Setting Bernie Sanders Apart From the Debate Field: A Palpable Sense of Conviction; NYTimes
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A review of Mr. Sanders’s campaign debates — from his early days as a no-shot radical through his tenures as a crafty, independent small-city mayor, a congressman and then a junior senator from Vermont — shows that his economic inequality message has remained strikingly unchanged. And it reveals a compelling, highly confident debating style in which Mr. Sanders wields his accomplishments and command of policy, but mostly a palpable sense of conviction and outrage, to set him apart on stages where allotted speaking times and parsed positions are the norm.
He has also improved over the decades. Mr. Sanders has learned to suppress his exasperated expressions and eye rolls, speak in sound bites and use humor to make his arguments more digestible. He has an unstilted conversational style, packed with matter-of-fact questions asked and then answered. (“Is that a woman’s issue? I think it is.”) He will jab at an opponent’s weaknesses, dodge when necessary and, perhaps most remarkably, given his cantankerous nature, compliment his questioners.
“He can be adept at using sarcasm and irony as an attack style, but his primary voice is declarative,” said Greg Guma, a Vermont reporter and author who knew Mr. Sanders so well he played him during debate preparation for Gov. Madeleine Kunin, a Democrat whom Mr. Sanders, an independent, unsuccessfully challenged in 1986.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/us/politics/setting-bernie-sanders-apart-from-the-field-a-palpable-sense-of-conviction.html?_r=2
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