Mayor Bernie 1985 -- A great article that debunks the "He's all talk" meme

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/bernie-sanders-mayor/407413/

This is an article written in 1985 by novelist Russel Banks about then-Mayor Bernie Sanders in his third term. It looks at his early life and dperformance as mayor. It's very long but well worth reading. (Among other tidbits, I didn't realize he was a jock when young.)

ESPECIALLY worth reading by those who claim he could not be an effective Chief Executive.

Excerpt:
.....He has proven to be an excellent administrator, appointing people who are in general younger, better educated and more capable than the people they have replaced.

He has streamlined city government and has introduced procedural and financial reforms, many of which have been supported by Republican members of the 13-person Board of Aldermen, a body the Sanderistas now control, but that, in Sanders’s first year, when he had only two supporters on the Board, controlled him, even to the point of refusing to allow him to appoint his own secretary.

Allen Gear, a Republican member of the Board of Aldermen since 1979, looking back over Sanders’s tenure as mayor, says, “He’s done things I don’t think we Republicans could have done, because the two traditional parties in a town like this are very close. We interact with each other on business over coffee, over tea, crumpets and marmalade, if you will, and it would have been very hard for us, us being Republicans, if we had the Chief Executive’s spot, to have done some of the things Bernie has done ... He’s taken a lot of very Republican ideas and put them in place. Such as combining all of the garages of the various city departments and putting them into a single public-works department, initially a Republican proposal, to gain efficiency in handling city rolling stock ... He’s put a lot of modern accounting practices and money-management practices into place that are good Republican business practices ... And he has surrounded himself with some very talented, vigorous people.”

Sanders’s undeniable success as a third-party politician who combines radical rhetoric and careful day-to-day attention to detail, his unusual mixture of ideological rigidity and capacity for compromise, and his undeniable personal charm, a charm that comes through in spite of a personality that critics call “abrasive” and “combative” (terms which may in fact be euphemisms for far-less acceptable criticisms)—this remarkable success in a traditionally conservative city naturally makes one wonder if he can translate it into a successful run this year for the governorship.....
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