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Bernie Sanders Draws Big Crowds at Iowa State Fair, Town Hall:
Bernie Sanders may not leave Iowa as popular as the pork chop on a stick or fried PBJ — but the Democratic candidate rolled into the Iowa State Fair to a crowd that wrapped around to the back of the soapbox stage to hear him speak on Saturday afternoon.
"I believe that if we all — when it comes to Election Day — realize Bernie can win and we don't give up and say, 'Oh, he has no chance,' then we can do this," said Zach Murrell, 21, a senior mechanical engineering student at Iowa State University.
For Sanders, the political complexion of his rally attendees is not narrowly defined. Nearly all of those in attendance at Sanders' events caucused for either Obama or someone not named Hillary Clinton in 2008. But the issues—environment, Social Security, student loans—connect and bring out different generations.
"What initially got me to Bernie was the fact, you know what, he's got a lot of integrity. And how I know that? He's not backed up by any money. He's backed up by voters," Caleb Humphrey, 30, a campaign volunteer and Iraq War veteran, said.
"And as a veteran myself and especially a combat veteran, I've seen combat and I've been there," Humphrey said. "We should have used all of our resources to avoid it. It's a horrible thing."
Silly Bernie left his helicopter at home:
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) took a swipe at fellow presidential candidate Donald Trump's high-flying antics at the Iowa State Fair on Saturday, joking that he had forgotten to bring an aircraft to tango with Trump's private helicopter.
"I apologize, we left the helicopter at home," the Democratic hopeful told NPR's Don Gonyea. "It's in the garage," Sanders added as Trump departed the fairgrounds in his $7 million helicopter.
The Next Obama?:
Eight years ago, Hillary Clinton had an aura of inevitability.
Barack Obama? Who? An African American president?
Flash forward to today. Clinton again wants to project that aura, but it’s again slowly cracking, thanks to another rival who, on paper, seems a long shot to ever get elected president.
To do that, though, Bernie Sanders has to first win over the people of Iowa’s 99 counties, as Obama once did. It won’t be easy. But it’s not out of the question.
The U. S. senator from Vermont, who is actually an independent, but running for president as a Democrat, has been drawing huge, enthusiastic crowds in friendly places such as college campuses and liberal bastions like Portland, Ore., and Madison, Wis.
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Sanders offers a different kind of energy, a passion borne of a lifetime’s worth of uphill struggles and a zest for intellectual combat. He got big cheers when he said he’d oppose the Keystone XL pipeline and reminded everyone that as a House of Representatives member in 2002, he voted against the Iraq War.
Clinton has declined to state her position on the pipeline. She voted for the Iraq war resolution while in the Senate and later said that was a mistake.
Sanders took on issues rarely discussed on the presidential trail.
"Nobody will fight harder than I will to end racism in America," Sanders said, "and to reform our broken criminal justice system."
More On Sandesrs In Iowa:
A day after the 80th anniversary of the Social Security Act being signed into law, presidential hopeful U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., called for more social and economic reform in Iowa City Saturday night.
“The Social Security Act is one of the most important, effective and popular acts in American history because it helped people,” Sanders said. “This is a people’s campaign, not funded by millionaires, billionaires and their super PACs.
“This campaign is talking to the billionaire class right to their face and saying they cannot have it all.”
Sanders spoke to a sign-waving crowd of more than 300 supporters in front of his Iowa City field headquarters in Kennedy Plaza for nearly 30 minutes Saturday night.
Just hours after speaking on The Des Moines Register Political Soapbox at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, Sanders arrived at about 7 p.m. and talked to a the crowd to mark the field headquarters opening in Johnson County.
After the speech, a crowd of supporters swarmed Sanders to take selfies and shake hands. Jordan and Elijah McNeish of Iowa City brought their 2-1/2-week-old daughter Cassiopeia to Sanders, who posed for a photo with the couple and their baby.
“It feels good to be here,” Jordan said. “He seems like a person who will fight for my daughter’s future.”
On Reviving Kings Dream:
Throughout American history, advocates for racial justice and economic justice have sometimes been at odds, but they've also found common ground. In recent weeks we've watched this tension play out in a surprising way, when Black Lives Matters (BLM) activists disrupted Bernie Sanders rallies to demand that the socialist Senator from Vermont focus more attention on racial inequities. Now that BLM and Sanders have made peace, his campaign has the potential to revive Martin Luther King's dream of building a progressive movement that can challenge both racism and economic inequality.
Since the BLM movement emerged a year ago -- in reaction to the killing of an unarmed teenager by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri - it has stirred controversy, particularly on the right. Many conservative commentators considered the young BLM activists too angry, unruly, confrontational, and divisive. But BLM's attack on Sanders split progressives. Many progressive activists cheered the BLM's protest, some supported their message but not their disruptive tactics, while others criticized them for going after Sanders rather than targeting more conservative candidates.
