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Bernie Is Building A Real Campaign Organization:
CNN's Suzanne Malveaux caught up with Sanders following his headquarters opening in Ottumwa, Iowa. In an office filled with "Bernie" t-shirts, posters, yard signs, and some "Cats for Bernie" pins, he acknowledged that his support during what's been dubbed the "summer of discontent" has outpaced his political infrastructure.
"So what we are doing now is hiring on people. We have now dozens of people on the ground here in Iowa. Great crowds are wonderful, but that does not necessarily translate into votes. People need to be organized and know how to come out and participate in the caucuses," Sanders said.
Sanders said his campaign is not only hiring in Iowa, but also in New Hampshire and elsewhere, creating an organization structure to handle volunteers.
"We're doing it all over this country. Creating a political infrastructure with organizers, with volunteers, to make sure that supporters come out and vote. And that's how I think we're going to win this thing. We will be outspent -- let me just say this -- I know we will be outspent by our opponents. We don't have a Super PAC. We're dependent on small, individual contributors. But I think the grassroots movement that you saw out there -- that's what's going to win it for us."
The Real Deal:
Leaders of Bernie Sanders’ campaign said Friday the Vermont senator’s rise to the top of many Democratic presidential polls has surprised even them.
And in New Hampshire, they said, the challenge has been to build a campaign organization fast enough to keep up with his surge in order to parlay enthusiasm into votes.
A top advisor also said during a media conference call that while polls now show that most voters believe Hillary Clinton has a far better chance than Sanders of becoming the nominee of the Democratic Party and winning the general election, that perception will change as Sanders’ rise continues.
The Sanders campaign now has 37 full-time staffers in the Granite State, has opened five offices and has three more set to open in the coming weeks, state campaign director Julia Barnes said, calling it “meteoric organizational growth.”
Sanders’s crowds at events have been so large that the campaign has been forced to move many of them to larger venues.
Attack Of The Proxies:
Stumping for Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, a trip partly paid by Clinton's campaign, Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy did more than defend the former secretary of State's email use -- he criticized Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ record on guns.
In Des Moines the same week, Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro, whose travel expenses were paid for by the Clinton campaign, knocked Sanders for a lack of outreach to Latinos.
And Thursday, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has endorsed Clinton, drew another unflattering contrast between the top Democrats in the race. “I don’t think there’s any comparison between Hillary Clinton’s credentials and qualifications and positions, and Bernie Sanders,” Cuomo told reporters. “I do not see that as a close call.”
Clinton’s campaign, it appears, is unleashing the hounds. While the wounded front-runner is ignoring her competition in the primary race altogether -- she still does not utter Sanders’ name on the campaign trail – Brooklyn is paying the travel costs for proxies who are using their appearances in the early-voting states to criticize the surging senator.
Sanders Supporters Strike Back:
San Antonio Congressman Joaquín Castro is taking it on the chin from a hometown political segment that would usually back him.
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"I want to say this in all frankness. I didn't come here to knock any of the candidates, but Sen. Sanders has not reached out to the Hispanic caucus in Congress, has not reached out to me," Castro said, according to the Texas Tribune. "I've never met the gentleman. [He] has not visited Texas or the Rio Grande Valley."
That got Sanders supporters in SA riled up – to say the least.
If they were looking for a reason to publicly decry Castro, he handed it over to them.
The Sanders movement in the Alamo City is still a nascent one. It's got around 300 active members, many of them Latinos. Around 50 of them plan to let their feelings on Castro known by protesting outside his office in downtown SA on Monday morning.
A press release announcing the protest said the action is being taken "in response to his recent attack on presidential candidate Bernie Sanders."
Sanders Deserves The Latino Vote:
Yes! Vote Bernie Sanders in the presidential primary. What better way to show Clinton that we are strong and united against anyone who dares to use our community as a political tool or as a source of hatred.
Why Bernie Sanders? Because he was part of the Civil Rights Movement.
Latinos without a doubt, benefited from this movement.
Bernie Sanders has always been consistent, making right choices that protect humanity and preserve democracy.
Bernie Sanders has been consistently championing for issues that directly affect the Latino community.
With Bernie Sanders as president, America will once again understand that the president is elected to serve the people, he is not there to fall down to his knee first in front of corporate CEOs and begin licking their boots.
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The challenge for the candidates is to strike the right balances between humanity and the rule of law. Bernie Sanders understands this better than all the other candidates running for president.
Sanders Speaks About Latinos (and Trump):
Bernie Sanders picks the Muscatine Boxing Club to throw some jabs at Donald Trump.
"Undocumented people did not cause the greed and activities on Wall Street," he said.
The Senator from Vermont calls it absurd, racist and wrong to point a finger at Latinos.
"Let us not blame undocumented people in this country for all of these problems," he said.
Sanders is courting the Hispanic vote before 30 invited guests in Muscatine on Friday morning.
"He's authentic," said Maria Bribriesco, a Sanders supporter. "He's sincere. He's like that, and I wanted everybody to know him."
