Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Monday speech at the Democratic National Convention was a calm, controlled and condemnatory takedown of President Donald Trump.
The moment leading up to the online address, however, was also caught on camera, giving viewers an unexpected glimpse at the senator warming up his mouth and mugging for the camera alongside his wife Jane, and at one point even gently bickering with her.
“Is that a terrible thing, to have my hands showing?” Sanders asked Jane, inquiring about his position on the podium and taking his wife’s advice to put his hands down and rely on gestures instead.
The duo then posed for a quick wave to the camera before Sanders shooed his wife away, telling her to “get off the screen.”
“Stand up straight,” Jane ordered at one point.
“Stop it,” her husband shot back, looking as if he’d heard this more than once over the course of their 32-year marriage. “Enough, enough!”
The sassy yet wholesome banter quickly took off on Twitter, with more than one commentator pointing out that in the midst of a Democratic National Convention focused on COVID-19 and Trump’s failings, it was refreshing to witness a rare, unscripted moment between husband and wife.
Sanders met Jane O’Meara Sanders, the woman who would be his second wife, in 1981, as he was running for mayor in Burlington, Vermont. The pair were married in 1988, and Jane quickly became one of her husband’s most important advisers, assisting him in drafting “more than 50 pieces of legislation” in the early ’90s, according to The Washington Post.
Ironically, the pair both grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn, within 15 blocks of each other.