Get ready for Senator Bernie: a letter from Vermont.

Burlington, Vt.

BARACK OBAMA, who has become a U.S. senator, millionaire, best-selling author, and Grammy Award winner in just the last year, came to Vermont the other day for what the Burlington Free Press described as a "rock-star-like appearance." While he did not walk on water, Obama did draw a crowd too large for the hall where he was scheduled to speak in support of the Senate bid of Congressman Bernard Sanders.

Sanders is running to succeed the retiring James Jeffords, who, of course, left the Republicans in May 2001, costing the party control of the Senate. Jeffords got his picture on the covers of the big newsmagazines and wrote a book about his conscience, but he did not go over to the other party. While he voted reliably with the Democrats, he fastidiously maintained that he was an Independent. Sanders, too, is an Independent--they are one thing that does grow well in Vermont's poor soil--but he didn't have to quit one of the major parties to get there. Throughout his long political career, Sanders has consistently and stridently argued that the two major parties neglect the interests and needs of "working Americans" and favor plutocrats whose money keeps them in power. Sanders and his supporters refer, disdainfully, to the "Demicans and Republicrats"--shades of George Wallace in 1968, including the wounded pugnacity.

But if Sanders is down on the Democrats, one wonders why the party's biggest star would come here to stump for him. Don't the Democrats have a dog in this fight? Well, actually, no; Vermont's Democratic party is not running a candidate for the Senate and has endorsed Sanders. So, for that matter, has the national Democratic party, whose chairman, Howard Dean, tried mightily, when he was governor of Vermont, to keep Sanders out of Congress, campaigning hard for his opponents.

Evidently, the Democrats have decided that they can't beat Sanders, but--since he has voted with them on the big issues--they can live with him. Obama's visit, then, is just a routine political stop to raise a little money and dispense a little glitter for the party's sanctioned candidate, right?

Could be. But it might also be that Obama and the Democrats need Sanders more than he needs them.

A HISTORY OF SOCIALISM 

Everybody here expects Sanders to win, and win fairly easily. To most voters, it seems as if he has been around forever; and he pretty much has. In 1972, four years after settling in Vermont, Sanders ran as the Liberty Union party candidate in a special election for an open U.S. Senate seat. Fewer than 2,000 Vermonters voted for him--about 2 percent. Six months later, he ran for governor in the regular election and got less than 1 percent of the vote. In 1974, he ran for the Senate again and got about 4 percent of the vote. In 1976, he offered his services for governor and received 6 percent of the vote.

Though he was repeatedly, and decisively, beaten in elections, Sanders neither lost his enthusiasm--which bordered on messianic self-righteousness--nor altered his message, which boiled down to: The "rich" have too much of everything and everyone else is getting a raw deal. Money is power, and power is self-interested; establishment politicians are part of the problem and until they are thrown out of office, nothing will change. Sanders made this case relentlessly.

In 1981, he ran for mayor of Burlington, Vermont's only proper city, which then had a population of some 40,000. The political establishment that had governed the city for years, and did not take Sanders seriously, was shocked when he won the election in a ten-vote squeaker. Out-of-state students at the University of Vermont almost certainly put him over the top--but this was long before the Florida recount, and that was how you played the game.

During the 1980s, Burlington prospered and Sanders became something of a national figure. He got Doonesbury's attention when, as a gesture of opposition to Reaganadministration policies in Central America--especially support of the Nicaraguan Contras--he made Burlington the "sister city" of Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua. Sanders has a weakness for these ideological stunts. After he was married in 1988, he and his new wife honeymooned in the Soviet Union.

But the voters bought it. Sanders's detractors argued that this was because Burlington enjoyed the Reagan-era economic boom--and was therefore able to afford such initiatives as subsidized daycare, a city arts office, and a city youth council. Yet Sanders's own boundless energy did work to energize the city and imbue it with the sense that it was somehow special. Vermonters of a certain type felt a smugness about themselves and their state in those times--a conviction that, even in their newfound prosperity, they somehow stood apart from the crass money-lust of the rest of the country. They were, you see, a different kind of yuppie.

In 1988, Sanders lost, once more, a bid for Vermont's House seat. He ran for the same office again in 1990 and, this time, won. He was repeatedly reelected until, by the turn of the century, he had become the state's most recognizable politician--had achieved, in fact, that special status in politics where one is known only by one's first name. Always and everywhere, Sanders is "Bernie," the same way the junior senator from New York is "Hillary."

A MAN TO MATCH THEIR MOUNTAINS

If Sanders seems somehow inevitable here in Vermont, that is probably because he and the state have come so far together. Vermont, remember, was one of only two states that FDR did not carry in his 1936 landslide. Its character was as austere and frugal as that of its famous son, Calvin Coolidge. Then, in the 1960s, the new people started coming in. Vermont was a tolerant place: a good place to be poor and get high. The newcomers got older and raised families and became voters. They were followed by another crop of immigrants, less counter-cultural and with more money. The state became known to the rest of the country as a kind of far-left outpost where the kooks went to make macrame and road-test their far-out political schemes. This is the state where you go to the same store to check in the deer you have just shot or buy a $70 bottle of Chardonnay. Vermont is where same-sex civil unions started; where Howard Dean was governor; where a judge recently sentenced a pedophile to the kind of term that would, in other jurisdictions, be considered lenient for jaywalking.

People who don't live here have a hard time taking Vermont seriously. There are only slightly more than 600,000 people in the state, and that number is shrinking. Vermont has always been the kind of harsh place where people eventually get fed up and leave. Early generations found the soil thin and the growing season short. These days, they experience a forbidding business climate of high taxes and excessive regulation. The state is resource-poor and doesn't supply the rest of the nation with anything it particularly needs, unless you count maple syrup. It is the home turf of no important corporations, with the possible exceptions of Vermont Teddy Bear and Ben & Jerry's. There are no major research universities and, hence, no high-tech zones in the state. Vermont's contribution to the nation's welfare comes down to an unusually high number of high-profile national politicians: Dean, Jeffords, Patrick Leahy, and Bernie Sanders.

