I’m letting a colleague from my graduate school days who recently retired from the University of Vermont write part of today’s column. Here’s what he had to say in a recent e-mail message:

“I arrived in Burlington in 1981, very near the date of Bernie’s election to his first term as mayor, so my Vermont residency closely tracks his public career, and although his visits to Vermont have become much less frequent since he moved to Washington I still have the chance on occasion, to watch him regaling the Righteous in quiet settings, such as a certain locally-owned coffee shop, a Church Street restaurant or at a minor league baseball game.”

“There are two features of the great Tribune’s Tischreden that some might see as trivial but I actually find revealing. The first is his table etiquette, which recognizes no cadence between a full mouth and a solemn declamation on some familiar theme of injustice, and knows only one volume (loud). My second observation is the private man seems not to be all that different from the public when it comes to his emotional register. He is always angry. Waitpersons are not spared. Beware burghers, his is a man nostalgic for the guillotine. Maybe, he had a less than ideal relationship with his father?”

[Tischreden = “table speeches.”]

I have no supporting evidence about the man’s alleged rudeness to Waitmammals but something like 90 percent of the photos I’ve been seeing show a man two dribbles away from frothing at the mouth. No way of knowing whether his complexion is the consequence (like mine) of high blood pressure or of perpetual high dudgeon. For those who have never seen the man depicted, the old phrase “pink as a farmer’s butt on a frosty morning” reflects his tincture well enough.

A word of caution here: Bernie may suffer from perpetual indignation, but he doesn’t actually hate anyone. He’s on the left and “Rightists” have a monopoly of political hate. Consult the liberal media and you will see that this is so.

More, we have the word of Sarah Lyall that “Mr. Sanders has remained true to his original message: sympathy for the downtrodden, the impoverished and the disenfranchised in the face of the rich and the powerful.” I don’t know why Ms. Lyall is so certain of Bernie’s motives and sympathies, but I know she writes for the New York Times. What more needs saying? It’s sympathy, not hate, that motivates the People’s Friend and excites his followers.

Lyall’s research for her July 3 NYT article, “Bernie Sanders’s Revolutionary Roots Were Nurtured in ’60s Vermont” is a valuable resource. It suggests that the young Bernie was truly the father of the Bernie my old friend from Rutgers studied in Burlington in recent years. The young Bernie of yesteryear had the same tender regard for the suffering middle class as the presidential candidate demonstrates.

Here’s Bernie’s “…apocalyptically alarmist account of the unbearable horror of having an office job in New York City, of being among ‘the mass of hot dazed humanity heading uptown for the 9-5, sentenced to endless days of “moron work, monotonous work….The years come and go. Suicide, nervous breakdown, cancer, sexual deadness, heart attack, alcoholism, senility at 50. Slow death, fast death. DEATH.’”

There’s a kind of symmetry here. The Tribune speaks in the Cross Center where dazed middle class drudges labor away in the nearby dark, satanic office of the Cross Insurance Benefits Center laying the foundations for cancer, heart-attacks, impotence, alcoholism, and premature senility.

The casual and superficial reader might easily take this quote all wrong. Bernie wasn’t saying that the middle class is a mass of morons. He’s just saying at lot of them work at moronic jobs that are making them senile. The Green Mountaineer from Brooklyn has avoided this hideous fate by taking up the exciting career of a professional politician, a career where a man can talk and talk and talk and listen to his own voice a lot, interspersed with some loud cheers. He wants the same life for all of America’s middle class.

The Portland event is receiving the national news it merits – as many as 9,000 enthusiastic supporters turned up! When has Hillary drawn an equivalent turn-out? Will she ever? Word from her supporters (the anonymous ones) is that they are feeling a teenie bit nervous, but mostly because they worry that a Sanders victory in New Hampshire and Iowa might bring a more formidable rival into the race.

My own inexpert opinion is that an electoral juggernaut based on votes from Portland, Maine; Madison, Wisconsin; Seattle, Washington; Burlington, Vermont and San Francisco has scant prospect of a national victory, although those places are great for media events.

Finally, I must make it clear that I’m not opposed to Bernie Sanders capturing the Democratic Party presidential nomination. Not at all.

Professor John Frary of Farmington, Maine is a former US Congress candidate and retired history professor, a Board Member of Maine Taxpayers United and publisher of www.fraryhomecompanion.com and can be reached at: [email protected]