Long Forgotten Bernie Sanders Cable Access Show

Sanders, only 45 and looking 70, talks to kids.

One of them says, “you look like a character from Back To the Future.” All the other kids laugh.

Later he asks the kids if they’ve ever seen cocaine. No, really, he does.

Politico-

Whatever good it did for Bernie Sanders at the time, “Bernie Speaks with the Community” is now 1,667 minutes of material for opposition researchers, health care insurance companies and Trump’s reelection campaign to pick through. Here’s a short, and surely incomplete, list of the things Sanders said on his TV show that his opponents could cut into a 30-second ad: The Nicaraguan Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega “happens not to be a communist.” Nora Astorga, the Nicaraguan ambassador to the United Nations who had recently visited Sanders, might have gotten cancer because of the “tremendous grief and suffering that’s going on in her own country” caused by the war. The Soviet Union’s economy is being “devastated” by military spending. And perhaps, as he proposed to a classroom of small children, Burlington should develop an exchange program with communist and socialist countries around the world. “I would like to see families—your mothers and dads and yourselves maybe—go to the Soviet Union and learn about that country, and people from there come to here,” he says. “If you actually had kids here who were from Nicaragua or from the Soviet Union, and they could tell you what’s going on in their own country, boy, you could learn a whole lot. And then if kids from Vermont or Burlington were in those countries, they could tell those people what was going on in their hometown.”

A striking part of “Bernie Speaks with the Community” is that Sanders is obsessed with international affairs to a degree that seems downright strange for the mayor of a 40,000-person city. He talks about how he worked with Channel 15 to air films from Cuba. He updates viewers on a city resolution on the war in Nicaragua. In at least one-fourth of the episodes, Sanders discusses foreign policy—a stark contrast to the 2016 election, when he was tagged as a lightweight on world politics.

There is even a lost episode, No. 52, that contains footage of Sanders after he returned from his honeymoon in the Soviet Union, as well as a news conference he gave about the trip. It is not listed on CCTV’s website, and it never aired, Davitian says. I discovered it only when Davitian shared the station’s old show notes with me. The description, clearly drummed out on a typewriter, is this: “Bernie & Jane’s wedding 5-28-88; Return from trip to Soviet Union 6-10-88; press conference about Soviet trip 6-13-88.” CCTV was the videographer for the Sanders’ wedding, Davitian says, and the unaired episode was a kind of memento for the couple. “We did it as a friendly thing,” she says.

When I ask members of Sanders’ inner circle if they’re worried that their boss decided to put so much of his political career on videotape, they admit that “Bernie Speaks with the Community” could be a gift to his 2020 rivals. “The president is probably watching it right now,” Weaver jokes.