This is undeniably Sanders's moment. He is an old-fashioned left-winger whose hero is Eugene Debs and who has consistently and indefatigably made the left-wing case, from his first, forlorn campaign more than 30 years ago until today, when he is on the verge of election to the U.S. Senate. The Republicans, meanwhile, are running a candidate straight out of Sanders's playbook, if not his dreams. Rich Tarrant is a self-made multimillionaire who drives a Bentley and has a second home in Florida. He is prepared, he says, to contribute $5 million to his own cause, which will likely be the campaign's most abiding theme. He might make it interesting but it is hard to see how he has a chance.

HISTORIC MOMENT?

Meanwhile, the hard Left is a rising force--in Vermont, certainly, but also in the national Democratic party. Voters who hate the war, who hate Bush, want to hear that old-time religion: none of this "triangulation" or "Third Way" stuff. And while most of the political cognoscenti are talking about a reprise of 1994, but this time in reverse, some of Bernie's people are dreaming even bigger dreams. The memory here is of another, more distant and transforming election: that of 1968. Astalled and unpopular war; an administration and a president badly out of touch and unable to do much about it, or even recognize and admit it; a resistance that is feeling its power and novelty and is on the march in a little state in New England--then it was New Hampshire; now it is Vermont.

The analogy is imperfect, or worse, but that doesn't keep people from believing. In the same week that Barack Obama was praising Vermonters for their "flinty, say-what-you-mean attitude," voters were holding town meetings all over the state. Town Meeting day is still a school holiday in Vermont, but the institution has lost most of its vitality. The big decisions are made elsewhere and local government has been left with the table scraps of democracy. It is hard to imagine Tocqueville getting very worked up about town meeting these days.

In one town--Newfane, in the southeastern corner of the state--the voters debated a resolution that called for Vermont's representative to the U.S. House to introduce impeachment proceedings against President Bush. The Union Hall on the Newfane Green--one of the loveliest greens in the state, with four striking white clapboard buildings crowned by steeples--was packed and there were reporters, of course, there to cover the debate, which went on for well over an hour. I couldn't find a seat, so I stood in the back between two men who were plainly not "flatlanders." Both of them had long, rough beards and wore heavy boots and coarse wool shirts. I guessed they were loggers.

They listened while an amendment to include Dick Cheney's name in the impeachment resolution was debated and defeated, and while one voter from town said, "If I had my way, Bush wouldn't just be impeached, he'd be sent to Gitmo." Toward the end of the debate, one of the men turned to me and said, "National politics at town meeting. Ain't that some sh**."

The motion passed, unsurprisingly. And with that, most of the people in the building got up and left, even though business remained. One of the men standing next to me asked for the floor. He then read a statement about the problems he'd encountered in trying to get a permit to build a small shed on his property. You hear this lament all the time, especially from old Vermonters: "We've got a zoning board here fighting people like me . . . spending tax dollars to fight taxpayers. I think we need to take back Vermont." At the Newfane town meeting, the outsiders--those who hadn't left already--weren't interested. They had a president to impeach, and they got national coverage.

Sanders released a statement in which he said he "[could] very well understand" the town's impeachment vote, but that "with Republicans controlling both the House and the Senate ... it would be impractical to talk about impeachment." This disappointed some of Sanders's faithful supporters, who believed he could be counted on to make a fight based on the merits, not the prospects of success. Futility, after all, had never held him back before. But now, with his eyes on the Senate prize, Sanders has begun to maneuver in ways that look suspiciously ... political. He declined to support any candidate in the Burlington mayoral race and wound up looking timid when the Progressive-party candidate won. He has also pressured the Progressives against running a candidate for his House seat, since that might help tip the election to the Republicans. (This from a man who, for three decades, routinely shrugged off the charge that he was running "spoiler" campaigns.) Even worse, Sanders has endorsed Peter Welch, the Democratic candidate, who is known to have owned stock in Wal-Mart. The horror.

The man who had written the Newfane impeachment resolution made his disappointment with Sanders clear enough, telling a reporter, "My biggest fear is that he's taking John Kerry's tried and true [strategy] and moving to the middle--and losing." A letter writer to one Vermont newspaper suggested that the state's congressional delegation, including Sanders, had "lost its edge." This, evidently, was too much for Sanders, who--two days after his statement on the Newfane vote--signed on to a bill, introduced in Congress by Michigan Democrat John Conyers, that could lead to impeachment. Sanders made the move without the usual fanfare, and after he had originally called the Conyers effort "impractical."

Still, the Sanders campaign is the purest expression anywhere of the old Progressive ideal. It may strike what appears a merely nostalgic chord--you sometimes expect Sanders to start braying about mankind being crucified on a cross of gold--but it still resonates with millions of voters. Sanders, like any good politician, will run on fears and resentments, and his issues will be trade, loss of jobs, immigration, health care, income disparities, and corruption. Globalization may be inevitable, and it may be a good thing, but it will not be painless; Bernie screams for the people who hurt.

When he makes it to the Senate, he may represent the most insignificant state in the Union, but he will still be one of only 100, and he will have a national voice. His constituency extends way beyond the Green Mountains. Which is why Barack Obama felt obliged to drop in and make nice for an afternoon and why, in his own remarks, Sanders promised, "This small state is going to lead this nation in a new direction."

Mr. Norman writes frequently for National Review Online and other publications, including the Wall Street Journaland The Weekly Standard.