The Secret of Bernie's Millions. How did he amass three houses and a net worth approaching at least $2 million? The surprisingly conventional middle-class climbing of a radical-sounding socialist. [politico]

 The Secret of Bernie's Millions

How did he amass three houses and a net worth approaching at least $2 million? The surprisingly conventional middle-class climbing of a radical-sounding socialist.

By MICHAEL KRUSE

May 24, 2019


Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer for Politico.

BURLINGTON, Vt.—Early on in his eight years as the mayor of this city, when he typically dressed in a tieless ensemble of work boots and corduroys, Bernie Sanders one day left City Hall and found a ticket on the windshield of his rusty Volkswagen Dasher. The offense: This was the mayor's spot, and surely, a cop had thought, this was not the mayor's car. But it was. It matched perfectly with both Sanders' image as a scrappy advocate of the little guy and his own consistently shaky financial reality. It was the beginning of the 1980s, and he was approaching 40, a single father of a not-quite-teenage son, renting a sparse, second-floor apartment and having a hard time keeping up with his bills. "Not only," he wrote on his yellow, coffee-splotched legal pads, kept in archives at the University of Vermont, "do I not pay bills every month—'What, every month?'—I am unable to …" His scribbles in barely legible cursive in the margins read now simultaneously like reminders and afterthoughts: "gas," "light," "water."

He was, said Bruce Seifer, a friend of Sanders, an economic aide in his administration and one of many people who know him who told me this, "frugal." Seifer paused and considered the right way to put it. "That's a nice way of saying he's a cheap son of a bitch."

Today, he might still be cheap, but he's sure not poor. In the wake of his 2016 presidential run, the most lucrative thing he's ever done, the 77-year-old democratic socialist is a three-home-owning millionaire himself—with a net worth approaching at least $2 million, taking into account his publicly outlined assets and liabilities along with the real estate he owns outright. In a strict, bottom-line sense, Sanders has become one of those rich people against which he has so unrelentingly railed. The champion of the underclass and castigator of "the 1 percent" has found himself in the socio-economic penthouse of his rhetorical bogeymen. This development, seen mostly as the result of big bucks brought in by the slate of books he's put out in the last few years, predictably has elicited snarky pokes, partisan jabs and charges of hypocrisy. The millionaire socialist!

https://www.newsweek.com/bernie-sanders-criticized-twitter-users-having-three-houses-587721
https://americarisingpac.org/bernie-sanders-net-worth-makes-him-a-millionaire/
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/college-students-call-bernie-sanders-a-hypocrite-after-learning-hes-a-millionaire

Sanders himself has been impatient to the point of churlish when pressed about this. "I wrote a best-selling book," he told the New York Times after he recently released the last 10 years of his tax returns. "If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too." Asked on Fox News if this sort of success wasn't "the definition of capitalism," he bristled. "You know, I have a college degree," he said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/us/politics/bernie-sanders-millionaire-net-worth-taxes.html
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/15/bernie-sanders-millionaire-1276928
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/welcome-to-the-1-percent-club-bernie-sanders/2019/04/16/108243e6-605c-11e9-bfad-36a7eb36cb60_story.html

Based, though, on a deeper examination of his financial disclosures, his tax returns, property records in Washington and Vermont and scarcely leafed-through scraps of his financial papers housed here at UVM, Sanders' current financial portrait is not only some stroke-of-luck windfall. It's also the product (with the help of his wife) of decades of planning. The upward trajectory from that jalopy of his to his relative riches now—as off-brand as it is for a man who once said he had "no great desire to be rich"—is the product of years of middle-class striving, replete with credit card debt, real estate upgrades and an array of investment funds and retirement accounts.

https://efdsearch.senate.gov/search/
https://berniesanders.com/tax-returns/
https://www.politico.com/story/2015/09/bernie-sanders-candidate-wealth-2016-213364

