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Feb 15, 2016 Web Exclusive By John Everhart

Bill Maher once called political cartoonist/writer Ted Rall on air, to paraphrase, “the man with 10 pound balls,” after he had the temerity to call George W. Bush an “Illegitimate” president weeks after 9/11, and excoriate Bush’s decision to bomb Afghanistan. To put it mildly, Ted Rall, while an extreme liberal, isn’t a craven mouthpiece for the American left. He calls it as he sees it, and always manages to piss someone off in the process.

This alone makes Rall’s Bernie bio/graphic novel a captivating and essential read. Rall isn’t easy on Sanders at all, and vehemently disagrees with many of the foreign policy decisions he’d carry out if elected president, most notably nearly carte blanche support of Israel and a near mirror image of Barack Obama’s stance on drones.

Yet, Rall clearly respects Sanders, and his takeaway from his research and interview with him are that of a man with the courage to stick with his New Deal redux convictions. He portrays Sanders as a fervently private man who adamantly refuses to inject tawdry personal details of his life into his campaign, instead focusing on the issues he brings a Stanley Kubrick-esque level of singular obsessiveness—namely radical income redistribution and Medicare for all within the United States, topics previously anathema to much of the left that have become increasingly fashionable given Sanders’ implausibly meteoric rise in the Democratic primaries.

What’s perhaps most astonishing about this book, aside from the fact that it can be read in less than an hour, a necessity perhaps in our ADHD addled culture, is how neatly it complements Sanders’ travails throughout the present primary race. Rall doesn’t give Sanders a free pass by any stretch, but was nonetheless impressed with his honesty, humor, and the fact that he legitimately cares about the plight of the proletariat. He also, perhaps to Sanders’ mortification, offers deeply personal details regarding Sanders’ early life, which humanize him in a manner that’s downright touching—the palpable tension between Sanders’ mother and father over the route to attaining the classic American Dream is thick enough to cut with a knife, and heartbreaking at moments.

Rall’s never one to be starstruck, and he depicts Sanders as just a man—one who cares deeply about his country and the downtrodden and legitimately wants to instill “hope and change” into a disillusioned electorate. Is it possible for Sanders to actually win such a rigged game? Rall doesn’t posit that he has a great chance, but much has changed since the writing of this book months ago. And if you’re a nihilist who thinks we’re essentially fucked as a species no matter who will be sitting in the Oval Office come January of 2017, Bernie will at very least remind you of a time when you saw a glimmer of hope. Those glimmers sparkle like coal compressed into diamonds throughout Rall’s superb book. (catalog.sevenstories.com/products/bernie)

Author rating: 8/10