Latinos comprise nearly 17% of the population in Muscatine County.
At this event, they're connecting with the candidate.
Sanders Speaks To Native Americans:
Relations between the federal government and Native Americans have been a “disaster from day one,” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said Friday, but the presidential hopeful told members of the Meskwaki tribal community he would “be so proud to welcome you into the White House.”
“In the short term, probably, my Senate office,” Sanders added to laughter from his audience of more than 200 people at the Meskwaki Community Tribal Center.
Sanders, the first presidential candidate to hold a campaign event on the Meskwaki settlement west of Tama-Toledo, promised to work to improve relations with tribal governments
“Without going into history that many of you know better than I,” Sanders said that on many Native American reservations the poverty rate “is sometimes off the charts, health care and education are inadequate, unemployment is extraordinarily high.”
The federal government has to work with tribal governments to address those issues, but Sanders said that he wants tribal communities to be making decisions rather than the federal government dictating policy
More:
But he also addressed Native American concerns directly, invoking tribal respect for the land in his call for action on climate change and answering questions on the federal-tribal relations.
“Native American people, perhaps more than any other people in our country, have always known the relationship and the importance of treating nature with respect,” Sanders said, to rising applause from a crowd roughly evenly divided between white and Native American attendees.
He went on, “Native Americans forever have understood that we gain sustenance, we gain life from nature. You destroy nature, you destroy life and that is what we’re doing globally right now and that has got to change.”
In response to a question on the relationship between the government and Native American tribes, Sanders called for federal action to address economic, education and health care issues on reservations and other tribal lands – but with local autonomy.
Bernies Revolutionary Rhetoric Resonates:
In theory, Sanders’s campaign for the presidential nomination in 2016 breaks all the rules of modern politics. He is angry, dishevelled and making no attempt to soften his message for the tiny handful of TV cameras that have shown up.
This unabashed “democratic socialist” from Brooklyn via Vermont, which he represents as an independent US senator, talks about class, corruption and the pathological greed of the rich. Yet the middle-aged, midwestern audience greeting him here in one of the most conservative states in the country cannot get enough of it. “Welcome to the political revolution,” Sanders says to another loud cheer.
The large, adoring crowds are not new. Sanders first captured national attention this summer by filling venues with up to 20,000 supporters in liberal bastions like Portland, Oregon.
A succession of opinion polls showed him catching and then overtaking the establishment frontrunner Hillary Clinton in the early primary state of New Hampshire – injecting sudden drama into a race that most pundits had initially decided was barely worth following compared with the excitement of the enormous Republican field, currently dominated by businessman and TV personality Donald Trump.
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But what is new is the sight of Sanders challenging Clinton in Iowa, the first state to choose a candidate – in caucuses held on 1 February – and the scene of her humiliating defeat by Barack Obama in 2008.
Bernie Joins The Picket Line:
Sen. Bernie Sanders, who's been a fierce voice for the working class on the presidential campaign trail, put some action behind his words Friday, joining a picket line outside a factory here.
Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, marched with workers at the Penford Products plant, which produces potato starches, and where the union that represents them is locked in a bitter contact dispute with a new out-of-state owner.
"We are sick and tired of the war against working families," Sanders told scores of workers who gathered in a park next to the plant following the informational picket.
Auditing Sanders Coverage:
Many Times readers have been asking me, over months now, to examine the paper’s coverage of Bernie Sanders’s presidential run. It’s even reached the point where, in comments to my blog posts, on completely unrelated topics, readers are complaining about what they see as dismissive coverage and asking that the matter get my attention. (See the top reader-recommended comment by Robert Roth here.)
“Stop the media blackout on candidates who are not Donald Trump or Secretary Hillary Clinton,” Roswell Colt Deutscher wrote in an email to me. And Chris Switzer, in an email criticizing Sanders coverage earlier in the summer, wrote: “I’ve enjoyed my subscription to the Times but I would like to see better coverage of the issues, less coverage of the personalities, and a little bit of parity among the candidates.”
This post is just to say that I’ve heard your requests and over the next few days, with the help of my assistant, Joumana Khatib, I will be doing a content analysis of the coverage. I hope to publish a post soon, letting readers know what I’ve found in terms of quantity, placement and tone.
Sanders Is Going Back To South Carolina:
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders – the Vermont independent hoping to catch up with Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton ahead of next year’s presidential primary elections – will visit Rock Hill next Saturday for a campaign rally at Winthrop University.
Sanders will appear at Winthrop with Cornel West, prominent political activist, former Harvard professor, and member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Sanders was elected to his U.S. Senate seat in Vermont as an independent in 2006. Before that, he served as Vermont’s representative in the U.S. House for 16 years.
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National polls show Sanders is behind Clinton but gaining support in some key primary states. He held events in Columbia, Charleston, Greenville and Sumter last month.
Those wishing to attend Sanders’ event should register at berniesanders.com.