Historically, running for president requires overcoming a gauntlet composed of prior bad acts,

positions you've evolved, votes that are now regrettable, and friendships which now appear unsavory.

It's all the more remarkable then that Bernie Sanders has had such a long career that he can run

on rather than run away from. You probably already

know that Bernie has been fighting for the rights of others since he was a teenager.

In 1963 as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago,

Bernie Sanders became a leader of the school's chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, or Core.

Core was one of the leading activist organizations

in the early years of the American Civil Rights Movement.

And Bernie led his chapter in protesting housing segregation, police brutality, and other racial inequalities,

getting arrested at age 21, and a picture which you've probably seen, but which Bernie didn't

even know existed until it was unearthed during the 2016 presidential

race. But his advocacy didn't stop there. In 1972, a year before Roe v. Wade, Bernie told Vermont's Bittington Banner newspaper

that a woman's choice of what to do with her body should be exclusively between her and her doctor, not a bunch of predominantly

male legislators.

By contrast, nearly a decade later, another elder statesman in this race voted to let states overturn Roe v.

Wade. While others in this race had not yet chosen to engage meaningfully in politics. In the 1980s Bernie backed Burlington

Vermont's first ever gay pride parade and created the Burlington Community Land

Trust which became a model for promoting affordable housing all around the country.

Before the term climate change had even been coined, much less accepted as scientific consensus, Bernie was sounding the alarm.

We face, as all people know, an ecological crisis in our time, whether it's acid rain, the

destruction of the ozone layer, the greenhouse effect. One would think that the seed... the having different scientists talking about the issues involving people and understanding what's going on in terms of our planet.

...