Two Guys From Brooklyn: The Bernie Sanders Interview

One’s from Flatbush, the other Crown Heights. Now, the Hollywood director and the senator from Vermont he supports for president meet for the first time to talk free education, guns, a certain ‘demagogue’ (you get one guess) and Obama’s legacy on the eve of the crucial New York primary.

- Spike Lee

It's the last night of March, and there are hundreds of people lined up on the sidewalk outside St. Mary's Park in the Bronx. The rainbow crowd, mostly under 30 but with representation from every generation (and based on the packed subway on the way here, every borough), is buzzing with anticipation. Some 18,500 supporters are gathering on this unseasonably mild evening to see Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders speak at his first big New York rally, and even though he's a long shot to win the state's Democratic primary April 19, the mood is celebratory.

On the sidewalk outside the park, a man in a Donald Trump mask holds a sign offering foam noodle whacks for $3, and two eager pint-size activists are gleefully whacking away. At the entrance, everyone submits calmly to Secret Service inspections, including a young woman in a college sweatshirt who sets off the metal detector ("I have a lot of piercings," she explains). And inside there's an energetic sense of mission pervading the crowd — along with the unmistakable whiff of marijuana. ("Smell the Bern," jokes one journalist in the casually cordoned-off press area, and it sounds like it's not the first time he's used this line at a Sanders event.)

This is what 74-year-old self-proclaimed "Democratic socialist" Bernie Sanders' political revolution looks like in New York, a must-win for him in what most still see as his quixotic bid to arrest the inevitability of Hillary Clinton's selection as the Democratic president­ial nominee.