if I was ever homesick for some five borough flavor, I didn’t need to get on Amtrak and have one of my constituents yell at me on Queens Boulevard. I could just light a Bernie bomb by prodding him about his party affiliation. The query always got a typically bombastic reaction out of Bernie.
Independent Bernie Sanders seemed to like this question. He probably got it a lot. He would tell me that I shouldn’t confuse the fact that our voting records generally matched with party agreement. He was a proud socialist and thought the institutional Democratic Party was too cautious and lacking imagination. As much as I prodded, I would never get him to think about joining the Democrats for a moment.
In fact, Bernie always got me fired up to make the fighting wing of the Democratic Party feistier. So much so, that I loved it when my less clever right wing opponents would decry Obamacare as “socialism”. Bernie and I would remind these blockheads that giving people tax credits to buy a product from a giant corporation is hardly socialist. . .
Many times over the course of his career Bernie has repeated the line that his independence made him more able to speak truth. He argued forcefully that being a Socialist was his identity and not function of political expediency. Well, duh, nobody chooses to be a Socialist to smooth their political path. Yet, as 2016 approaches, here he is filing papers all over the country presumably declaring himself a member of the Democratic Party.
Bernie is right about a lot of things. He is right that a Medicare for All health care program is a simpler, cheaper and more American solution to our health care needs than a jury rigged system that is better under Obamacare but still has too many gaps. And his battle cry on behalf of working Americans is almost as good as Hillary Clinton’s.
In spite of all this, if Bernie wants to lead this party, he needs to explain what he's doing here in the first place.'
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