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Boston Area College Students Felt The Bern:
It seems like Boston-area college students are “feeling the Bern.”
At a packed Boston rally on Saturday, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders spoke boldly about issues including wealth and income inequality, and free tuition at public colleges to an enthusiastic, overflowing crowd filled with college students and Millennials.
“I do not represent the agenda of the billionaire class or corporate America and I don’t want their vote,” Sanders said to the more than 20,000 attendees. “We are running a people’s campaign. And while the millionaires and billionaires have more money than we do we have something that they don’t have – look around this room!”
Luis Castro, a sophomore at Boston University, said this was his first political rally, and he liked everything Sanders had to say.
“Bernie spoke about everything I believe in,” he said. “Campaign finance reform, criminal justice reform, education. He knows who his constituency is and that’s why I support him.”
More attendee reactions:
Several attendees said they were impressed with Sanders’ ideas and they will continue to support him.
Grove Harris, 57, of Cambridge, said income inequality needs to be addressed and Sanders is the candidate who will do it.
“His values are in the right place,” she said. “He is practical about economic change and has got the big picture square in mind.”
Nadia Noormohamed, 22, is a student at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, and said she looks forward to seeing youth participate in the primary vote.
“If he can win the primary then he can win the election,” she said. “It’s not just about coming to rallies and posting on social media. It’s about getting out the vote.”
Maura Embler, 49, of Woburn, attended with her family and said she saw Sanders speak in Washington before he announced his candidacy for president.
“I will support him at the primary with my vote,” she said. “I’ll continue to spread the word. It’s exciting because I have been waiting my whole life for someone who is as well spoken as him. I hope he can get past the primaries.”
From WBUR:
Liam Geary, a music producer from Pembroke, was one of many young adults who came by train to hear Sanders. The 21-year-old said he feels the American economic system is broken.
“I think that the youth is really set up to fail, where if you decide to go to school you’re going to be left with a crushing, staggering amount of debt, and there’s not a lot of jobs for kids that are just freshly graduated, and the only jobs are unpaid internships, which isn’t practical when it comes to paying back your student loans, which is why I dropped out of college,” Geary said.
Geary, an independent voter, said he fully supports Sanders. The 74-year-old U.S. Senator from Vermont is officially an Independent, but caucuses with the Democrats.
In his address Saturday night, Sanders promised to push for free tuition at all public universities and for people to be able to refinance their student loans.
“What we are doing is pulling the rug out from under these young people, and we are harming the future of America, because we need to capitalize on the best intellects that we can, regardless of the income of their families,” Sanders said.
Bernie Is Only A Radical By Modern Standards:
Ever since Jimmy Carter, it has been evident that much of the Democratic electorate, and for that matter much of the country, is more progressive in its core values than what Democratic presidents have been offering. As big money has crowded out grass-roots democracy, the policies that people crave are simply not on offer.
Go back through the history of the Democratic Party primaries for the past half-century, and look what happened to progressives. In 2004, Howard Dean rallied the popular hunger for someone "from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," but he turned out to be a flawed candidate.
Paul Wellstone? Died in a plane crash. Bobby Kennedy? Assassinated. Fred Harris and Mo Udall, both progressives who ran in 1976, crowded each other out. As politics has been captured by elites, we have not had a rendezvous of the right leader with the right moment.
Meanwhile, the American economy has turned viciously against ordinary people. Banks, corporations, and the one percent have more power than ever, political as well as economic.
So there is a pent-up demand for a candidate who can articulate popular frustrations. The fact that a 74-year-old, self-described socialist transplant from Brooklyn to Burlington, Jewish no less, is the surging vessel of these demands only tells you how deeply felt they must be.
But Bernie is no more radical than, say, Harry Truman, FDR or LBJ (when he was thinking about domestic policies).
A New Student Group For Sanders:
Among the thousands were several Boston College students, attending collectively as BC Students for Bernie Sanders, a newly formed student group with the aim of student organization around the democratic presidential candidate. The rally was, in many ways, a fitting launching point for the student organization’s efforts this year.
The club seeks to generate student support for Sanders by promoting an informed dialogue on Sanders within the student political landscape of the University. BC for Bernie was created this summer, the result of the efforts of sisters Chandler and Camryn Hicks, MCAS ’16 and MCAS ’18, respectively. Ameet Kallarackal, CSOM ’18, joined the club’s helm shortly thereafter. Together, the three undergraduates manage the club, which, for now, is largely organized around the group’s Facebook page. The administrators of the club hope to use social media as an organizing tool, where members can learn about upcoming events and stay updated on the candidate.
Still in its early stages of organizational development, the club hopes to gain traction and popularity through its first planned event, a viewing of the Democratic primary debate on Oct. 13. Not a registered student organization, it is largely an organizing effort for student promotion and advocacy of Sanders, who is currently leading in presidential polls among Democrats in Iowa and New Hampshire. BC for Bernie hopes to collaborate with other political student organizations on campus in the future, in an effort to create a productive dialogue with representatives from all political leanings.
“The goal would be to have people that have fundamentally different views, and then examine those candidates and see what’s different, why are they different, and how can we come to some better understanding of reality,” Kallarackal said.
The Populist Prophet:
If you attended a Bernie Sanders rally this summer, when his seemingly quixotic Presidential campaign began gathering force, you might have noticed a few surprising things about the crowd. One was the scarcity of nonwhite faces—a problem that the campaign would soon be confronted by, very publicly. Another was how many young people were turning out to see an irascible seventy-four-year-old senator from Vermont. But that’s a little like being surprised that some millennials appreciate Neil Young or Joni Mitchell at a time when it’s easy to find songs from different decades in a promiscuous jumble online. Young people who like Bernie Sanders like him because he sounds like an old record. He’s been talking about the injustices done to working people by unequal income distribution for more than forty years. His voice, often hoarse from his habitually loud and impassioned speeches, even has the crackle of worn vinyl.
In Portland, Maine, on an evening in July, the line to see Sanders looped around the Cross Insurance Arena. Sanders’s popularity had clearly been exceeding his own expectations. In a conversation this summer, he recalled an event in Minneapolis: “I was blown away. We were driving in, we saw these lines of people snaking down the sidewalk. ‘Jesus, what is that? There’s a ballgame going on?’ ”
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Most of his policy proposals have to do with helping working people and reducing the influence of the wealthy. He would like to break up the big banks, create jobs by rebuilding infrastructure, and move toward public funding of elections—and provide free tuition at public universities. (This program would be subsidized, in part, by a tax on Wall Street speculation.) He wants to end the “international embarrassment of being the only major country on Earth which does not guarantee workers paid medical and family leave.” In the speeches I heard, Sanders rarely discussed foreign policy, though he spoke with conviction about climate change and the need for the U.S. to set an example for Russia, India, and China by using fewer fossil fuels. He tends to sound both doleful and optimistic, like a doctor who has a grave diagnosis to deliver—and no time for small talk—but is convinced that he can help his patient heal.