As an immigrant's son who started close to the bottom and has ended up nearer to the top, Sanders has a narrative arc that would form the backbone of the campaign story of almost any other candidate. But it's more complicated for him. There's never been anybody like Sanders in the modern political history of this country—somebody who made a career out of haranguing millionaires … and who is now a millionaire himself. There is no set strategy for how to run for president as a democratic socialist with an expensive lakefront summer house. Americans generally don't begrudge millionaires their millions—and, as Donald Trump has confirmed, the aura of wealth can serve as a useful means of self-promotion—but what to make of Sanders' apparently conflicting narratives?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/15/us/politics/bernie-sanders-taxes.html

"He became the very thing he criticized others for becoming and at the same time didn't fix any of the problems he's been railing about that got him to this point," Boston-based Democratic strategist Mary Anne Marsh told me.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/mary-anne-marsh-bernie-sanders-undone-why-he-will-not-be-the-2020-dem-nominee

"He almost at times sounds like he thinks it's inherently evil to be well-off," veteran Democratic strategist Bob Shrum said this week in an interview.

Does all of this make Sanders' abiding calls for economic justice more authoritative or compelling, especially as the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee argues on the 2020 hustings for costly programs like tuition-free college and universal health care, or does it defuse his drilled-home political brand and somehow muffle his message?

https://www.budget.senate.gov/ranking-member/newsroom

"I think it's only awkward if someone has sort of a facile understanding of what Bernie is trying to accomplish," senior Sanders adviser Jeff Weaver told me, "which is to give lots of people opportunities to have a modicum of security."

"It depends on how it plays out," Shrum said.

What's certain, though, is that how Sanders has become wealthy, and how he has managed his money, is one of the least radical things about the self-identified radical Sanders.

***
Before he had three homes, Sanders grew up in a rent-controlled apartment with three and a half rooms. The national economy boomed in the years following World War II, but in Sanders' corner of the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, New York, life meant cut-rate groceries and hand-me-down coats.

His parents, a Polish paint salesman and a homemaker, were "solidly lower-middle class," as he once put it, and they argued frequently about money—"arguments and more arguments," Sanders has said. "Painful arguments. Bitter arguments. Arguments that seared through a little boy's brain, never to be forgotten." There was some talk at the outset of his second presidential candidacy that Sanders now was reluctantly ready to share more of his personal past, but this at least is a piece of it he's been talking about for as long as anybody's been listening to him and writing it down. "Money was a constant source of anxiety," he said to a reporter from the Wall Street Journal in 1983. "Money was something the family, the whole neighborhood, was constantly preoccupied with," he told The Atlantic in 1985. "The money question to me," he said in 2010, in a book called The Jews of Capitol Hill, "has always been very deep and emotional."

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/bernie-sanders-mayor/407413/
https://books.google.com/books?id=bu-dDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA10&dq=Painful+arguments.+Bitter+arguments.+Arguments+that+seared+through+a+little+boy%E2%80%99s+brain&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjb_56Gl6riAhWCv1kKHS1eBjMQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=Painful%20arguments.%20Bitter%20arguments.%20Arguments%20that%20seared%20through%20a%20little%20boy%E2%80%99s%20brain&f=false
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/01/bernie-sanders-2020-hopeful-1198880
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/bernie-sanders-mayor/407413/
https://books.google.com/books?id=unHkCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT27&dq=%E2%80%9CThe+money+question+to+me+has+always+been+very+deep+and+emotional.%E2%80%9D&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjIvpuXl6riAhUNtlkKHXi9AK8Q6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=%E2%80%9CThe%20money%20question%20to%20me%20has%20always%20been%20very%20deep%20and%20emotional.%E2%80%9D&f=false
https://www.amazon.com/Jews-Capitol-Hill-Compendium-Congressional/dp/0810857316

