The Christmas season in the year 2000 was filled with extra anticipation.  No one knew what to expect from the President Elect whose victory had the most sober observers of public affairs emptying their caches of superlatives to describe what might be in store for the nation.  One Liberal wag penned that it was an event as momentous as Caesar crossing the Rubicon.  A Conservative former Congressman predicted that every value of his party was in play.  Everyone had an opinion on the impending Administration of President Bernie Sanders.

And President Sanders did not disappoint anyone.  The first year of his Administration was on the surface quiet and generally rated as a modest failure.  We now know that he was already busily laying the foundation for what would be the most extraordinary eight years in the history of the Republic.  He quietly engaged a sweeping reform of foreign policy.  He let it be known that the “fascismo” as he called it in Oval office meetings, that bundle of tyrants and dictatorships that had been bound together by 50 years of American foreign policy, would be unbound and left to fall into a “loose and useless pile of sticks,” as he so colorfully said in private meetings.  He let it be known that only legitimate democratic societies and their supporters were welcome in his White House.

He transferred authority over anti-terrorism efforts from the Pentagon to a panel of international experts.  He also transferred the budgets of the myriad intelligence agencies to the control of these experts, with the intention of replacing the “militarized” approach to international discord with humanitarian and Liberal Democratic objectives.   There was enormous opposition to this in the ranks of the uniformed military and the intelligence community alike.  President Sanders used a heavy hand in having his way.   Several high ranking generals were forced into early retirement.  He even sent his vice-President to the CIA, to let those in charge as well as those at the level of intelligence analysis know that opposition to President Sanders policies was “a career decision.”  Chris Matthews would later chortle “He made them an offer they couldn’t refuse.”  

In his second year in office President Sanders took steps visible to all observers.  The Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, had been continuously stating publicly that the disappearance of the Federal deficit as engineered by Bill Clinton was a danger to overall economic growth.  Sanders deftly took Greenspan’s warning and used it to promote his “Emergency Policy to Energize Commerce And Capitalism” (EPECAC).  He slashed taxes for those earning $250,000 or less by what would eventually amount to an average 60% reduction.  He also levied fees on financial and Wall Street income of such magnitude that as the end of his first term approached, President Sanders was able to allow every citizen to join Medicare regardless of age by Executive Order, without the need to ask Congress for additional funding.  In a tribute to the skill with which the President enacted these initiatives, the International Federation of Chess Grandmasters took the unusual step of awarding the 2003 Bobby Fischer Strategic Brilliance Award to an unrated player, Bernie Sanders.

In the six years that followed the initiation of the EPECAC program, President Sanders expended over $2 trillion dollars for everything from health insurance to infrastructure improvement to free university educations.  As one looks back on this time, the numbers speak for themselves.  Unemployment was no longer reported because any number above zero was within the range of statistical error.  The crime rate dropped to just above Luxembourg.  Three million new family farms were created.  The alternate energy industry in the U.S. became so successful that 28 times in those six years trading on energy stocks was suspended because of the volatility – upwards – of stock in these businesses.  The list is as long as it is dizzying.

As the end of his second term approached, there was a national clamor to allow President Sanders to remain in office.  The debate among Constitutional experts and political leaders was deadlocked when the religious Right announced that a new translation of the Apocrypha revealed that the Rapture was actually a time of material security – and that it had arrived.  This overwhelmed public sentiment and Bernie Sanders was allowed to serve another term, with the caveat that the Inauguration would be moved from January 21 to December 25.  And so as we now say in the U.S.A. – Merry Christmas.   

(One can dream can’t they?)