked the people of Vermont to send me to Congress so that I could stand up to a Republican president when he was wrong, and a Democratic president when he was wrong; to stand up to a Democratically controlled Congress when they were wrong and a Republican controlled Congress when they were wrong. And that’s what I’ve done.
    Mostly, I asked the people of Vermont to send me to Congress so that I could fight for justice—a concept we don’t hear too much about anymore. To fight for justice for working families and the middle class—80 percent of whom, since 1973, have experienced a decline in their standard of living or, at best, economic stagnation—while at the same time the people on the top have never had it so good.
    During the 1980s, the top one percent of wealth holders in this country enjoyed two-thirds of all increases in financial wealth. The bottom 80 percent ended up with less real financial wealth in 1989 than in 1983—and that trend continues. Today, tragically, the United States has the most unfair distribution of wealth and income in the entire industrialized