Sanders' mother died when he was 18, and his father when he was 20. He got "a few thousand dollars" of inheritance. And for $2,500, the summer after he graduated from the University of Chicago, he and his first wife bought 85 acres of meadow and woods in Middlesex, Vermont, an out-of-the-way plot that came with an old maple "sugarhouse." With no electricity or running water, life in the ascetic, dirt-floor, shack-like structure didn't work out, and neither did his marriage.

https://www.geni.com/people/Dorothy-Sanders/6000000027755787335
https://www.geni.com/people/Elias-Eli-Sanders/6000000027756093071
https://mag.uchicago.edu/law-policy-society/political-education

Toward the end of the '60s and throughout the entirety of the '70s, as he ran twice for governor and twice for the United States Senate as a member of the anti-war, left-wing, little-but-loud Liberty Union Party, Sanders worked sporadically as a carpenter and a freelance writer and eventually made and sold to schools filmstrips about largely regional history. "He was always poor," friend Sandy Baird told me. Sanders collected unemployment during one of his political campaigns, borrowed gas money for his battered beater of a VW bug and dangled extension cords to share electricity with a downstairs neighbor. He got evicted. He didn't seem to those around him to be too worried about it. "Everyone has to make sure that they survive, so obviously money was a concern," remembered Linda Niedweske, a nutritionist at the time who got to know Sanders and later would become a political aide, "but it was never an overriding goal." Fellow pal Dean Corren agreed. "I don't think he ever really worried about that on a personal level," he said.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/bernie-sanders-vermont-119927

"He didn't give a shit about clothes," said Tom Smith, a progressive activist and former city councilor. "He didn't care about his car."

In this respect, according to local attorney John Franco, a longtime confidante who's known Sanders since the '70s, he fit in with many of the congenitally parsimonious citizens of his adopted home. And it's more than even that, Franco added. It's not just that he didn't and doesn't want to spend money. "He doesn't want to be bothered."

Sanders also used his meager means to buttress his political aims, wielding it almost as a kind of authenticator for the crux of his lodestar view of the haves and have-nots. He lambasted "a United States Congress composed of millionaires." He said again and again that it wasn't right that their elected representatives appeared in his estimation to disproportionately serve "the interests of corporations and big business—their fellow millionaires."

In 1974, waging one of his quixotic campaigns for the Senate, he practically ran more against Nelson Rockefeller than he did his actual opponents. And in 1976, in releasing his financial disclosure as a candidate for governor, he attached a short statement that sat on the page actually not like an apology so much as a chest-out boast. "Unfortunately," he said, "there is not too much to report. At the present moment, I am 'worth' about $1,100, which includes a savings account and a 1967 car. I own no real estate, stocks or bonds."

This steadfast posture got necessarily more locally focused when he ran for mayor starting in the fall of 1980. As the election of Ronald Reagan ushered in nationally a more conservative, pro-business age, Sanders prioritized tenants' rights, pledged no hikes in property taxes and promised a "people-oriented" waterfront instead of an enclave of high-priced condominiums. "It is my belief, if present trends continue," he wrote in a crinkled newsprint pamphlet tucked in the UVM files, "the City of Burlington will be converted into an area in which only the wealthy and upper-middle class will be able to afford to live." He knocked on door after door in the cold in the city's poorer wards.

"Not having money, he was able to identify with these people," Garrison Nelson, a Vermont political science professor and veteran Sanders watcher, told me, "and they were able to identify with him."

"He would walk into a home where people were fairly poor," said former city councilor Gary De Carolis, "and he'd be absolutely right at home."

He won by 10 votes. His new job came with a yearly salary of $33,824, plenty hearty at that time, the equivalent of more than $100,000 in today's dollars and easily more than he had ever made. "It's so strange, just having money," he marveled to a reporter from the Associated Press.

Nearing a year into his tenure, he bought a new car, a silver Honda Civic station wagon—paying $6,400 and taking out a three-year loan, committing to monthly payments of $239.69, according to records of the transaction in his files. After three fender benders, he would come to regret the splurge. "I knew I should never have bought a new car," he told New England Monthly.

