{"id":2094,"date":"2016-02-17T09:04:26","date_gmt":"2016-02-17T17:04:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/sanders-brother-shares-political-odyssey\/"},"modified":"2016-02-17T09:04:26","modified_gmt":"2016-02-17T17:04:26","slug":"sanders-brother-shares-political-odyssey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/sanders-brother-shares-political-odyssey\/","title":{"rendered":"Sanders’ brother shares political odyssey"},"content":{"rendered":"

OXFORD, England \u2014 <\/strong>These are exciting times for Larry Sanders, a stalwart Green Party campaigner in Oxford, England. He\u2019s just been appointed to a new job as his party\u2019s national spokesman on health. And he\u2019s helping out his little brother Bernie with a small electoral campaign on the other side of the Atlantic.<\/p>\n

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is an outsider who has far exceeded expectations as he battles Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party\u2019s presidential nomination. The left-wing senator has energized thousands of young supporters with his promise to transform the American economy, education and health care systems, and last week gained more momentum by winning the New Hampshire primary.<\/p>\n

More than 3,000 miles away, his brother, a retired academic who has lived in Britain since 1969, finds himself a \u201csudden celebrity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI was at a meeting the other day and when I stood up to ask a question, half the people in the audience started clapping,\u201d Larry Sanders said in an interview with The Associated Press. \u201cI\u2019ve been going to meetings for 40 years and no one\u2019s ever applauded before.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sanders, who ran for a seat in Britain\u2019s Parliament last year (he came fifth of seven candidates), has watched his brother\u2019s growing success with emotions that swing from pride to disbelief.<\/p>\n

He says he has only recently started to believe that underdog Bernie can \u201cgo all the way to the White House.\u201d<\/p>\n

At 80, Larry Sanders is six years older than his brother, his Brooklyn accent mellowed by more than four decades in Britain.<\/p>\n

He says the brothers\u2019 politics are rooted in the post-war Brooklyn where they grew up, the children of \u201cstaunch New Dealer\u201d parents.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were not poor \u2014 we had everything we needed \u2014 but our parents argued, and what they argued about was money,\u201d Sanders said in the kitchen of his modest, century-old house not far from Oxford\u2019s historic city center.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think a lot of politicians, if they\u2019ve come from financially secure backgrounds, it doesn\u2019t really resonate what it means to have these arguments and to have this tension. And Bernard, without wanting to have it, has it, and it hasn\u2019t gone away.\u201d<\/p>\n

To Sanders, his brother is always Bernard, never Bernie, which just doesn\u2019t \u201csound right.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sanders said their early values were simple ones learned in public school and Hebrew school: The Declaration of Independence\u2019s assertion that \u201call men are created equal,\u201d the Torah\u2019s exhortation to be kind to \u201cthe stranger among you.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTens of millions of people anywhere will have had very similar upbringings,\u201d he said. \u201cBut Bernard, somehow it stuck with Bernard.\u201d<\/p>\n

Larry Sanders studied politics at Brooklyn College, where he was involved with the Young Democrats, and discussed political ideas with his younger brother. He was surprised when Bernie announced his first political campaign, a run for high school student president.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe didn\u2019t do very well \u2014 he finished third out of three,\u201d Sanders said. \u201cBut he was the only one who had a serious platform. The others talked more about prom stuff, but he … (said) the school should raise money for scholarships for Korean orphans.\u201d<\/p>\n

Later, Larry watched as Bernie charted his own political path \u2014 first as part of the civil rights movement in Chicago, then in Vermont, where, as an independent, he served as mayor of Burlington, congressman and senator.<\/p>\n

Larry moved to Britain with his late first wife, becoming a university lecturer and serving for a decade as an Oxfordshire county councilor. Last week, he was named national health spokesman for the Green Party, which has thousands of members but just one lawmaker out of 650 in Parliament.<\/p>\n

Sanders, who still has U.S. citizenship, has been campaigning to get American students at Oxford to back his brother in the Democrats\u2019 global primary in March.<\/p>\n

He spent five weeks with Bernie on the campaign trail last fall, and was astonished by his stamina.<\/p>\n

\u201cI do worry a little bit about his health, but the miracle is that he does it and he thrives,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Larry Sanders plans to return to the U.S. for the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in July. He has allowed himself to daydream about watching his brother take the presidential inauguration oath \u2014 and about visiting him in the White House.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s said to be a very good B&B, so we\u2019ll take advantage of it,\u201d he said. \u201cI won\u2019t insist on the Lincoln bedroom.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OXFORD, England \u2014 These are exciting times for Larry Sanders, a stalwart Green Party campaigner in Oxford, England. He\u2019s just been appointed to a new job as his party\u2019s national spokesman on health<\/a>. And he\u2019s helping out his little brother Bernie with a small electoral campaign on the other side of the Atlantic. Vermont Sen. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":2095,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-2094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-nation-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2094\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2094"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=2094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}