Bernie Sanders has a new addition to his campaign speech. Speaking to crowds around New York state and Pennsylvania in the last week, the progressive Democratic candidate has ratcheted up his focus on environmental issues, specifically talking at length about his opposition to fracking.
Last fall, Sanders introduced during sweeping legislation to ban the extract of any fossil fuels on federal lands, but in Binghamton, New York on Monday, the Vermont senator went even further, proposing a national ban on the controversial natural shale gas extraction technology.
“In my view, if we are serious about safe and clean drinking water, if we are serious about clean air,” he said. “If we are serious about combating climate change, we need to put an end to fracking not only in New York and Vermont, but all over this country.”
Last year, after a significant activist movement, New York prohibited fracking despite the state’s large shale gas resources. The issue works in Sanders favors in two ways, as both a way to contrast his record with his primary opponent as well as highlight recent successes of grassroots organization.
“I want to applaud you for standing up to Governor [Andrew] Cuomo,” Sanders told his fans in upstate New York. “What may have been considered unrealistic or pie in the sky just a few years ago has now been achieved in New York because you made it happen.”
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In Binghamton, Sanders was introduced by one of the nation’s leading frack-tivists, filmmaker Josh Foxx, who made a name for himself with his politically-charged documentary about fracking called "GasLand." Foxx argued that there was only one candidate who genuinely opposed the practice.
It's been 16 years since a presidential candidate made a campaign stop in Binghamton. But on Monday, Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders put Binghamton on his schedule with a town hall meeting at the Floyd L. Maines Veterans Memorial Arena.
"Are you guys ready for a political revolution,” Vermont Senator Bernie Sander chanted. “Are you guys ready to transform America?”
The crowd of 5,000 in Binghamton was feeling the Bern Monday -- at Bernie Sanders' town hall rally. Action News got to speak with the presidential hopeful one-on-one.
"We’re going to go through as much of the state as we can,” Sanders said. "We're running an aggressive campaign. New York state is really important to us, we have to pay attention to upstate as well as the city and we think by doing that, by creating the momentum we need, we're going to do just fine on election night."
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Action News also asked him what his most important message is for the Southern Tier.
"I am very worried about the future of clean water in our country and in fact around the world,” Sanders said. “We can not simply frack and cause massive pollution and this is something where Secretary Clinton and I have strong disagreement
With about a week before New York state's highly contested primary election, Democratic hopeful Bernie Sanders made his first visit to the Capital Region to enlist support for his campaign.
“This is a campaign on the move. This is a campaign with momentum. This is a campaign that has won eight of the nine caucuses and primaries,” Sanders said, “and with your help here, we are going to win the New York primary on April 19th.”
Speaking to a crowd of more than 4,000 people -- and about two thousand more outside -- the U.S. senator from Vermont discussed the changes he would like to make.
The loudest cheers were perhaps when the former Burlington mayor talked about corporate greed, marijuana possession, creating jobs, reforming education and the criminal justice system.
“Unless we deal with the reality of America today, we will not have the future we require,” he said.
“This is a campaign that when it began we were 65-70 points behind Secretary Clinton in national polls. Last week, two polls had us ahead of her,” Sanders said.
In the pouring rain, they poured in.
Hours before Bernie Sanders was set to arrive, several thousand people flooded University at Buffalo's campus. They waited in the rain, on muddy ground, for the Democratic Presidential hopeful's 7pm rally to energize Western New Yorkers ahead of the New York Primary on April 19th.
By 4pm, people began filing into Alumni Arena. It didn't take long for the venue to reach maximum capacity, with nearly 10,000 people packing in. Hundreds of supporters were turned away at the door, but their effort didn't go unnoticed.
Before entering the Arena, Sanders greeted the 'overflow' supporters, spending time shaking hands and taking photographs.
Once inside, Sanders was given a rock star's welcome.
"This campaign is going to win because we are listening to the American people," Sanders told the excited crowd.
"On April 19th, New York can make history. Let's do it."
One year ago, Kriss Welch was a Hillary Clinton supporter in the presidential race.
Not anymore.
The unemployed secretary is firmly in the Bernie Sanders camp.
"I think he's the answer," Welch said of the longtime Vermont senator.
