2016 Postmortem

Armstead

(47,803 posts) Mon Feb 8, 2016, 02:43 PM Feb 2016

Experience: Sanders track record as a government CEO -- "He got things done."

One of the Big memes against Sanders is that he would be an ineffectual chief executive of the US Government. "Sure he's got some good ideas, but he could never get anything done. He's too ideological and can't fight back, or build coalitions to get anything done. Just an ideological ranter We need an experienced pragmatist and realist like Clinton."

Well Bernie does have a track record in an executive position, as Mayor of Burlington. As the below quotes from articles indicate, he was pretty damn good at it too....Sure it was a small city in Vermont, but it's only a difference in scale. He has proven he has the smarts, character and "street sense" to get things done, even when entering a hostile political environment.

You want experience in getting things done? I'd suggest that one candidate has that, and he speaks with as Brooklyn accent.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/bernie-sanders-mayor/407413/
This from a 1985 profile of Sanders when he was Mayor.

If there is a clear message, however, it would not seem to be in Sanders’s election, but in his reelection in 1983 and again in 1985, by increasingly wide margins...... He has proven to be an excellent administrator, appointing people who are in general younger, better educated and more capable than the people they have replaced. He has streamlined city government and has introduced procedural and financial reforms, many of which have been supported by Republican members of the 13-person Board of Aldermen, a body the Sanderistas now control, but that, in Sanders’s first year, when he had only two supporters on the Board, controlled him, even to the point of refusing to allow him to appoint his own secretary.

Allen Gear, a Republican member of the Board of Aldermen since 1979, looking back over Sanders’s tenure as mayor, says, “He’s done things I don’t think we Republicans could have done, because the two traditional parties in a town like this are very close. We interact with each other on business over coffee, over tea, crumpets and marmalade, if you will, and it would have been very hard for us, us being Republicans, if we had the Chief Executive’s spot, to have done some of the things Bernie has done ... He’s taken a lot of very Republican ideas and put them in place. Such as combining all of the garages of the various city departments and putting them into a single public-works department, initially a Republican proposal, to gain efficiency in handling city rolling stock ... He’s put a lot of modern accounting practices and money-management practices into place that are good Republican business practices ... And he has surrounded himself with some very talented, vigorous people.”

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https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/10/31/socialist-even-conservative-could-love-burlington-mayor-sanders-was-able-out-republican-republicans/SCmh2TLifXxXRPFKC8NMjO/story.html

Frederick J. Bailey is a conservative man. Fresh out of college, he volunteered for Ronald Reagan in 1980... And so when the baby-faced Bailey became a member of the Burlington Board of Aldermen at age 28, he was stunned to find himself sitting across from socialist Mayor Bernie Sanders. Like many conservatives in town, Bailey had dismissed Sanders as a “kook” when he became mayor in 1981 and presumed he would not last long.

But here it was four years later and Bernie, as everyone called him, was still there, sitting under his beloved portrait of Socialist Eugene Debs in City Hall. Bailey, a banker’s son, disagreed with some of what the wild-haired mayor said, but on the bigger issues, like keeping property taxes down, they saw eye to eye. To the fury of his Republican colleagues, Bailey began to vote with the mayor.

“Other people just could not look beyond that socialist shtick of his. I just never took it seriously,” said Bailey, who later became the chairman of the board. “The truth is, he was a very decent mayor. It is a nitty-gritty job of day-by-day executive decisions and he did it well. He got things done.”

.....Determined to find alternatives to the property tax, which he considered regressive, he had municipal attorneys pore over the city charter in search of novel revenue sources. When he found the city’s insurance contracts had been repeatedly awarded to the same local companies, he applied a “radical socialist concept, competitive bidding,” as he later jokingly described it, and saved the city thousands of dollars.

Conservatives grumbled when Sanders put his sneaker-clad feet up on the table, but when his new treasurer discovered a $1.9 million surplus hidden in the budget, they grew quiet.

Walk around Burlington today and it is hard to miss Sanders’ legacy. The city’s waterfront, slated for condominiums and commercial development when he took office, now boasts a community boathouse, a science center, and a public beach. The city’s lone downtown food store is a cooperative market that heeds 26 “Supermarket Principles,” one of them a commitment to serve low-income customers. Not far from it is the Champlain Housing Trust, a nonprofit that manages about 2,600 units of affordable housing, and is the largest such trust in the country.

Sanders had his share of critics, to be sure. Those to the right said he was too antagonistic and ridiculed his development of a municipal “foreign policy,” while those on the left said he was too compromising, a traitor to the socialist cause. But few disputed that his policies resulted in an efficient and responsive city government, one that, among other successes, kept the streets cleared of snow.

And then the war began. The 13-member Board of Aldermen dug in its heels, determined that the socialist mayor in their midst be stopped. Enraged but undaunted, Sanders’ exiled team began meeting in one another’s apartments, poring over the city budget on their kitchen tables in search of revenue sources that would enable them to hold the line on property taxes while pursuing the new mayor’s goals.

Sanders, meanwhile, planned task forces on issues related to women, youth, and the arts, and launched a hugely popular public concert series in the city’s Battery Park, which continues to this day. When local retail workers began to unionize, Sanders threw them his support. His message to those working for him was the same: “He’d say, ‘I want new ideas,’ ” recalled John Davis, former housing director with the city’s Community & Economic Development Office, imitating Sanders accent, as many who worked with Sanders do. Citizens enthusiastically flooded City Hall meetings with their own ideas, but the mood there remained combative. As the 1982 alderman elections approached, Democratic alderwoman Joyce Desautels predicted that the “fungus of socialism” would be eradicated.

But voters liked what Sanders was doing. Three of his allies, part of an evolving Progressive Coalition, won seats on the 13-member board, bringing the total in his corner to five and giving them the crucial ability to sustain a mayoral veto. In the next year’s mayoral election, Sanders won 52 percent of the vote, crushing his two opponents and drawing a record voter turnout. Even some of his fiercest opponents began to relent. “That,” recalled Sanders, “is when things began to change.”

Terry Bouricius, 61, a longtime Sanders supporter who joined the Board of Aldermen in 1981, says the shift was rooted in Sanders’ growing popularity. Sanders, he said, “fixed the streets and he spoke the truth. So, going against Bernie because he was Bernie was a losing proposition.”