US Presidential Contenders

[Buster's Uncle]

Bernie Sanders’ first television ad promises ‘real change’
Yahoo Politics
Dylan Stableford  Senior editor  ‎November‎ ‎01‎, ‎2015

Real Change

Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign has released its first television ad documenting the Vermont senator’s unlikely journey from Brooklyn to Washington.

“The son of a Polish immigrant who grew up in a Brooklyn tenement,” a voiceover says at the beginning of the minute-long ad. “He went to public schools, then college, where the work of his life began: fighting injustice and inequality. Speaking truth to power.”

It highlights Sanders’ four terms as mayor of Burlington, Vt., his opposition to the Iraq War in Congress and his ongoing battle with Wall Street and “a corrupt political system.”



(YouTube/Bernie 2016)


The spot, entitled “Real Change,” will air in Iowa and New Hampshire, part of a $2 million-plus ad buy, according to the campaign.

The ad also notes that Sanders’ grassroots campaign has been funded “by over a million contributions.”

“People are sick and tired of establishment politics and they want real change,” Sanders says in a clip from a stump speech in Oregon.

“Bernie Sanders: Husband. Father. Grandfather,” the voiceover concludes. “An honest leader — building a movement with you to give us a future to believe in.”



Bernie Sanders speaks at a rally in Portland, Ore., in August. (Photo: Troy Wayrynen/AP)


The ad is designed to introduce Sanders to voters in Iowa and New Hampshire who may not be familiar with his upbringing.

“As some of you know, I was born in a faraway land called Brooklyn,” Sanders said in May while formally announcing his presidential bid. “My father came to this country from Poland without a penny in his pocket and without much of an education. My mother graduated high school in New York City. My father worked for almost his entire life as a paint salesman and we were solidly lower middle class. My parents, brother and I lived in a small, rent-controlled apartment. My mother’s dream was to move out of that small apartment into a home of our own. She died young and her dream was never fulfilled. As a kid I learned, in many, many ways, what lack of money means to a family. That’s a lesson I have never forgotten.”

Hillary Clinton also highlighted her late mother’s influence in her campaign’s first TV ads that aired in Iowa and New Hampshire in August.

Family Strong | Hillary Clinton

“When I think about why I’m doing this, I think about my mother, Dorothy,” Clinton says in one of them. “I think about all the Dorothys all over America who fight for their families, who never give up. That’s why I’m doing this, that’s why I’ve always done this: for all the Dorothys.”

As expected, Sanders’ first TV ad does not mention his Democratic opponent.

The Vermont senator, who likes to say he’s “never run a negative political ad” in his life, vowed that his campaign would not resort to “reckless personal attacks or character assassination.”

“My campaign will be driven by issues and serious debate, not political gossip,” Sanders said in May. “This is what I believe the American people want and deserve.”

https://www.yahoo.com/politics/bernie-sanders-first-television-ad-promises-real-185918187.html


...They forgot to lead with a pic of Sanders looking rant-y, mad -angry and/or crazed- and maybe a bit evil.  That's unprecedented in my experience...

[Rusty Edge]

As for immigration — the issue [Sleezebag] dragged to the forefront while announcing his candidacy — Graham called the party frontrunner’s position “hateful and illogical.”

This is why you are losing.

“There’s a reason 75 percent of Hispanics disapprove of this guy,” he said. “We will get slaughtered if he’s the nominee. So if you give a damn about winning, pick someone who doesn’t dig the hole deeper with Hispanics.”

Why are Republicans spitting on their own base to pander to a people that don't vote for them?

Yes illegal aliens and voter intimidation won Obama the election whats your point.
If Romney had had Reagan's demographics he'd have won.

The demographics have changed, and are continuing to change. It doesn't look good for the GOP. Old white men like me are dying all of the time. We are no longer a majority. We can not afford to write off the blacks, antagonize women and gays, and insult the Hispanics, too. If the GOP doesn't adapt it will go the way of the Whigs and the No-Nothings.

If Cincinnati were on the other side of the river, W. would have lost to Kerry. If the Florida Supreme court had decided differently, Gore would have been president. Even when Republicans win a presidential election recently , it hasn't been by much.

Cultural Conservatives and Capitalists think that the Hispanics coming here seeking to better themselves through employment and entrepreneurism are a natural fit for the Republican version of the American Dream. Marco Rubio tells that tale pretty well.

