I’ll say what will be common knowledge by Tuesday night.
Bernie Sanders is making a brilliant run for president, about to beat the most powerful corporate campaign every assembled.
He is drawing record crowds, rising in the polls, on his way to winning New York (and if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere).
Marginalized at the start, Sanders has managed to drive the issues for months with a few simple messages.
The rich are cheating the middle class: They don’t pay Social Security tax on nearly all of their billions. They pump dirty money into Super PACs. They skip out on taxes by stashing money in Panama and the Caymans.
Sanders knows they need to be brought to heel (to borrow a phrase), and he’s the one candidate with the stomach to do it.
Politicians are on the take. American democracy in the age of Citizens United is an obscene orgy of money and power. Billionaires like Soros and the Kochs are like feudal lords, with their minions and their marching orders.
Only a clean candidate, crowd-funded by the masses, can reform this system because he is not subverted by it. That future president is Bernie Sanders.
Global warming is a pending disaster, abetted by fracking, a dirty process that mingles fresh water, toxic chemicals and methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
If you hate the earth, but love short-term profits, fracking is for you. One of the Democratic candidates sold it around the world. But Bernie Sanders says no to fracking (not maybe, depending on which state he’s in). He is a climate change leader, committed to renewables, willing to take on the fossil fuel industry.
Everyone deserves respect.
Women need the whole damned dollar and control over their bodies. Palestinians are people. Seniors need a Social Security boost. Black Lives Matter (and many have been ruined by the 1994 Clinton Crime Bill, an extension of the war on non-corporate drugs). For-profit prisons are predatory institutions and herding people there to inflate the bottom line is immoral. Prisoners are people, too, Native Americans should be honored; immigrants need a path to citizenship, working class students should not be fleeced for getting a college education. Health care is a right, and providing it, a moral obligation.
War is strictly a last resort.
When Bernie Sanders looked at Bush and Cheney’s excuses to attack Iraq, he saw what millions around the globe saw. This was strictly a war of choice, and the idea that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the United States was pure fiction. Trillions were spent, millions were driven from their homes, hundreds of thousands were slaughtered, and the region is still roiling nearly a generation later.
Sanders, an honest broker, knows we have to lead by example, live by diplomacy, focus on the future, strive to defuse conflict, address poverty, make a world where everyone has a stake.
Millions have answered his call to action, his $27 ticket to democracy. Pope Francis has recognized a kindred spirit. And now, in its hour of need, with democracy choking on dirty money, the nation is turning to a native New Yorker, heir to FDR.
A man for the masses, not for himself. A candidate who isn’t running to get his name in the history books, but to answer the call for honest, courageous leadership.
The next president of the United States.
Bernie Sanders.