Okay, Jim, I'm sending you the video.

Okay.

Oh, I watched this video.

Face it, you don't find too many socialists in elective office in this country, and one is elected mayor of a size of...

The other day I asked Slate's Jim Newell, writes about politics, to go back in time with me. Good morning, Jane. A couple of facts. Burlington is the largest city in Vermont. This tape we're watching is from 1981, The Today Show. Phil Donahue is about to interview the newly elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont. This is Mayor Bernard Sanders.

Mayor Sanders got a lot of attention recently,

not only with his 10-vote victory out of about 9,500 votes cast,

but mostly because he is a socialist.

And everybody reading that article said,

my goodness, how did this happen in good old conservative Vermont?

How do you respond?

Well, in Vermont being conservative

is different perhaps than being conservative elsewhere in the country. I just, I mean, I love

watching old Bernie because he's so exactly current Bernie, you know? And he speaks in that same

purposeful voice, you know, like he knows exactly what he believes

and he's going to share it.

I won the election, I think, because we effectively put together a coalition of low-income

people, elderly people who in Vermont are very often up against the war economically in very bad shape.

The cops supported you, didn't they?

The police department supported us, yes. The patrolman's association did right.

So you had police officers voting for you who probably voted for Ronald Reagan. Well, I'm not so sure that I don't know. But that's certainly. But the police officers in our particular city are earning their trade unionists. Just a little thing. When he talks about unions, he always calls them trade unions too, which is like, I don't know, it's just a little like remnant of sort of his, like, lefty upbringing. He goes by the more formal term, and he's,

you know, never going to change. Jim just got back from following Bernie Sanders the presidential

...