IAN THOMAS JANSEN-LONNQUIST FOR "THE WORLD"
InvestigationThe independent senator from Vermont, a candidate for the Democratic nomination in the United States, grew up in politics in this peaceful and rebellious little town, of which he was mayor for several years.
Often in her childhood, Lauren Bickford-Bushey crossed Lake Champlain by ferry to Burlington, Vermont. Without regret, she left Plattsburgh, her gloomy town in the north of New York State, and rave about the city of Vermont.
"It's the opposite story of two cities", says the young woman, now 37 years old. On one side, Burlington and its shores laid out along the lake, modest families, owners of their housing thanks to the help of the town hall, a dynamic economy, an underground culture; on the other, Plattsburgh, a town affected by the closure of an air base in the 1990s, residents, such as Lauren’s parents, belonging to the "Standard middle class in difficulty", unable to become owners.
"I was punk, remembers Mme Bickford-Bushey, sheep farmer in Vermont. Bernie understood us. He always understood those who did not fit into the frame. " Bernie, like Bernie Sanders, 78, former mayor of Burlington (1981-1989), and current progressive candidate for the Democratic primary.
This city of 42,000 inhabitants, between lake and Adirondack Mountains, was his laboratory. He has not piloted it for three decades, but his successors have continued his policy, and the myth continues. "To me, Bernie is almost like a prophet", proclaimed on the evening of Super Tuesday, March 3, Ali Dieng, an African-American who took over the popular constituency of Bernie Sanders.
Brooklyn child
The "prophet" appeared in Burlington on March 3, 1981. On that day, he was elected ten votes in advance, dethroning the indefinable Democratic mayor, all under independent label, by proclaiming himself "Democratic socialist".
However, nothing predisposed him to land in this rural state. Born in Brooklyn (New York) in 1941, into a modest Jewish family, part of which was exterminated during the Holocaust, he began to study in Chicago (Illinois). He participates in a long movement against racial segregation at the university, goes to the Washington March in 1963, where Martin Luther King delivers his speech "I had a Dream", and spends a few months in a kibbutz, in Israel. But the Brooklyn boy did not forget two country trips from the time he was a boy scout. Attracted by nature, he settled in 1968 in a Vermont village where he became a carpenter, before moving to Burlington, the only major city in the state, in the mid-1970s.