And shortly after his first re-election, in 1983, perhaps feeling a smidge more secure and emboldened, he finally stopped renting. With a mortgage of $49,500—records don't show what he put down, or the total price of the sale—he purchased a two-story, six-room, 1,900-square-foot house on Catherine Street, a mile south of City Hall. The décor remained spartan. "Not a whole lot of furniture," De Carolis recalled. Even so, and even then, the fact that the socialist mayor owned just one home caused some critics to tut-tut. "I can remember lefties criticizing Bernie when he bought his first house," Franco told me, their suggestion, he said, "that he was a bourgeois sellout when he did that."

***

"My political philosophy," Sanders penned in one of his legal pads, underlining his mid-'80s chicken scratch.

"Ultimately, I believe in democracy—that we should live in a society where all of our citizens help decide what happens—and where all of our citizens enjoy the fruits of their labor. In practical terms, the development of a democratic society in our nation would mean a far greater degree of citizen participation, public ownership of production, and a far more equal distribution of wealth and power," he said.

"Essentially," he continued, "I believe that 200 people years after the 1st American Rev.—we need a 2nd American Revolution."

In these private writings, he returned to this theme regularly.

"There is a great deal of confusion in this country as to what politics is really about," he said. What it wasn't about: ads, TV, how a candidate looks, "inane debates between Dems and Reps, saying the same thing." No, he said. "In politics, there are winners and losers," and the losers, Sanders believed, were "the majority of our population who work hard—day after day, year after year—and often have nothing in the bank to show for their years of efforts."

Those were the people he sought to represent.

"My view of politics," he wrote elsewhere in his notes, "is that you can't always represent everybody. Which side are you on? The Class Issue is the major issue."

When he was mayor, the monomania of Sanders' theory and rhetoric didn't change, obviously—but something else about him definitely did. Because in retrospect, a step toward improving his personal finances in some sense was stabilizing the city's.

Surprising skeptical and even fearful local businessmen, surprising both Republicans and Democrats on the city council, surprising his friends and many say even himself, "Hizzoner the socialist," as the Boston Phoenix called him, proved to be a diligent and able steward of the municipal purse. "He's not a spender," Peter Clavelle, one of his top economic staffers who ultimately succeeded him as mayor, told me. "He was in fact a fiscal conservative that managed the city's resources quite well."

With the help of a savvy treasurer in accountant Jonathan Leopold, Sanders found an unexpected surplus of $1.9 million, which he used to pave roads without hiking taxes. Putting out to bid the city's fuel and insurance contracts, instituting the first audit in nearly 30 years of the city's pension fund and streamlining cooperation between different departments, he saved hundreds of thousands of dollars. He upped fees for large-development building permits. He raised taxes on commercial properties, but opponents' ads saying Sanders "does not believe in free enterprise" fell flat. From his third-floor office, with a Eugene Debs poster hanging on the wall—"Unionist. Socialist. Revolutionary," it said—he launched an economic task force that led to the creation of the Community and Economic Development Office. "It is my view that there is probably no more important area of concern for the City of Burlington than the issue of economic development," he wrote in announcing the endeavor.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/02/18/eugene-v-debs-and-the-endurance-of-socialism

"The Republicrat administrations were acting just like a big corporation," Sanders said in 1982 in an article in New York's Ithaca Times, emphasizing his conviction that there was little difference between the two major parties. "They were sluggish, without motivation or ideas. We had the good fortune to inherit that moribund system and revamp it."

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/bernie-sanders-2016-democrats-121181

"Socialist Mayor Presides Over a Spell of Prosperity," read a headline in the Hartford Courant in 1985.

City staffers sometimes claimed that Sanders was "out-Republicaning the Republicans."

"Trotskyites for Sound Fiscal Management," they joked.