Welch was one of the estimated 8,000 people who jammed into every nook and cranny of the University at Buffalo Alumni Arena to take part in Sanders' first Buffalo-area visit of the campaign. His appearance, fueled by a petition signed by 3,300 UB students, comes eight days before the hotly contested April 19 Democratic Party primary.
As has been typical for his campaign Sanders brought out a crowd of "every man." There were no major political leaders in sight like there were last week when Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, made Buffalo are stops.
The crowd that snaked around Alumni Arena was made up of people like Welch, who want a change from the traditional front-running Democratic presidential candidate.
"He will help people like me put more food on the table," Welch said. "Bernie is the only one who isn't trying to stack everything against us."
Sen. Bernard Sanders’ presidential campaign released an ad touting the Brooklyn native’s “values forged in New York” ahead of the April 19 primary in the Empire State.
“New York — what makes it think bigger? Go bolder?” a narrator says in the 30-second ad. “You do.”
The ad highlights Mr. Sanders’ support for issues such as increasing the minimum wage and tuition-free public college.
“Values forged in New York,” the narrator goes on to say of Mr. Sanders. “Brooklyn-born. Native son who knows what we know: We’re all in this together.”
Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz of Texas has taken some criticism for his line during one of the debates deriding presidential front-runner Donald Trump for embodying “New York values.”
f there is one thing Bernie Sanders never fails to reference in the Democratic primary, it’s Hillary Clinton’s vote in favor of the Iraq war. He brought it up after answering a question about gun control, he continually references the vote during Democratic debates and he’s made his opposition to the war a cornerstone of his foreign policy. Last week he said, “I don’t think you are qualified if you have voted for the disastrous war in Iraq,” and on Sunday, he again questioned Clinton’s judgment based on her vote.
The response from some journalists and Clinton supporters has been to derisively question whether he has any other notes, with a tone of: when is he going to stop complaining about something that happened over a decade ago?
He shouldn’t stop. If anything, more politicians should be bringing up the Iraq war at every opportunity. The dismissive tone Clinton supporters have taken to the issue belies a callous indifference to the most disastrous foreign policy calamity in our lifetime – a decision that continues to directly affect US foreign policy across the entire Middle East. It is dangerously shortsighted and an insult to the countless people who died as a result. If anything, we should be talking about the Iraq war more, not less.
Four thousand five hundred members of the US military died in the Iraq, tens of thousands of Americans were injured or maimed, and at least a half million Iraqis died as a result of the decision to declare war (some estimates put it as high as one million), for starters. Should we stop talking about those unspeakably tragic deaths because most happened 10 years ago, or because the majority of them weren’t American?
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Instead of questioning why Sanders constantly returns to the Iraq war, the real question should be: why don’t more politicians bring up the Iraq war? And why aren’t most of us retaining the lessons we should learn from our recent history? Far from being obsolete, the Iraq war influences almost every facet of Middle East policy today.
After losing an embarrassing six straight primaries, including the critical states of Florida and Illinois, the upstart presidential candidate came under tremendous pressure from the party establishment to get out of the race. Party insiders called his proposals "simplistic," pundits fretted he was too old and even a key aide admitted one goal was to show "we were not the candidate of kooks."
But the challenger insisted that he'd tapped into real anger among the ignored rank-and-file voters who wanted him to fight all the way to the party convention in July.
"The issue I sense," he told an interviewer, "is that the Empire is in decline. The establishment doesn't want to raise it." He used new technologies to reach small-dollar donors, and his allies noted that he'd "sharpened" his rival's message for a general election.
And so, in the spring of 1976, Ronald Reagan pressed on with his underdog quest to wrest the GOP nomination from the incumbent (albeit unelected) President Gerald Ford -- following a track that should look very familiar to the voters and pundits watching the out-of-left-field 2016 Democratic primary challenge by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
By pressing his challenge to the very end, "the Gipper" set the stage not just for his own presidency four years later but for a new, right-leaning GOP orthodoxy on the size of government tax policy, and social issues such as women's rights and abortion.
Exactly four decades later, Sanders -- the avatar of so-called "democratic socialism" that would swing the national pendulum to the far left -- stands on the precipice of remaking the Democratic Party every bit as much as Reagan did on the far opposite side of the ideological spectrum. Indeed, the spirit of '76 -- 1976, that is -- looms large behind Sanders' determination to keep fighting Clinton all the way to Democratic confab in Philadelphia.
