Face it, "Populists": a Socialist cannot be elected President

[Jim Lane]

40. My understanding is that Bernie is divorced.

From this story in the National Journal, a glimpse of his life before he was elected Mayor of Burlington:

After high school, Sanders attended the University of Chicago, where he joined the Young People's Socialist League and spent very little time studying. After graduating, barely, in 1964, he moved back to New York and worked briefly for Head Start, which had just been created. But the more formative experience may have been the half-year he spent in the mid-'60s on an Israeli kibbutz. "There's a sense of community he likes. He would like to believe people can work together who are opposed against each other by economic forces," {his friend Richard} Sugarman says. "Historically, the socialist Zionism was involved in farming and making things, and that part appealed to him."

Communitarianism, agrarian socialist Zionism, whatever you want to call it, Sanders sought a version of it in Vermont. In 1968, he and his first wife, a college sweetheart whom he would divorce several years later, moved to a small shack near Montpelier. For the next decade he ran repeatedly and unsuccessfully for statewide offices under the banner of the fringe Liberty Union Party. Meanwhile, he made ends meet primarily by traveling the state hawking educational film strips. (A 30-minute Eugene Debs documentary that he put together was his pièce de résistance.)

It would obviously be hypocritical for any Reagan-idolizing Republicans to use this fact against Bernie, but I wouldn't be surprised if they try it.