Summer of Sanders: Is Bernie’s push for president more than just a dream?

Can the Vermont senator turned presidential hopeful move the debate to the left, let alone compete, in 2016?

Sanders waves to supporters in Phoenix, Ariz. The Vermont independent is popular yet trails Hillary Clinton in the latest polls (55 percent to 21 percent, according to averages on Real Clear Politics).

Sanders waves to supporters in Phoenix, Ariz. The Vermont independent is popular yet trails Hillary Clinton in the latest polls (55 percent to 21 percent, according to averages on Real Clear Politics).

PHOTO BY GAGE SKIDMORE

This story first appeared in the Burlington, Vermont-based newsweekly Seven Days, which is chronicling Senator Bernie Sanders' political career from 1972 to the present at http://BernieBeat.com.

As the summer of 2015 began, Bernie Sanders became impossible to ignore. On July 1, as 10,000 people cheered and chanted his name, the 73-year-old U.S. senator from Vermont summited a stage in a Madison, Wisc., arena and took his place behind a wooden podium. He raised his right arm to wave at a sea of supporters and embraced his wife, Jane, with his left. Then, peering up at the distant nosebleed seats, Sanders did something unusual: He grinned. “Whoa,” he said.

Whoa, indeed.

In the 43 years since Sanders first ran for office, skeptics have doubted him at every turn. They never believed he could serve as mayor, defeat an incumbent congressman or chair a senate committee. Well before he entered the presidential race in April, Beltway pundits had long since written him off as an also-ran— a latter-day Dennis Kucinich.

But by the time Sanders arrived in Madison at the start of a three-state, four-day tour of the Midwest, CNN had declared it the “summer of Sanders.”

Read this story in its entirety at Vermont’s Seven Days site, here.