In a short period of time, BLM has proved to be amazingly effective and influential. Despite having little funding and relatively few activists, they have helped inject the issue of police misconduct and the broader racial bias of our criminal justice system into the political debate. There's been no sudden upsurge of racial profiling, arrests, beatings and killings of African Americans at the hands of law enforcement officers. Instead - thanks in part to BLM -- Americans have simply become more aware of the problem. The names of the victims of police abuse - Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, and others -- have been seared into the national consciousness.
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BLM's spat with Sanders reflects the persistent tension between "outsiders" and "insiders" in American politics. Outsiders engage in confrontation in order to get their voices heard and put new issues on the public agenda. Politicians have to decide whether to embrace or vilify the protestors and their issues.
In this case, BLM's protests may have actually strengthened Sanders' growing movement. Sanders -- who began his activist career in the 1960s civil rights movement when was arrested for demonstrating against segregated public schools in Chicago, and who, from the start of his campaign, has focused attention on the shockingly high unemployment rate among black youth -- moved quickly to address the BLM's concerns. A week after BLM disrupted the Phoenix gathering, Sanders spoke to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights group founded by Martin Luther King, where he said "black lives matter" and outlined a detailed set of initiatives to deal with racial inequality, which he posted on his campaign website.
Then he hired an African American woman -- Symone Sanders, the national youth chair of the Coalition on Juvenile Justice - as his press secretary. A well-respected activist, Symone Sanders has spoken at recent Sanders rallies and helped the Vermont Senator sharpen his message on racial issues. His most recent stump speeches at huge rallies in Portland, Oakland, and Los Angeles have included specific references to police misconduct, mass incarceration, the GOP's efforts to suppress voting rights, and "institutional racism." His comments about racism have gotten some of the loudest and most sustained cheers from the crowd at these rallies.
"I Welcome Their Hatred:
Bernie Sanders borrowed from Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Iowa on Saturday morning and echoed the 32nd president’s disdain for the mega-rich who seek personal gain over the common good.
After delivering an hourlong stump speech, the Vermont senator opened the floor to questions at the Boone County Fairgrounds.
“I want to know if you are the next coming of FDR. We will fight for you if you will fight the Republicans in Congress,” said one man in the crowd of about 400 people. “I voted eight years ago for hope and change, and I’m still waiting.”
Sanders, an independent, is seeking the Democratic nomination for president. On Saturday, the second day of a three-day Iowa swing, he pointed out how FDR called the wealthy protectors of the status quo “economic royalists.”
“He said, ‘They hate my guts. Never have they hated someone as much as they hate me. And I welcome their hatred,’ ” Sanders said.
“And let me echo that today: If the Koch brothers and the billionaire class hate my guts, I welcome their hatred. Because I am going to stand with working families.”
Sanders Kicks It Into Overdrive:
After a poll this week showed the previously unthinkable — the 73-year-old Independent senator from Vermont surging past Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire — there’s a feeling that the Bernie Sanders operation is maturing from a quixotic pursuit for the White House into the real deal.
Sanders’ campaign is calling the Franklin Pierce University and the Boston Herald poll, which found Sanders beating Clinton 44 percent to 37 percent in the Granite State, an “astonishing” feat. It gives even more fuel to a momentum that the Sanders team is riding to significantly expand its ground game, especially in New Hampshire.
The campaign has already outgrown its modest office on Manchester Road in Concord, and will be moving the state headquarters to Manchester in the coming days. The campaign currently has 10 staffers, with six or seven more staffers to begin Monday. A week after that, another new crew is starting. Aides also will be scouting out more real estate to add to the two field offices.
“And then in the next month, our staff size is going to really bloom,” said Julia Barnes, Sanders’ New Hampshire state director, in an interview with POLITICO on Friday at her desk in front of a stack of resumes.
Reaching Out to #BLM:
After protests twice derailed campaign events in recent weeks, the Bernie Sanders campaign has asked to meet with Black Lives Matter activists in Washington.
In an email obtained by BuzzFeed News, the campaign’s African-American outreach director, Marcus Ferrell, told a group of activists that Sanders wanted a more formal interaction. As a sitting U.S. senator, the meeting could be arranged as a means of “possibly introducing legislation and making a constitutional change. We would like to know what YOU would like to see happen.”
Campaigns are rushing to curry favor with Black Lives Matter activists, whose public actions confronting Sanders twice disrupted the campaign, forcing Sanders to more forcefully voice his support of the movement. He has also since announced Symone Sanders, who is a young black woman, as his national press secretary; she was hired after she met with the senator about the activism and criminal justice. Bernie Sanders has also released a comprehensive racial justice platform, referenced by Ferrell in the email.
PHOTOS OF BERNIE @ IOWA STATE FAIR