Anyway, reaching out to Hispanics isn't the only path to victory, but it may be the fastest. Purging the party of Senators who say rape pregnancies are a gift from God, or casually use terms such as "legitimate rape" is only the beginning of bringing back women to the party.  Or maybe a black or a woman on the GOP ticket would help. Or maybe they could find a way to win over young people.



All of that said, if Donald [Sleezebag] can motivate people to vote who have given up on the political process, and haven't voted for years, good for him!

[vonbach]

The demographics have changed,

Yes Its changed and we never voted to be invaded and replaced.
Just look to South Africa to see what happens when whites become a mInority. They get slaughtered.
Oh and by the way I actually know people that are unfortunate enough to live in South Africa.

If the GOP doesn't adapt it will go the way of the Whigs and the No-Nothings.

Its been "adapting" as you call it, and its gotten nothing but being called racist.

Anyway, reaching out to Hispanics isn't the only path to victory,

Victory for whom? Socialists? Just take a look at South American countries.
The idea of "reaching out" to Hispanics and "adapting" just means letting the
left do what they want. People in the Republican party are sick of being ignored and
replaced. Especially when they are paying for it.

[Dio]

This whole process elicits a single reaction from me. *digestive fluid in mouth mixed with a feeling of disgust*

[Rusty Edge]

The demographics have changed,

Yes Its changed and we never voted to be invaded and replaced.

That's probably what the Spanish speakers living in the Texas-California-Colorado triangle said in the  19th century. 

Just look to South Africa to see what happens when whites become a mInority. They get slaughtered.
Oh and by the way I actually know people that are unfortunate enough to live in South Africa.

Okay. Maybe you can clarify a few things for me. Weren't the whites a minority when they settled there? Weren't they always a minority, even when they were in power?

[Rusty Edge]

Anyway, reaching out to Hispanics isn't the only path to victory,

Victory for whom? Socialists? Just take a look at South American countries.
The idea of "reaching out" to Hispanics and "adapting" just means letting the
left do what they want. People in the Republican party are sick of being ignored and
replaced. Especially when they are paying for it.

Victory for the Republicans.
Aren't the South American countries predominately Hispanic, except for the smallest ones?

Do you object to majority rule per se?

[vonbach]

That's probably what the Spanish speakers living in the Texas-California-Colorado triangle said in the  19th century.

The Spanish never owned it except on paper Texans fought for it and after they fought the bestial Cheyenne (They were fond of gang raping and cutting the noses off of girls they caught). The Mexicans decided to lay claim to it after American settlers tamed it. Naturally the Texans objected to this.

Okay. Maybe you can clarify a few things for me. Weren't the whites a minority when they settled there? Weren't they always a minority, even when they were in power?

No they were not. They were the majority there because there was no game there and the blacks don't know how to farm.
The South Africans bought the land from the few blacks that were there and still have the deed.
After the  white made a stable country the blacks came flooding across the border looking for  handouts
producing the majority black population we have now.

Victory for the Republicans.

Hispanics do not vote republican. They vote for whomever gives them the most benefits.
Look at South  America their countries are all socialist crapholes.

Do you object to majority rule per se?

An artificial majority thats being brought in to replace the native population without its consent.
This is genocide. When China does this in Mongolia its called a war Crime.
When its done in western countries its called "diversity."

http://www.genocidewatch.org/genocide/whatisit.html

By Gregory H. Stanton, President, Genocide Watch
The crime of genocide is defined in international law in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.

"Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

[Buster's Uncle]

This is the last straw.  We're trying to have a decent place.

The next racist post I see earns a ban.

[Buster's Uncle]

Being married to Bernie
Yahoo Politics
Lisa Belkin Chief National Correspondent  ‎November‎ ‎03‎, ‎2015



Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders and his wife, Jane, at a campaign rally in Manassas, Va., in September. (Photo: Cliff Owen/AP)


From the stage at the first Democratic presidential debate, nearly all the candidates opened with talk about their families.

“My wife, Hong, came to this country as a refugee from war-torn Vietnam,” said Jim Webb, who then went on to name his five children and their occupations, pausing just long enough in the middle to make viewers wonder if he was trying to remember one of them.

“My wife, Katie, and I have four great kids, Grace, and Tara, and William and Jack,” Martin O’Malley said when it was his turn, adding that his most important role was as “a husband, and a father.”

And Hillary Clinton, with all her complicated reasons not to bring up her spouse, still found a way to mention other generations and relations. “I’m the granddaughter of a factory worker and the grandmother of a wonderful 1-year-old child,” she said.

