Sounds familiar?
Bernie Sanders will face a political challenger running to the left who blames him for Hillary's defeat.
Sanders' record of winning with landslide margins in Vermont has scared off would-be Democratic opponents since his first Senate campaign over a decade ago.
But on Friday, the former 2016 presidential hopeful drew an opponent for his expected re-election campaign next year.
Jon Svitavsky, a homeless advocate who has never held public office, tore into Sanders for undercutting Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party during last year's presidential primaries.
“I hold him absolutely, centrally responsible for Donald Trump being president,” Svitavsky told NBC News, expressing a view held by other Clinton loyalists. “That's my number-one issue.”
He said that within hours of “soft-launching” his campaign, he had already heard from thousands of people across the country who want to donate or volunteer. “There's a lot of anger out there in my party against Bernie,” Svitavsky said.
It's a clever approach. Harness some of the Hillary Defeat anger that is floating free out there. And turn it against Bernie.
Svitavsky has a history with the Great Socialist 1 Percenter Hope.
Svitavsky, who calls himself "a bona fide, strong, left-wing Christian liberal," says he shares many of Sanders' political views — if anything, he adds, "I'm more liberal than Bernie"— but he is no fan of Sanders' conduct, calling him "a vicious politician. So many good words, but so arrogant."
Svitavsky directed the Burlington Emergency Shelter, which refused entry to anyone drunk or on drugs, and required them to seek help or find work. By his account, his shelter ran into opposition from then-Burlington mayor Sanders, who was — again, by Svitavsky's account — opposed to the Emergency Shelter's stance against drugs and alcohol. The Sanders' administration eventually set up a shelter called the Waystation, which placed no conditions on entry and resulted, according to Svitavsky, in an abrupt increase in the city's homeless population.
"I became very disillusioned with Sanders," Svitavsky says.
Bernie is on record as opposing charity. And Svitasky's organizing appears to have been more useful than Sanders' filmstrips. Or, for that matter, his entire Senate career.
Svitavsky admires Sanders for "standing for the little person, and not being afraid to stand against power and money. Wonderful, wonderful rhetoric, but he's sponsored and passed three bills in his time in Congress, and two of them were renaming post offices."
Fact check: True.