Top Vermont lawyer goes nat'l defending "socialism s***"

By Ted Cohen/Patch.com

A prominent Vermont lawyer who 45 years ago earned his political stripes saluting to a Brooklyn socialist made national headlines Tuesday with a four-letter synopsis of that era.

In an interview with Politico, attorney John Franco of Burlington summarized what a popular Democrat socialist NYC mayor candidate had to prove to overcome former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

“Bernie one time quite famously said, ‘If we don’t plow the streets and fix the roads, the people aren’t going to put up with this socialism shit,’” said John Franco, who served in Sanders’ mayoral administration in the 1980s. “You have a lot of persuasion to do to say, ‘Look we’re not crazy. We have good ideas, and we can run things well.’” - Politico

Franco was assessing the chances of Zohran Mamdani - Bernie's choice for how to ruin a city - to overtake Cuomo in Tuesday's primary polls and go on to the general election.

Politico drafted Franco for its analysis because Mamdani's socialism was being compared to the Bernie Sanders brand.

Sanders, a New York City native, stunned the political world in 1981 when his socialist platform ousted a longtime Democrat mayor in Vermont's largest city.

Sanders, who had lost several elections in the Green Mountain State as a Brooklyn-talking Liberty Union socialist candidate, fooled all the oddsmakers with his first electoral victory as a small-town mayor.

Despite the skeptics, he parlayed the "socialist shit" into several terms in the U.S. House before he made it to the upper chamber, the U.S. Senate, America's most influential political club, at least one of them a hippie-turned-multi-millionaire.

Mamdani showed incredible momentum late in his successful race against the disgraced former New York governor who failed to rise from the ashes after resigning as governor in a sexual-harassment scandal.

But the question Tuesday was whether Mamdani had the Bernie "shit" to be able to sell his government-knows-best, cradle-to-grave platform to voters in the Big Apple.

Mamdani is worth only $200,000 but if he sticks to the Bernie playbook he'll be a millionaire in no time. If socialism is as good to Mamdani as it has been to his pal Bernie he'll end up a rich man owning several houses who employs his relatives by paying them with campaign funds.

Long before Vermont's New-York styled socialist became a twice-unsuccessful presidential candidate, he convinced Burlington voters to remove cars from the main business district in the state's largest city.

The pedestrian-only district is now all but blighted with many vacant storefronts and discarded hypodermic needles.

Socialism has been so good to Burlington that it is now an economic, drug-infested cesspool littered with souvenirs left by drug addicts.

That's Bernie's shit.

And he's laughing all the way to the bank.

Good luck New York.

"If we don’t plow the streets and fix the roads, the people aren’t going to put up with this socialism shit." - John Franco, ex-aide to socialist Bernie Sanders