WSJ: My Dinner With Bernie Sanders, and His Many Fans

4:40 pm ET
Aug 21, 2015

My Dinner With Bernie Sanders, and His Many Fans

By Peter Nicholas


Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders greets supporters in Eldridge, Iowa.


RENO, Nev. – Midway through a Bernie Sanders rally at a local university here, one of his aides passed along an invitation. The Democratic presidential candidate would be eating dinner with his wife later at a steakhouse before flying home. Would I want to eat with them?

I’d been working on a piece (you can read it here) about Mr. Sanders, whose rise in the polls has put a bit of a scare into Hillary Clinton’s supporters. Of course I’d join.

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With his medium rare ribeye getting cold on his plate, he took on all comers. Postal workers came over to invite him to a convention next door. Mr. Sanders told them that as a senator from Vermont he’d worked closely with their union. Staff gushed and asked for selfies.
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People kept coming. One diner wanted to talk to him about his appearance on the Diane Rehm radio show. A group of waitresses asked if he’d pose for a group photo. Often his wife, Jane O’Meara Sanders, would take their cellphones and obligingly snap the shot.

There’s no escape. Mrs. Sanders recalled how her husband left a restaurant once to take a walk outside and ran into a Der Spiegel reporter who was there to write a story about him.
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Word spread quickly through the restaurant that Mr. Sanders was in the house.

Everyone wanted a piece of him.

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I offered to pick up the check. Mr. Sanders refused. He asked the waitress to divide up the bill so that I paid my share and he and his wife and two aides paid theirs.

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http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/08/21/my-dinner-with-bernie-sanders-and-his-many-fans/