Bernie Sander has a secret, an article in Politico magazine by Michel Kruse.

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Riggs said she was just doing her job and that she had done nothing illegal.

Sanders in his Outsider book devoted nearly three pages to the episode.

“She contacted my ex-wife, Deborah Messing, from whom I’ve been divorced for over 25 years,” he wrote. “Deborah contacted her friend and neighbor, Anthony Pollina, who used to work with me, and Anthony contacted me. Deborah and I then talked.

“Clearly, Riggs was hoping to find a disgruntled ex-wife who would spill the beans on her former husband. But that was not going to happen with Deborah, who has been remarried for over 20 years. While we don’t see each other very often, we remain good friends, so Deborah told Riggs where to get off. Her sentiments were reflected all over Vermont.”

Sanders cited a chunk of an article from the Associated Press written by Christopher Graff, who at the time was the AP’s longtime Montpelier bureau chief (and whose son, Garrett Graff, is the editor of POLITICO Magazine).

“What may be considered fair and proper in other states leaves Vermonters apoplectic,” Graff had written. “It is against this background that Vermonters viewed Susan Sweetser’s hiring of a private eye to probe Sanders’ background. Such a hiring would not even gain a passing mention in most states these days. It is accepted practice.”

Sweetser, seeing that this attempt at a thorough vetting of Sanders had backfired, denounced the woman her campaign had hired. “I want to make it clear to the people of Vermont that Cathy Riggs went too far,” she said. Too late. Sanders trounced Sweetser, winning the election by more than 20 percentage points.

Sanders went on to win another election in 1998, and another in 2000, and another in 2002, and another in 2004, and was elected to the Senate in 2006. In 2012, 40 years after he got 2.2 percent of the vote in his first bid for the Senate, he was reelected to that seat with 71 percent. “He’s very trustworthy,” said Donna Kaplan, who gave him $20 when he was running for governor in 1976. “What Bernie is saying is the truth,” said Bob McKee, who gave him $100 during that campaign. “And he’s never wavered,” said Betty Clark, a friend from his time with Liberty Union.

Over the last three and a half decades, occasional personality profiles have appeared; invariably, they have focused on his socialism and his looks – his unfussy clothes, his uncombed hair.

“I do not like personality profiles,” he told the New York Times Magazinein 2007.

This past May, in Burlington, he announced he was running for president on a blue-sky day on the bank of Lake Champlain. Some 5,000 people came to see him do it. “This campaign is not about Bernie Sanders,” he said in his speech. In speeches in Denver, in Wisconsin, in Iowa and in Maine, he has said the same thing over and over. “Not about me.”

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/bernie-sanders-vermont-119927_Page4.html#.VZ99bUr3arV