When Bernie met Hillary

On a crisp Monday night earlier this month, Amtrak police at New York’s Penn Station escorted Bernie Sanders off the train from Washington and into ClubAcela. The just-declared presidential candidate, spotting a phalanx of body guards, asked his escort what VIP was in their midst.

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“She genuinely seemed happy to see him,” said Richard Sugarman, Sanders’ close friend and former roommate, to whom he relayed the story of their chance encounter. “He said it was almost impossible not to feel for her — how isolated she was, and how insulated she was. And he came away from that saying, ‘What can I tell you. It’s not easy being her.’ ”

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This wasn’t the first time Sanders has reached out to Clinton. He’s been doing that for more than 20 years. As one of Congress’s most liberal members in the 1990s, Sanders went back and forth between clashing with Bill Clinton and warily embracing the leader of the centrist New Democrats. But even before the Clintons were in the White House, Bernie was playing the role of pragmatic progressive, making overtures directly to Hillary and working to pull her to the left.

In 1992, the lone socialist in Congress, Rep. Bernard Sanders, as he was then known, wasn’t wild about the centrist Arkansas Governor running for president, and he let it be known publicly. “Bernie was the founder of the progressive caucus. Clinton was the founder of the [Democratic Leadership Council], the whole point of which was to exterminate the progressives,” said Bill Curry, who served as counselor to the president during Clinton’s first term. “They weren’t even two ships passing in the night. They were two shipping sailing in the opposite direction.”

But in May of 1992, Sanders wrote to the First Lady of Arkansas at her Little Rock law firm to tout a bill he had written to provide federal funding for state cancer registries, attaching his testimony on the bill’s behalf and a Reader’s Digest article calling registries “THE CANCER WEAPON AMERICA NEEDS MOST.” Though there’s no record of a response from Little Rock, Sanders would grab the Clintons’ attention soon enough.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton-119082.html#ixzz3dKWn6qnl