Krugman’s dead wrong about Bernie:Why Sanders’ track record proves he’s not just about “happy dreams

Paul Krugman recently penned a piece in The New York Times about the Democratic candidates for president, taking aim in particular at Bernie Sanders, whose idealism Krugman believes is quixotic. “There’s nothing noble about seeing your values defeated because you preferred happy dreams to hard thinking about means and ends,” Krugman writes. He posits that “Sanders is the heir to candidate Obama,” while “Clinton is the heir to President Obama” — the dreaming revolutionary versus the get-it-done realist.

On this matter, Krugman is woefully mistaken, because Bernie Sanders is absolutely a pragmatist focused on “means and ends” — and if you don’t know that, you haven’t been paying attention.

Even as a young person, people who knew Sanders say he was “not like the rest of us kooks, who didn’t know what we were doing. He had more ideas and he spoke better.” They remember him as “very smart and very policy oriented,” always asking, “‘What can government do to solve this problem?’ or, ‘What policy… should we be asking for?’”

At the University of Chicago, Sanders was a chapter leader of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the famous civil rights group that organized the Freedom Rides, and helped to lead the group’s sit-in protesting racism in university housing. The 15-day movement ended in success, with the university agreeing to create a new committee including students, faculty and local civil rights leaders, to investigate and take action on off-campus housing inequality.

As mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Sanders grew the economy by giving new entrepreneurs start-up funding, creating trade associations, offering technical assistance, and lobbying the state government to promote business growth, while saving the city thousands of dollars by employing competitive bidding and scouring the budget for wasted resources.

He was so fiscally conservative that some Republicans say he managed to “out-Republican the Republicans.”

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http://www.salon.com/2016/01/30/paul_krugmans_dead_wrong_about_bernie_why_sanders_track_record_proves_hes_not_just_about_happy_dreams/