The Sanders train is gathering momentum. From The New Yorker:
Bernie Sanders: A Man With a Cause
Six days after formally entering the 2016 Presidential race, Senator Bernie Sanders is having some time of it. After attracting overflow crowds at a number of stops in Iowa late last week, Sanders moved on to Minnesota on Sunday, where he appeared at the Minneapolis American Indian Center and declared, “Our country belongs to all of our people and not just a handful of billionaires.” According to a report in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, about three thousand people turned out. A local television station estimated the number of attendees at four thousand.
Whatever the exact number was, the seventy-three-year-old from Vermont appears to be attracting bigger crowds than any other candidate, Democrat or Republican. With one recent national survey finding that fifteen per cent of likely Democratic voters support him, and a new Des Moines Register poll showing him picking up sixteen per cent of the Democratic vote in Iowa, the media is starting to accord him some serious attention.
They go on:
Sanders is running for a cause—a resurgent progressivism that was conceived during decades of wage stagnation and rising inequality, born during the great financial crisis of 2008, and announced on the political stage by the street protests of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the widespread public support they engendered.
Of course, many candidates claim that their campaigns aren’t about them but about something larger. But when Sanders uses this line, which he does all the time, he is merely stating a fact
And then there is
this from the The New York Times:
Bernie Sanders Finds Appreciative Audience on Late Night TV
Mr. Sanders, who is seeking the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, stiffened a little when Mr. Meyers brought up the essay and noted that Mr. Sanders had already disavowed it as satire and “a bad ‘50 Shades of Grey.’” But then Mr. Sanders chuckled as Mr. Meyers teased him for not continuing to write in that vein, because he could have been “rolling in cash” given the success of the “50 Shades” brand.
“No, it was bad fiction — I learned my lesson — I think I could make a good president, but I write fiction pretty poorly,” Mr. Sanders said to laughter and applause from the audience.
The discussion continued:
Mr. Meyers moved on quickly to another creative endeavor in Mr. Sanders’s past: his participation in a 1980s folk album. Mr. Meyers played part of one song in which Mr. Sanders could be heard warbling tunelessly.
“Big mistake,” Mr. Sanders said about the album. “So now we have learned that I do bad fiction and bad music. But I do have some other attributes.”
Most of the interview was substantive, dealing with Mr. Sanders’s positions on eliminating tuition at public colleges, ensuring health care for all Americans, and raising taxes on wealthy Americans and large corporations. The studio audience frequently broke into applause at his remarks, and Mr. Meyers struck a decidedly positive tone about the senator’s bid for the White House.
“Some have tried to frame you as this fringe candidate, but a lot of the things you believe are things that the majority of Americans believe,” Mr. Meyers said
7:01 AM PT: A couple more links.
What does it mean if Bernie Sanders continues to do as well as he has been doing
And then there is Bernie on Pot
“I coughed a lot,” he said in an interview with Yahoo News’ Katie Couric. “I smoked marijuana twice — didn’t quite work for me.”
..
“What I can tell you is this — we have far, far far too many people in jail for nonviolent crimes, and I think in many ways the war against drugs has not been successful, and I think we ought to rethink that,” he said.
8:29 AM PT: MoneyBomb for Sanders:
Diary Here
8:38 AM PT: Excellent article Here:
There will be those who attempt to portray what Sanders is saying — and what he is doing with this campaign — as new or radical. It is neither. The Sanders campaign is about something very old and very American. The United States was founded in revolt against monarchy and the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a few very wealthy men. Throughout much of American history, serious contenders for the presidency — from Abraham Lincoln to William Jennings Bryan to Teddy Roosevelt to Robert M. La Follette to FDR to Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower — warned against letting the affairs of state be guided by self-serving millionaires and billionaires.
In recent decades, however, the balance has tipped toward the billionaires.
The eternal premise that “all men (and women) are created equal,” the battlefield promise that this would be a land “of the people, by the people, for the people,” the pledge of “liberty and justice for all,” has been replaced by a call from a campaign donor to a pliant politician. The shift in our politics and our governance has yielded broken trade policies, bailouts for bankers and corporations, wage stagnation and income inequality.