The "red mayor in the Green Mountains," as Rolling Stone had dubbed him, was reelected the first time around with 53 percent of the vote, and then in 1985 with 55 percent, and then in 1987 with 56.

If he wanted to talk about what he really wanted to talk about, which was income and wealth inequality and the burgeoning American "oligarchy" as well as foreign policy, he knew, say his advisers and friends, that he first and foremost had to get right the dollars and cents. "If he did a good job there," De Carolis said, "then he could talk about what's going on in Nicaragua. But he couldn't talk about the inequalities of various parts of our country if he didn't take care of that home front."

https://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/the-foreign-minister-of-burlington-vt-120839
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/us/bernie-sanders-burlington-mayor.html

He was, Bill Conroy wrote in the 2016 preface to his 1990 book about Sanders that started as his doctoral thesis in the '80s, a "pragmatic socialist."

http://oak.library.temple.edu/tempress/titles/608A_reg.html

"Bernie himself may or may not have been a good financial manager," Steven Soifer told me. Now the chair of the Department of Social Work at the University of Mississippi, he is also the author of a 1991 book on Sanders' time as mayor. "However," Soifer said, "Bernie always had the skill of surrounding himself with very competent, sometimes brilliant people."

https://www.amazon.com/Socialist-Mayor-Bernard-Sanders-Burlington/dp/0897892194

One of them was Bruce Seifer, a higher-up in the Community and Economic Development Office, or CEDO. "It's about fairness and democracy with a small 'd,'" he told me. "You run government effectively and efficiently, number one, and then you make sure that everybody does the job they're supposed to do, and everybody pays their fair share of taxes." But Sanders was at the helm. "And the thing is, he's not a radical," Seifer said. "He's just, like, your common sense uncle."

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-04-25/creating-a-durable-local-economy-lessons-from-the-burlington-vt-model/

***

Looking back, the last two years of the '80s can be seen as the start of the rest of Sanders' life—because that was the moment when he really started using traditional tools of the country's capitalist financial system to put himself on firmer footing.

In May of 1988, he married the former Jane O'Meara Driscoll, a divorced mother of three who had been his significant other the entire time he was mayor while also serving as the director of his administration's youth office. And that summer and fall, nearing the end of his fourth and final term at City Hall, he ran for Congress, as an independent, of course—and lost. But he lost only by 3.7 percentage points, and he beat the Democrat, effectively becoming for the first time in his career a realistic electoral option in a statewide race. "A real breakthrough for him," Nelson, the UVM professor, told me. It was a hint of what was to come.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/03/15/bernie-sanders-2020-race-jesse-jackson-1988-presidential-campaign-225809

At the time, though, that's all it was—latent potential in a moment marked more by unknowns and unease. Biding time and weighing his options, Sanders scrambled for paying gigs. In January of 1989, he contacted the chair of the sociology department at Hamilton College, four hours away in Clinton, New York. "I believe," Sanders wrote to Dennis Gilbert, "that I could offer your students an unusual academic perspective." After spending a semester as a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, he taught classes on urban sociology and social democracy at Hamilton. Leaning on the last hunk of his salary as mayor and speeches at colleges and universities, Sanders made more than $45,000 in 1989—given inflation and the rising cost of living, effectively less than he had made when he was first mayor. Staring at 50 and mulling another crapshoot of a congressional bid, he fretted. "At Hamilton," Steve Rosenfeld, his 1990 press secretary, would say, "Bernie would often confide in Dennis, saying he was worried about his professional future and financial security."

https://issuu.com/hcspectator/docs/11-12-15_press
https://www.hamilton.edu/academics/our-faculty/directory/faculty-detail/dennis-gilbert
https://iop.harvard.edu/fellows/bernard-sanders
https://www.uticaod.com/article/20150703/news/150709837
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1990/11/27/when-hills-last-shall-be-its-first/64106957-eaab-4d7a-b8f9-57592b9e6589/?utm_term=.9760360fd94e
https://www.abebooks.com/9780893416980/Making-History-Vermont-Election-Socialist-0893416983/plp

Sanders and his new wife responded by pooling resources. Central to their efforts? One of the most reliable ways that millions upon millions of Americans have used to leverage and try to improve their financial fortunes: real estate.