Bernie Sanders, however, didn’t pause to sketch a family portrait. In fact, he was the only one onstage who didn’t give a bio of any kind. He started right in with the “series of unprecedented national crises” that prompted his candidacy, and he never spoke of his 27-year marriage, nor the blended group of five children he and his wife consider theirs.

Sitting in the audience with two of those children, Jane O’Meara Driscoll Sanders was not the least bit surprised. Accomplished in her own right — she is, among other things, a former president of a Vermont college — she is the people person to his curmudgeon, the one who lives on the ground while he lives in his head. As her husband makes a strong national showing in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, she remains his closest adviser, and part of her advice, on debate night as always, was that he stay focused on why he decided to run this race in the first place.





“Why should it be about me or about our family?” she said in a long and candid interview in her husband’s tiny Washington, D.C., campaign headquarters recently, dressed, as always, in casual flowing pants and blouse, her blue eyes framed by her long strawberry blond hair. “It’s about the issues. We’ve always been about the issues.”


*****

Their meet-cute was also a meet-political. In 1981, Jane O’Meara Driscoll, a recently divorced transplanted New Yorker, went to a meeting where the then mayor of Burlington was discussing a proposed tax hike that many thought would hurt low-income residents. Jane took the floor to ask some pointed questions, and when she sat down the person next to her said, “You sound like Bernie Sanders.”

“Who’s Bernie Sanders?” she asked.

He was the candidate opposing this six-term incumbent mayor, she was told, and Jane was soon working to organize a debate between the two. “He was so inspiring,” she says of her now husband at that event. “He embodied everything I believed in.”

She’d brought her then 6-year-old daughter, Carina, along, and a favorite family story is about how the little girl was the only one in the room who didn’t join in the standing ovation for her future stepfather.

“It was very clear from that night that Bernie was an astonishing person,” Carina remembers, stopping in briefly to chat during this interview. “He had the ability to really move people, and that was what drew my mother to him long before they were a couple.”

Well, not very long before. Jane and Bernie didn’t technically meet that night. She worked for his election, and they were introduced at his victory party 10 days later, after he won the race by 10 votes. Within months they were a couple.

“That was the beginning of forever,” she has said.

*****

When Jane gets tired, her children tease that her New York accent returns and “you sound just like you never left,” she says.

Born Mary Jane O’Meara in Brooklyn in 1950 (her family still uses the Mary), she grew up (like Bernie, who is nine years her senior) in Flatbush, where her childhood was defined by the chronic illness of her father. Benedict O’Meara had tripped over a sidewalk crack when Jane was 2 years old, breaking his hip, and then developed a blood infection from a deterioration of the surgically inserted pin.



Bernie and Jane in 1984. (Photo: Sanders family)


He was hospitalized for two and a half years straight, and then returned to the hospital for several months each year after that, which meant he lost his job as a schoolteacher, which had been the only income for his family of five children. When not bedridden he became a taxi driver. Jane’s mother, Bernadette, went to secretarial school at night and persuaded the Catholic kindergarten to accept Jane, her youngest, at age 3 instead of 4 so Bernadette could work during the school day. It was only 12 years later, when Jane’s older brother had built a successful business — as a blacksmith in Brooklyn (no, really) — and paid cash for the first complete medical workup their father ever had, that Benedict became well enough to stay out of the hospital for several years at a time.

“It was an awakening,” Jane says. “It was my first realization that money can buy health, and that this fact was deeply unjust.”

After graduating from Catholic high school in Flatbush, she went to the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, where she studied “marriage and children,” she says — specifically classes in marriage in the family and child development — as a sociology major. She married her high school sweetheart, David Driscoll, and left without a degree. When they moved back to Brooklyn, he worked in sales for an office supply company and she worked hourly jobs — cashier, teller — while raising two children, Heather (now a yoga instructor in Sedona, Ariz.) and Carina (a founder and owner of a Vermont woodworking school).

In the early ’70s, Driscoll was transferred by IBM to Manassas, Va., where the city girl learned to hoe fields in her ever-expanding vegetable garden and grow “actual corn.” But she chafed at the culture of a place “where the men would go after dinner and talk politics and the women would go clean up,” she says. Wanting different role models for her daughters, she urged Driscoll to ask for a transfer north, which is how she came to live in Vermont in 1975, where her youngest child, Dave (now a director of a Vermont snowboard company), was born, and where she enrolled in Goddard College — a school that to this day remains proud of its “history of creativity and chaos, invention and experimentation” — to finish her social work degree.

