Bernie's Hotel Rooms Must Be 60 Degrees,and Someone Must Stand In Them Even When He Isn't There

Mon Mar 9, 2020 

Daniel Greenfield

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It's good to be a socialist, if you're a party member, not one of the peons paying for the whole thing.

With three homes and a membership in the 1% (if you get paid a lot of money to put your name on a book and then your campaign buys a lot of books, you too can be a millionaire, etc...), it's good to be Bernie.

And then there are the private jets.

But in April, Bernie Sanders took 50 staffers and reporters on a chartered Delta 767 for a trip to the Vatican where he briefly met Pope Francis. Not only wasn’t Bernie flying coach, but he was chartering mostly empty passenger planes on left-wing political jaunts. The menu on board Air Sanders included lobster sliders, crab salad, red lentil soup, herb crusted lamb loin, chocolate ganache, fine cheeses and white wine.

But Bernie's hotel obsessiveness is even worse.

He hates the cramped hassle of flying commercial, aides say, even if going private doesn’t entirely comport with his brand.

The list, distributed to aides in his entourage and shared with hotel employees, stipulates that his room must be kept at an arctic 60 degrees. That he needs an oscillating fan. Other wish lists have requested that written materials be removed. That the room must be at least five doors away from the ice machine and from the elevator, though the walk to the elevator must not be too long.

The morning before he was to arrive a hotel in Las Vegas, his staff summoned the hotel engineer to jury-rig the air-conditioner to the required temperature
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There was one more problem: Someone had to stay in the room to keep a motion sensor from kicking the thermostat back to 72 degrees. A representative of the Sanders team looked hopefully at a Perez aide, who declined to volunteer. 

Assigning someone to stand in a hotel room so the temperature is just right for Bernie sounds like the worst job in the world. But any job interacting with Bernie is the worst job in the world.

"As a supervisor, he was unbelievably abusive," says one former campaign staffer, who claims to have endured frequent verbal assaults. The double standard was clear: "He did things that, if he found out that another supervisor was doing in a workplace, he would go after them. You can't treat employees that way."

"Bernie was an asshole," says a Democratic insider who worked with Sanders on the campaign trail. "Just unnecessarily an asshole."

"He yelled in meetings all the time," says one of Sanders' former Senate staffers. "He'd yell, 'I don't want to hear excuses! I want to get it done!'"

Like several others quoted in this column, the campaign worker would speak only on the condition of anonymity, saying that to do otherwise would constitute "career suicide" in a small state such as Vermont. But others echoed the former employee's story, saying the senator is prone to fits of anger.

Not me. Us. For the working class.