Bernie Sanders Takes Greenwich Village

[Purveyor]

BY JOHN CASSIDY

Over the years and decades, quite a few tub-thumping radicals have stood up in Washington Square Park and railed at the world, but few, if any, have attracted a crowd like the one Bernie Sanders attracted on Wednesday evening. By mid-afternoon, the New York Police Department had cordoned off the park and the blocks around it. From Houston Street to Eighth Street, and from Sixth Avenue to Broadway, the area was sealed, and inside the barricades long lines of people were waiting to clear security. The campaign later estimated that twenty-seven thousand people attended, in all.

On the corner of West Third Street and LaGuardia Place, guys were selling official Sanders campaign T-shirts for twenty dollars, and posters saying “The Revolution Is On Fire” for ten. Down the block, someone else was selling less-official “Feel the Bern” T-shirts for ten dollars. A middle-aged couple in front of me stopped to look at one, but went with a “Fuck Trump: Keep America Great” shirt instead.


On the west side of the park, at the corner of Washington Place, a tall man was carrying a handwritten sign that said “Not Me, Us. Not I, We. We Can Win.” He told me that his name was Murray Herman, and that he was forty years old and a veteran of antiwar protests and the Occupy Wall Street movement. “In Presidential elections, I’m usually supporting third-party candidates,” he said. This year, he was making an exception for Sanders. “It’s not a campaign: it’s more of a movement,” he said. As I went to move on, he stopped me and asked if I knew that Bill Clinton had made two highly paid speeches in the United Arab Emirates at the same time the oil-rich country was asking the State Department, which was then headed by Clinton’s wife, to approve the construction of a screening facility at Abu Dhabi’s airport for passengers flying to the United States. I said that I thought I recalled something about the story. (The Wall Street Journal reported on it last December.) The request was approved, Herman said, adding, “Ask your readers why.”

By the time I got into the park, the rock band Vampire Weekend had finished its set, and, from a stage that had been set up in front of the Washington Square Arch, Thomas Duane, who was the first openly gay member of the New York City Council and the New York State Senate, was lauding Sanders’s record on gays in the military, same-sex marriage, and other issues. “The thing about Bernie—Bernie’s just always against everyone who’s against me,” Duane told the crowd. “Hillary, she’s never against the people who are against me. You gotta talk her into it.”

Duane was followed by a number of other speakers, including the actor Rosario Dawson and the film director Spike Lee. There were also representatives of labor groups, led by J. P. Patafio, a vice-president of the Transport Workers Union Local 100. Earlier in the day, Sanders had appeared on a picket line with members of the Communication Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electric Workers, which went on strike against Verizon on Wednesday to protest benefit cuts and outsourcing. “When I saw Sanders come to my union hall today, speaking to my members, it was a great thing,” Patafio said, in a pronounced New York accent. “Then we went with Sanders to the Verizon building. Billion-dollar Verizon. Fuck Verizon.”

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[highprincipleswork]

1. Sounds yuuuuge! Unlike has been admitted by some parties.