By the late ’70s she was divorced — amicably, she says. (“We were childhood sweethearts. We grew apart.”) In 1981 she was working for the Juvenile Division of the Burlington Police Department and volunteering at local youth centers when she attended the pivotal mayoral debate. Between that night and Election Day, Bernie created a “task force on youth” to advise his campaign and asked each of 12 local organizations to send a representative to brainstorm ways to help children and families. The youth center sent Jane, and the group selected her as chair. So she worked for Bernie before she met him.





After his election he appointed her the head of his new Youth Office, a post that reported to the city council, not the mayor, which was convenient, since romantic sparks flew more or less immediately. In that job she created programs that she believes still help keep Burlington on lists of best places to raise a family in the U.S. The office sponsored after-school programs, a municipal childcare center, a teen center, a performing arts program, and both a newspaper and local access TV show produced by students.

Her romantic dinners with the mayor usually involved talking policy and politics, and the day after their 1988 wedding the newlyweds marched together in the Burlington Memorial Day parade, then got on a plane with 10 other people for a visit to Burlington’s “sister city” in Yaroslavl, Russia, for the Sanders version of a honeymoon.

“They are a team; they always were a team,” says Carina. “They have been a really amazing example of a partnership based on building something extraordinary together.”

*****

By the time he and Jane met, Bernie Sanders had been married and divorced and had fathered a child, Levi (now a paralegal in Boston), from another long-term relationship.

After Jane’s divorce, her ex-husband went on to have another child, Nicole. All five children — Heather, Carina, Dave, Levi and Nicole — along with the seven grandchildren, are simply “family,” Jane says, “no halves or steps” about it.

Says Carina, of the man she has always called Bernie: “I’m his daughter. He’s my dad. We grew up in his house. They’re our parents.”



Bernie and Jane in front of their home in Burlington, Vt., in 1988 with their children, from left, Dave, Heather, Levi, and Carina. (Photo: Sanders family)


So much so that when, long after the divorce, David Driscoll was dying of lung cancer, Jane and Bernie moved him into the unoccupied condo they had bought for Bernie’s mother to live in before she died. And when Nicole was married, Bernie and Jane threw the wedding.

“Family is family,” Jane says. “We take care of each other.”

But, she adds, it’s not a family that fits neatly into a campaign bio — or the opening statement of a presidential debate.

All but the youngest of the children were at college or living on their own by the time Bernie became Vermont’s only congressman in 1991. Dave and Carina stayed in Burlington, where they were attending high school, Bernie spent weekdays in Washington and weekends back home, and Jane often shuttled between the two, having left her job with the Youth Office to help set up and run his Capitol Hill office.

That’s the constant question all Capitol Hill couples face, she says: “Do you move the family down there and lose him every weekend, or keep the family back home and only see him on the weekends, have a weekend marriage?”

In addition to forcing the couple to shuttle between homes, the new job led to a reshuffling of their partnership. “When he was mayor we just made it up as we went along,” she says. “We would say, ‘This needs to be done,’ and then we would do it. But when you come to Congress, you have to learn how does the job get done, how do the committees work, how do the party structures work?”

Jane was involved from the start, reading through resumes and hiring staff, attending the informational seminars held by the leadership on how to run a congressional office. But now when she suggested, “Why don’t we try it this way?” he often said, “Jane, this isn’t Burlington, we can’t just make our own decisions.”

It also took a while to make friends. Washington social life is a complex organism, and at first it seemed that many of the other spouses lacked the “urgency about the issues” that she felt — reminiscent of the days when the men discussed politics on the porch while the women went back inside to clean up. She often found herself drawn more to the conversation with the members than with their husbands and wives. (That changed over the years, she adds, and now she has a deep bench of friends among House and Senate spouses.)

In the first few years she was at various times her husband’s press secretary, chief of staff, and political analyst, all while working toward the PhD she would earn in sociology. (Should her husband be elected president, that would make her the first first lady to hold the title of doctor.) She was also on the board of trustees of her alma mater, Goddard College, and in 1996, when the president of that school abruptly resigned, she agreed to step in as interim president and provost. By all accounts she steered Goddard through a rocky time, helping build morale and shore up finances.

“I went in when they needed me and learned that I could do it,” she said of her 18-month tenure.

It left her wanting to do more.





She founded CEO Leadership Strategies, a political and educational consulting firm based in Burlington, but conflict of interest rules meant she needed to eventually choose between earning a living as a strategist or continuing to serve that role for her husband.

Then, in 2004 she was named president of Burlington College, a commuter school of about 200 full-time students — most of them older and with untraditional backgrounds, in other words, the kind of student she had been when she returned to Goddard for her degree. She left both her roles — at her company and as Bernie’s adviser — to take the job.