In September of 1988, according to local property records and kicking off a spate of activity, Jane Sanders changed the house she owned on Isham Street to a house they owned—shifting legally from "sole owner" to "Jane O'Meara Sanders and Bernard Sanders, husband and wife, as tenants by the entirety." Just two days later, together, they used the house to take out a mortgage of $50,000. The following February, according to a three-line recording of the transaction in the Burlington Free Press, Sanders sold the house he had bought in 1983 with a $49,500 mortgage for $82,000—a fine return on that first investment. Not quite three months later, leaving the more "urban" portion of Burlington and moving to a neighborhood closer to picturesque Lake Champlain, Bernie and Jane Sanders got a $140,000 mortgage to purchase for $175,500 a three-bedroom, two-bathroom, not-quite-1,600-square-foot house on Killarney Drive—"a red-paneled, boxy, split-level house," as Rosenfeld would describe it, "that could be in any middle-class suburb in America." Barely more than a month after that, they sold the house on Isham for $135,000.

https://property.burlingtonvt.gov/

In 1990, sometimes wearing a blue blazer with a missing button, working out of a cramped basement office in the Killarney house that had plywood tables, a painted-shut window and green, glued-on, indoor-outdoor carpet, and getting into hot water in the press for paying his staffers as contractors instead of full-time employees, Sanders tried again to win Vermont's sole seat in the House—and this time did. In the aftermath of his victory, he was a mixture of exultant and indignant. "I'm not an insider," he said. "I know who I am. I know where I came from. I don't need to get down on my knees and ask rich people for help." After having excoriated members of Congress for voting themselves pay raises two years before—"quite beyond comprehension," he huffed in a letter he wrote to the three members of Vermont's congressional delegation that he made public with a mayoral press release—Sanders started making considerably more than he had ever earned: $125,100 a year.

https://www.nytimes.com/1990/11/12/us/socialist-vows-to-be-capitol-outsider.html

In the first half of the '90s, though—as the crotchety independent butted heads with Democrats in Washington while attempting to navigate the topsy-turvy political terrain of the time, the election of Bill Clinton spawning the rise of increasingly virulent, Newt Gingrich-led hyper-partisanship—Sanders' prospects were far from assured. And he used his house to hedge his bets. Signing over power of attorney to his wife, they refinanced in 1991 and then again in 1993, both times with mortgages larger than the one they had agreed to in 1989—$140,500 in '91, $145,600 in '93.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/newt-gingrich-says-youre-welcome/570832/

Sanders settled in, though, as a more and more fixed political presence in Vermont. His race in '94 was the last one he could have lost, really, as he cemented his status and security.

In 2000, with a real estate boom underway, and with a mortgage of $62,100, he and his wife bought in essence their first second home—a condominium in Burlington, which they bought initially for Jane Sanders' elderly mother, according to Weaver, and used intermittently as a place for extended family or a rental property.

In 2004, Jane Sanders was hired as the president of Burlington College, a small, middling liberal arts school. Making a six-figure salary of her own, her tenure would end in acrimony, after her decision to pursue a campus expansion by making a $10-million land purchase crippled the institution. She resigned in 2014 and took with her a $200,000 severance some called a "golden parachute." In 2016, the debt-beset college closed for good, felled by "an inexperienced president," in the barbed words of Jane Sanders' successor.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/22/bernie-sanders-jane-sanders-lawyer-bank-fraud-investigation-burlington-college-215297
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/bernie-sanders-jane-vermont-burlington-college-219114
https://www.vpr.org/post/attack-ad-hits-sanders-charge-golden-parachute#stream/0
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/what-happened-at-burlington-college/482973/
https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/letters/what-really-happened-at-burlington-college/

In the meantime, Bernie Sanders' career was heading in the opposite direction—up. In 2006, he was elected to the Senate. In 2007, with his congressional salary now at $165,200, and adding to the condo and the house on Killarney, quietly climbing some financial stairsteps when far fewer people were paying him any attention, Sanders bought at the top of a surging real estate market a row home in Washington for $489,000.

