Surprisingly good article on Bernie entitled “Exceedingly Social, But Doesn’t Like Parties” from Sunday’s Washington Post.

Michael Powell (I’m assuming not that Michael Powell) writes…

Bernie Sanders ran a tight ship. He balanced budgets, picked top-drawer appointees and showed up at 2 a.m. to ride fire engines and snowplows until services improved. He had a listed phone number and answered it. He denounced the depredations of capitalism until a cable company agreed to wire the city — and to repair sliced-up streets on its own dime. He kept his campaign promise and obtained a minor league baseball team.

They named it the Vermont Reds. [Nice touch, there, Mr. Powell]

Moody’s Investor Service gave him a thumbs-up. Sanders, who is married and has four grown children, road-tested his show in a 1986 run for governor. He got just 14 percent of the vote, but he carried the French Catholic farm belt. The farmers didn’t agree with or understand him. But they liked his manner, which was as plain as theirs.

In 1990 he won in a landslide against an incumbent Republican congressman, carrying Burlington but also Hardwick, a hardtack bit of outback Vermont. The state’s median income is the second lowest in New England, and poverty is rising. “There are no fancy folks there — it’s the no-gun-control and snowmobile crowd,” said McClaughry, who ran for the state Senate that year. “Bernie and I were the leading vote-getters in Hardwick. It really annoyed me.”

And it closes with this…

You nose up the rutted dirt roads north of Lyndonville and brake by a log cabin with three cords of fresh-split wood under the porch. Two political signs are in the grass — for Jim Douglas, the Republican governor, and for “Bernie,” the socialist.

Frankie Paquette, 63, asks you to sit in his kitchen while his wife, Millie, knits. He’s a wiry millworker whose mill moved south of the border three years ago. He subsists on odd jobs and no health insurance, hoping to limp to 65 and Medicare. He’s talked with Sanders twice and the congressman’s office helped him obtain college loans for his sons.

“Bernie’s got really crazy ideas,” Paquette says. “But he’s for the little guy who ain’t got three dollars for gasoline in February. That’s me and I’m for him.”