Being lazy is not the same as being poor.
Via The Guardian:
Four years ago, Bernie Sanders formally announced his candidacy on the shores of Lake Champlain in Vermont, with a 35-minute, lectern-pounding preview of nearly every stump speech he would deliver.
That consistency became a part of Sanders’ appeal, as progressives discovered that much like his Brooklyn accent, his policy-dense screeds against economic inequality had not changed after nearly 40 years in politics.
On Saturday, the 77-year-old democratic socialist will return to his native Brooklyn to formally announce he is running again, to unseat the Queens-born billionaire who captured the White House in 2016. It is one of several signs that this presidential campaign will be far different from his last – not least because this time, he’s running to win.[…]
“Bernie Sanders hates to talk about Bernie Sanders,” Nina Turner, the former Ohio state senator who is now a campaign co-chair, said in an earlier interview. She and other advisers believe his personal story will help him connect with voters, especially people of color he struggled to win over in 2017.
“He has to revisit his 20-year-old self, the Bernie Sanders who was fighting at the University of Chicago, who was standing up against segregation – the Bernie Sanders who was there when Martin Luther King delivered his I Have a Dream speech,” Turner said.
Sanders was born in Brooklyn in 1941 and raised in a three-and-a-half bedroom, rent-controlled apartment in a heavily Jewish neighborhood of Flatbush. An image seared in his memory, he has said, is the sight of Holocaust survivors, identifiable by the serial numbers tattooed on their arms, shopping along Kings Highway.
He attended James Madison high school, whose distinguished alumni include the supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, and five Nobel Prize winners. He was captain of the track team and ran cross-country, though to his ever-lasting dismay he did not make the school’s championship basketball team.
It was also there that he made his first foray into politics, running for student body president and losing, a distant third.
“My childhood in Brooklyn was shaped by two profound realities,” Sanders told Brooklyn College’s graduating class in 2017. One was growing up in a family that struggled to get by on the low wages his father earned as a paint salesman. The other was being born into a family that had come to the US fleeing antisemitism in Russia and Poland. Many of his relatives did not escape, and were killed in the Holocaust.