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What Would A Sanders Presidency Look Like?
What would happen if Bernie Sanders, a curmudgeonly Independent Senator from Vermont, actually became the leader of the free world?
So imagine: It's Inauguration Day, 2017. Sanders is putting his 75-year-old hand on the on the Bible—for the first time, it's just the Old Testament. His grey flyaways are flying away in the wind off the National Mall. Everyone around him is smiling, but Bernie is the face of grouchy stoicism. He's about to become the first avowedly socialist president in United States history and he has work to do.
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To find out, we called up the political science department of Middlebury College, a private liberal arts school in Sanders' home state of Vermont. Department Chair Bert Johnson, and professor Matthew Dickinson, who writes the blog Presidential Power, have been following Sanders' career as closely as anyone, and they were kind enough to bring us up to speed.
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Sanders is known for not being very friendly. Could that make his job hard?
Dickinson: This guy knows how to glad-hand. He knows how to get things done. Obviously his Senate record is not sterling in terms of lasting accomplishments, but we shouldn't dismiss the fact that Bernie likes to present himself as the man of the people. He's also an experienced politician.
Johnson: People give him a lot less credit for being pragmatic than he deserves, both when he was mayor of Burlington in the 1980s, and then also in Congress, but especially in the Senate. He has proven, at least on a few issues, that he's willing and able to work with people on the opposite side of the aisle on things like in the Senate, for example: veterans' affairs.
You know his career pretty well. Is he hiding anything from us?
Dickinson: The thing about Bernie that his stood him so well with local voters is his authenticity. He is who he presents—there's not a lot of guile there.
Bernie Can Be On The Oregon Ballot:
Good news for supporters of Bernie Sanders — he can appear on the 2016 Democratic Primary Election ballot, even though the Vermont U.S. Senator is officially registered as an independent.
Oregon Secretary of State Jeanne P. Atkins made the announcement Friday after consulting with the Oregon Department of Justice in response to questions raised by reporters and others. One state elections law says candidates who want to appear on a party’s ballot must be registered with that party at least 180 days before the filing deadline. But another law says the Secretary of State has sole discretion to decide who appears on which party’s Presidential ballots in primary elections.
“Under Oregon law, a candidate for President can be listed on the primary ballot if the Secretary of State determines that the person’s candidacy is ‘generally advocated or is recognized in national news media,’ or if the candidate obtains sufficient signatures on a nominating petition from voters throughout Oregon,” the Secretary of State’s Office said in a press release.
But that does not guarantee Sanders will appear on the Democratic ballot, however. The press release says Secretary of State Jeanne Atkins will not release her list of candidates for another four months.
Bernie In Minneapolis:
Taking his outsider message into the heart of the Democratic establishment, Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, challenged hundreds of the party’s leaders on Friday to embrace his candidacy, warning that the huge crowds of supporters he has drawn may not vote for Democratic candidates in 2016 unless he is at the top of the ticket.
Mr. Sanders, who has been gaining ground in the polls, was warmly complimentary at first in addressing the Democratic National Committee’s summer meeting here, crediting the party faithful for fighting on behalf of working people and low-income Americans.
But he soon turned pointed, suggesting that the Democrats’ electoral losses in 2014 – when Republicans won control of the Senate – could be repeated if the party nominated a traditional politician.
“My friends, the Republican Party did not win the midterm election in November: We lost that election,” Mr. Sanders said. “We lost because voter turnout was abysmally, embarrassingly low, and millions of working people, young people and people of color gave up on politics as usual and they stayed home. That’s a fact.”
As the audience sat largely in silence, Mr. Sanders continued: “In my view, Democrats will not retain the White House, will not regain the Senate or the U.S. House, will not be successful in dozens of governor races across the country, unless we generate excitement and momentum and produce a huge voter turnout.”
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That pivot to the issue of income inequality appeared to rally some audience members, who increasingly cheered Mr. Sanders’s comments as his speech went on. His call for “a political movement which is prepared to take on the billionaire class,” for instance, led a clutch of Democrats to begin cheering “Bernie, Bernie!”
KARE 11 (video @ link):
Some of the loudest and longest applause and cheering of the day at the Democratic National Committee Summer Meeting was for Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. The self-described Socialist Democrat entered the 2016 Presidential race as the Democratic alternative to Hillary Clinton.
Sanders has been drawing large crowds as he has campaigned across the country, tens of thousands at some venues. Chants of "Bernie! Bernie!" interrupted his 15-minute presentation at the Minneapolis Hilton Hotel on Friday.
Sanders said the enthusiasm generated by his campaign "did not happen with politics as usual."
"When Wall Street collapsed because of their greed and illegal behavior, the American people bailed them out. Now it is their turn to help the Middle Class of this country," Sanders told the delegates. "In this day of Superpacs and huge campaign contributions, I am very proud to tell you that our average campaign contribution is $31.20. This is a people's campaign."