And in 2009, with markets crashing, when half of the 100 senators still were worth a million dollars or more, Sanders' estimated net worth clocked in at $105,000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics—at the bottom of the Senate wealth chart. Back in Burlington, Bernie and Jane Sanders returned to real estate, using a mortgage of $324,000 to purchase for $405,000 an upgrade—a four-bedroom, 2,352-square-foot house that sits atop a slow slope of a hill up from the street on Van Patten Parkway. (They bought the house, interestingly, from her son, David Driscoll, and his wife. In 2012, for $265,000, Driscoll and his wife bought from Jane and Bernie Sanders the Killarney house. Effectively, they swapped houses. Driscoll, Weaver said, wanted to live in "his childhood home.") In 2013, Bernie and Jane Sanders refinanced the Van Patten house, taking out a mortgage of $312,275.

https://www.opensecrets.org/personal-finances/net-worth?cid=N00000528&year=2009

And in 2015, when he started running for president, he had a net worth of a little more than $700,000, according to CRP calculations, a financial picture that had all his assets in his wife's name and liabilities from a pair of mortgages as well as credit card debt he listed as between $25,002 and $65,000. It made him, a spokesman said at the time, "a regular American." More "regular," perhaps, than he should have been: According to the Federal Reserve, the average household in 2015 had credit card debt of about $10,000.

https://www.opensecrets.org/personal-finances/net-worth?cid=N00000528
https://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/bernie-sanders-wife-accounts-for-reported-assets-120261
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/2015/06/11/sanders-reports-credit-card-debt/71088390/

"Unfortunately," Sanders said during his 2016 campaign, using the same effacing opening clause and striking the same tone that he had in his financial disclosure of 40 years before, "I remain one of the poorer members of the United States Senate."

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/apr/14/bernie-sanders/bernie-sanders-says-hes-one-poorer-members-united-/

But for the politics he practiced—always—it was a useful note to sound.

He all but compared his finances to those of the frontrunning Hillary Clinton, she of the high-dollar speaking fees. "That type of wealth," he said, "has the potential to isolate you from the reality of the world."

https://www.politico.com/story/2014/07/hillary-clinton-public-speaking-fees-108581
https://www.cnbc.com/2015/05/26/10-questions-with-bernie-sanders.html

It wasn't long before unprecedented money for Sanders started rolling in.

***

Driving from address to address, I recently made a quick, self-guided tour of Sanders' sequence of houses here in the Queen City of Vermont, tracing from Catherine to Isham to Killarney to Van Patten the almost 40 years of the socialist's slow climb to the upper class. I stared at his car, a red 2010 Chevy Aveo, parked in his driveway.

Then, though, I carried on an hour so north, to bucolic North Hero, some 20 miles south of the Canadian border, to see the emblem of the economic altitude to which Sanders has ascended—the third house, the summer house, the house with rustic wood sides and a silver tin roof and four bedrooms and 500 feet of waterfront that Bernie and Jane Sanders bought for $575,000, cash, through an entity they created called the Islands Trust. "Jane's idea was to have something that would stay in the family," Weaver told me, "over generations, and that sort of structure was the way to help accomplish that."

https://www.sevendaysvt.com/OffMessage/archives/2016/08/08/bernie-sanders-buys-a-summer-home-in-north-hero

Past horses and silos and campsites and apple farms, it's nestled at the end of a gravel private lane, hidden behind a cluster of evergreens, looking out over the wide, resplendent blue of Lake Champlain.

