As Democrats took their roll call vote of the states at their convention on Tuesday, one delegate from Democrats Abroad got to make his own moving speech. Bernie Sanders’s 82-year-old brother Larry, who lives in the UK, shared a tribute to his parents and his little brother “Bernard.”
Bernie Sanders’s brother gave a tearful tribute to Bernie and their parents at the DNC
Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.
“I want to bring before this convention the names of our parents: Eli Sanders, Dorothy Glassberg Sanders,” Larry said, through tears. “They did not have easy lives, and they died young. They would be immensely proud of their son and his accomplishments. They loved him.”
Larry continued: “They loved the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt and would be especially proud that Bernard is renewing that vision. It is with enormous pride that I cast my vote for Bernie Sanders.”
The candidate has sometimes alluded to his parents’ difficult lives, and how they inspired his own politics. “My mother’s dream was to own her own home, and she never achieved that,” Bernie Sanders told me during a 2014 interview. “And my father never made much money, his whole life. He was never unemployed. We were never hungry by any means. But money was always a major issue within our family. It caused a lot of tension between my mother and my dad.” As a result, Sanders continued, “I became very aware of the importance of economics and what it does to people’s families.”
Interestingly, Larry Sanders is himself involved in British politics, and volunteers as health spokesperson for the UK Green Party, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
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By Dylan Matthews
