Outside the Auditorium Theatre on Monday shortly before midnight, a few Chicago police officers circled a shaggy middle-aged man gripping an acoustic guitar. Lounging in a chair, the hippie had been performing on the Congress Parkway sidewalk. The cops ordered him to pack up and go.
But if Trump’s rally felt like a political Altamont, Sanders’s event just three days later might as well have been Woodstock. I’m not saying that just because notoriously crunchy Jerry Greenfield, cofounder of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, was in attendance. Thousands of Sanders supporters, many clad in blue, queued up early underneath the el tracks along Wabash. When those in line were told that the auditorium’s capacity of 3,985 people had been reached, some continued to chant “Bernie! Bernie!”