Much has changed in these last four years. In 2015, Sanders had that credit card debt and two mortgages that ranged from $250,001 to $500,000, according to his Senate financial disclosure of that year. In 2016, the credit card debt was gone, and one of those mortgages had been halved. By 2018, only one of the mortgages remained at all; that January, records show, he paid off what was left of the $312,275 mortgage he had on his main house in Vermont.

In 2015, he published a book called The Speech, basically a transcript of his memorable 2010 filibuster on (what else?) corporate greed, income inequality and the decline of the middle class. Sanders made $3,035, which he donated to charity. In 2016, though, book money began to pile up. He got a $795,000 advance to write Our Revolution. He pocketed an additional $70,484 in royalties. In 2017, the book royalties added up to $880,091.14. And last year, while they dipped, they still were a hunk of money: $392,810.37.

https://www.amazon.com/Speech-Corporate-Greed-Decline-Middle/dp/1568585535
https://www.amazon.com/Our-Revolution-Believe-Bernie-Sanders/dp/1250132924

The Sanders' tax returns, too, tell the tale: From 2015 to 2018, their total income went from $240,622 to $1,073,333 to $1,150,891 to $566,421. Some of that, along with money from a retirement account, according to Jane Sanders, plus proceeds from a sale of a share of a family home of hers, helped pay for the nice place on the lake that I sat and looked at while listening to birds chirp in the chill of spring here in the northern reaches of New England.

https://www.apnews.com/08ee860c3c78484aa4f82e6a5a4fe92a
https://vtdigger.org/2016/08/18/sanders-lake-home-purchase-leaves-questions-unanswered/

"Bernie is a known quantity in any socialist paradise," GOP consultant Rick Wilson told me, "the party apparatchik with the dacha ..."

This kind of characterization makes Sanders' friends and others who've known him for years all but roll their eyes.

"He's still the same cranky guy," said Terje Anderson, the chair of the Vermont Democratic Party. "I run into him at Hannaford shopping for groceries."

And in his cart, I asked, aren't the finest meats and cheeses?

"Hell no," Anderson said.

"There's no change," Niedweske added. "His priorities remain the same."

"I mean, I don't think any of Bernie's supporters said, 'Oh, well, now that he's made a lot of money selling a book … I can't support him anymore,'" Terry Bouricius, a former Burlington city councilor and progressive who's known Sanders since the '70s, told me. "No—I don't think that happened to anybody."

A spectrum of politicos I talked to don't think this is that big of a political problem for Sanders. He has problems, actually, they said, that are bigger than his bottom line—his persistent lack of appeal to female voters and black voters, for instance, and his generally sagging poll numbers ever since an evidently formidable Joe Biden entered the race, and the slap-in-the-face mathematical fact that this time around he's running against not only Hillary Clinton but 20-plus other Democrats. He is, in other words, no longer the beneficiary of the anybody-but-her voters.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bernie-sanders-2020-the-big-question-can-he-win-support-from-minorities-and-women/
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryancbrooks/black-voters-bernie-sanders-mlk-2020
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/01/25/joe-biden-2019-profile-grief-beau-car-accident-224178

"The least of his problems," Marsh, the Democratic strategist from Boston, said of his wealth.

"Detractors will needle and pester and continue to push that argument," said Joe Trippi, the Democratic strategist who's been working on presidential campaigns for almost 40 years. "But I don't think in the end it's going to have much impact."

"On the list of stuff that bothers me about Bernie," said Stuart Stevens, the GOP consultant who was the chief strategist for Mitt Romney's 2012 run, "the fact that he wrote a book and made some money doesn't bother me at all."

Ditto Democrat Bakari Sellers.

"I'm not going to sit here and shit on Bernie Sanders for being a millionaire," the former South Carolina lawmaker and current Kamala Harris supporter told me.

Why not?

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/15/kamala-harris-south-carolina-1274083

"I want to be a millionaire, too!"