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With roughly three months until the Philadelphia convention, the voices among the Democratic elite clamoring for Sanders to leave the race or "tone down" his message are arguably acting with self-interested ignorance of history -- of how Reagan's mirror-image challenge reinvented the Republican Party to dominate American politics in the latter 20th century.
Former Ohio state lawmaker Nina Turner has emerged as one of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’s most prominent surrogates, adding another twist to a political career that has rankled the Democratic establishment at every turn.
Hardly a day goes by where the energetic Turner doesn’t appear on television, at a forum or at a rally touting Sanders’s record or defending him against criticism from rival Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Turner’s efforts are all the more surprising because she was once a Clinton supporter.
Former President Bill Clinton endorsed Turner’s 2014 run for Ohio secretary of State, and Turner worked as an unpaid volunteer for Ready for Hillary, the group that laid the groundwork for Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Last November, however, Turner switched allegiances, taking a leave of absence from a paid role with the Ohio Democratic Party to be an unpaid advocate for Sanders’s campaign.
“It came down to some soul-searching,” Turner said in an interview with The Hill. “It was actually my husband who said, ‘Baby, I think you should give Sen. Sanders a look. I believe he’s your candidate, because he has the same righteous indignation you have. He stands up for people the way you like to stand up for people.’ ”
Bernie Sanders, who calls himself a "not particularly religious" Jew, is the only major candidate running for president who isn't a Christian. But in many ways, Sanders is the most Christian candidate in the race.
Of course, I don't mean that Sanders subscribes to Christian ideas about faith and salvation, or even believes that Jesus of Nazareth was anything more than a famous itinerant preacher. In that sense, he is clearly less Christian than any of his rivals. Hillary Clinton is a Methodist, Donald Trump a Presbyterian, and John Kasich an American Anglican who grew up Catholic. Ted Cruz is a Southern Baptist.
But when it comes to the Christian imperative of helping the poor and the sick and the needy — all fundamental elements of Jesus' preaching — Sanders, more than anyone in the race, speaks about government having a moral obligation to help those in need. In promoting the deeply Christian principles that are actually germane to governing a country, Sanders is talking the Jesus talk better than his Christian rivals.
Indeed, if the proudly greedy Donald Trump is the Gordon Gekko in the 2016 race, Bernie Sanders might just be the Pope Francis candidate.
Sanders warns about climate change in biblical terms, too, bringing it up more frequently and more forcefully than Hillary Clinton, the only other candidate who publicly believes global warming is real and human-influenced. When Sanders visits the Vatican this week, he plans to bring up "the planetary crisis of climate change and the moral imperative to make sure we leave this planet in a way that is healthy and habitable for future generations."
The pope explicitly links greed and climate change and helping the poor in his encyclical Laudato Sí, hitting the Sanders trifecta. He also explicitly calls on governments to actively work to save the Earth. In his newest document, Amoris Laetitia, Francis calls for government policies that help families ensure "adequate health care" and "find dignified employment."
Bernie Sanders is still behind when it comes to delegates and votes, but he has one clear advantage over his Democratic and Republican presidential rivals — a lot of people actually like him.
By 48 percent to 39 percent, more Americans have a favorable than an unfavorable opinion of Sanders, giving him the best net-positive rating in the field, according to a new Associated Press-GfK poll. Unlike the other candidates, Sanders also is doing better as more Americans get to know him: His favorable rating is up from an earlier AP-GfK poll.
The numbers speak to Sanders' rapid rise from a relatively unknown Vermont senator to a celebrated voice proclaiming political revolution. They also reflect just how unpopular the rest of the field is.
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Sanders' popularity stands in contrast to the rest of the remaining candidates. Clinton gets unfavorable ratings from 55 percent of Americans, while just 40 percent have a favorable opinion. A whopping 69 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of Republican leader Donald Trump, and just 26 percent have a favorable opinion.
Among Democrats, 72 percent have a favorable opinion of Sanders and 20 percent have an unfavorable opinion. That's similar to Democrats' rating of Clinton. It's also improved from 61 percent who had a favorable view of Sanders in February, while his unfavorable rating remained stable.
"I've grown to like him more. The exposure that he's getting, there's a bit of a snowball effect with his campaign," said Les Blackmore, 60, of Washington, D.C., who is leaning toward Sanders.