More From Politico:
Bernie Sanders, a self-declared democratic socialist whose insurgency candidacy has shaken up the 2016 race and given front-runner Hillary Clinton a shot of competition, walked into the den of the Democratic Party establishment Friday and delivered a blunt message: You’ve been doing it all wrong.
“When I announced my candidacy less than four months ago, I think that it’s fair to say that few took our campaign seriously,” the independent Vermont senator, who is not registered as a Democrat, told a crowd packed with his supporters.
“But a lot has changed in these last few months,” he said, going on to detail the grass-roots enthusiasm his campaign has seen on the trail, drawing “some of the largest crowds of this campaign, including young and working-class people.
Then he told the assembled delegates at the Democratic National Committee’s summer meeting in Minneapolis exactly how the party, of which he is not a member, came to lose last November’s midterm elections.
“The Democrats lost that election because voter turnout was abysmally low, and millions of working people, people of color and young people gave up on ‘politics as usual’ and stayed home,” he declared.
Bernies Right Again:
Fact Checker: Was Bernie Sanders right in his burn of paid family leave
“First of all, we have got to end the international embarrassment of being the only major country on earth that does not guarantee family and medical leave to all working people. You know what that means? That means in Iowa today and in Vermont today there is a woman who is giving birth, and if she doesn’t have adequate income she has to go back to work in three days, five days or eight days.”
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Conclusion
Using the G-20 nations as a standard, Sanders correctly stated the United States is the only major country without a guarantee of paid medical and family leave. It should be noted, though, that not all these countries offer full salary during a leave.
His hypothetical statement easily could be true. A mother without adequate income or short-term disability insurance likely would find it hard to take several weeks of unpaid leave. We give Sanders’ claim a B.
An Update On The Enough Is Enough Rally:
Here is the latest news about the Facebook-driven grassroots movement proposing a huge march on Washington this fall to support the presidential candidacy of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)
I wrote in a column on Monday that advocates for the D.C. rally planned to present the idea to the Sanders campaign when their Facebook page collecting RSVP’s for the event reached 100,000.
The number of Sanders supporters who RSVP’d rose from 87,000 on Monday to 100,000 by mid-week and by Friday morning had climbed to 108,000. The grassroots activists spearheading the D.C. rally proposal formally presented the idea to the Sanders presidential campaign in a conference call late Wednesday. After the conference call, Charlie Ryan, a leading organizer of the movement to hold the Washington rally, told me: “I thought the call went well. There was interest in learning what the vision for the event is, what benefits we see from such an event and enthusiasm for our efforts but they weren’t in a position to make any commitments.”
Vermontors Prepared To Invade NH:
If there’s a Bernie Sanders rally in Washington, D.C., David Reed promises he’ll be there – even if he has to hitchhike from his Putney home.
At a rally Thursday night in Brattleboro, Reed demonstrated his dedication by bringing along a box of green T-shirts he had emblazoned with social media hashtags supporting the Vermont senator’s presidential campaign: “#EnoughisEnough, Washington, D.C., #BernieorBust.”
“This election is too damn important to not be talking about it every day,” Reed declared.
Reed may have been the most vociferous attendee of a “Windham County for Bernie” rally, but he had plenty of company: About 70 people crowded into a multipurpose community room at 118 Elliot St. to talk about ways to support Sanders’ 2016 Democratic presidential effort.
In a place where red “Bernie” bumper stickers are common, those who attended weren’t interested in taking home campaign signs for their yards. Instead, they sought volunteers and organizational help to carry their message into neighboring New Hampshire – specifically, Cheshire County and the city of Keene – for that state’s influential February primary election.
The 'Mad As Hell' Campaign:
The good news is that the 2016 presidential race has become a “mad-as-hell” campaign. The better news is: Bernie Sanders will win it.
Campaigns of the mad-as-hell type are rare in our American politics. The past five presidential election seasons—stretching from Bill Clinton’s victory’s in 1996 re-election campaign to Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012—were business-as-usual affairs, leading to relatively modest tacks to the left or the right. Such election seasons change the parties’ priorities and the themes that dominate our political discussions in fundamental ways. The electorate decides, as the protagonist of the 1976 movie Network did, that it isn’t going to take this anymore.
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But it’s Bernie Sanders, not Donald Trump, who represents the future, and it’s Sanders who is channeling the pent-up, reformist energy that will reshape our politics over the coming decades. He is, as David Shribman wrote recently for RealClearPolitics, “a man on fire,” and his message is perfectly in tune with the times. “This is where a good portion of the Democratic Party is today—proud of electing Barack Obama but disappointed he didn’t go far enough,” Shribman writes, “skeptical of trade pacts, fired with revulsion about police excesses, convinced economic mobility is more a phrase from the American past than a touchstone of the American future, wary of half-steps on the economy and ritualistic bows to progressive issues.”
In other words: mad as hell.
That doesn’t mean that Sanders will win the nomination, much less the presidency. Nor does it mean that he’ll mount a third-party bid—something he has promised not to do. What it means is that he is galvanizing energies on the Left that can’t be contained by the party establishments, and whose effects will unfold over several election cycles.