Outsider or Insider? How Bernie Sanders Learned to Walk the Line

Bernie Sanders was elected to the House in 1990 after branding himself an outsider and defying calls to join a Democratic Party he had long bashed as “ideologically bankrupt.”

Nonetheless, Mr. Sanders, a democratic socialist who won Vermont’s lone House seat as an independent, quickly sank into a funk when Democratic conservatives circulated a list of nasty things he had said about them over the years — ostracizing him from their caucus and blocking his committee assignments for a few nerve-frazzling days.