“I Don’t Know Who ‘I’ Am”: Bernie Sanders’ Brutally Honest Mayoral Memos
In the mid-1980s, the Democratic presidential candidate was a mess—and so was his house.
Sometime in the mid-1980s, about halfway through his eight-year tenure as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Bernie Sanders flipped to a fresh page in a yellow legal pad and poured out his crippling sense of doubt.
“What can be done?” he scrawled.
“What is hard to see through is the total”—he scratched out “total” and tried again—“almost total degree of powerlessness which presently exists. We can make almost nothing happen.”
Sanders laid out a series of frustrations. He was fighting with the state over where the city dumped trash; there was a labor dispute at the fire department; the police department was in turmoil. The revolution in city government he had promised as a candidate in 1981 had become mired in the mundane.
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