For three years she was president of a college and he was the congressman representing the state where that college was based. In 2007 he was elected to the Senate, and the dividing lines between their jobs became even more carefully defined. During her interim time at Goddard, she says, those lines had been informal because “there I was surrounded by familiar faces who knew me for decades and who knew Bernie well enough not to expect any treats from him.” But as they both grew in clout and stature, in organizations that were less familiar, “we more carefully separated our interests,” she says.

Among the rules, she says: She never spoke to members of his staff about any subject that had anything to do with the college. He almost never came to visit her at work, at most attending a few graduation ceremonies. When Burlington College applied for federal grants of any sort, its president’s name was not on the application and it would try whenever possible to pool its requests with those of other entities with similar interests in the state.



Jane is her husband’s closest adviser, and part of her advice is to stay focused on why he decided to run in the first place. “We’ve always been about the issues,” she says. (Photo: Mary F. Calvert for Yahoo News)


Despite the college’s determination to avoid conflict, however, controversy still managed to arise. One accusation that comes up increasingly often recently is that as part of Sanders’ expansion plan, Burlington College went into debt to buy a $10 million, 32-acre parcel of land for a new campus. The state agency that agreed to issue tax-exempt bonds against the loan required a commitment of several million dollars from private donors, and in listing those pledges the school included one large pledge that was a future commitment rather than money already in hand. It is standard accounting practice to count these, but in this case the payment never came through and the school now faces serious financial troubles.

The shortfall is a favorite topic of conservative websites, such as the Daily Caller, which call it deliberate loan fraud, saying it was the secret reason behind Jane’s departure from Burlington College in 2011. She calls that “nonsense,” saying that she left after seven years on the job because new board leadership came in that did not agree with her “expansive vision,” so she stepped aside. The current financial difficulties began under her successor, she says. Similarly, talk of loans and bonds and fraud didn’t come up until years after she had left, she says, when her husband began being mentioned as a possible candidate for president.

*****

When talk of the White House first began, Jane was against the idea. “Do you really want to spend all your time raising money and defending every single thing that every single one of us ever did or thought?” she remembers asking.

In her attempts to redirect, she says, “I thought of all sorts of ways he could raise the issues he felt were being ignored, but he could do that without running. Start a nonprofit. Write a book. Find other ways to steer the conversation.”





But in the end she gave her consent, and while she thought the campaign would succeed in its actual goal — not necessarily winning, but pushing other candidates to talk about things like income inequality — she and Bernie were both surprised by how fast it became so big.

That reality hit late this spring in Minneapolis, the first time the Sanders campaign drew a crowd of thousands. They were in a van, as usual, and Phil Fiermonte, the campaign field director, was driving, as usual, and as they approached the venue they saw a line snaking around the block.

“Who are we competing with, Phil?” Bernie asked, assuming that the crowd was for something, or someone, else. But it was for him.

The crowds have gotten even larger since then, yet their campaign style hasn’t changed much. Jane still travels with her husband whenever she can, because “it helps him to have a familiar face, someone he can count on.” They talk equal parts grandchildren and strategy while on the road.

Though no stranger to giving speeches herself — college presidents give a lot of them — so far Jane has stuck to shaking hands and talking to voters one on one. In a field of accomplished spouses — Kate O’Malley is a judge, Heidi Cruz is a former investment banker and Bill Clinton is Bill Clinton — she is arguably the least mentioned. She has no staff of her own. To set up an interview you call her cellphone and she answers. If you get lost on the way to the interview you call her cell again and she gives directions. Ask her where she will be the next week and she isn’t really sure, because this campaign’s schedule is a rather fluid thing.

“My daughter keeps saying I need some sort of assistant,” she says. “But it’s not about me.”

It’s about the issues, she repeats. And to watch her watch her husband on the debate stage, where he doesn’t mention her at all, is to get a glimpse of the effect his ideas had on her the first time she heard him speak.



Bernie Sanders kisses Jane before announcing his candidacy for the presidency in May. (Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)


“He’s doing what he aimed to do,” she gushed a few days after it was over. “The last election the candidates didn’t talk about inequality, they didn’t talk about fairness, they didn’t talk about climate change. He’s setting the agenda. That’s what it’s about.”

https://www.yahoo.com/politics/being-married-to-bernie-1291469214744630.html

[Unorthodox]

The Spanish never owned it except on paper Texans fought for it and after they fought the bestial Cheyenne (They were fond of gang raping and cutting the noses off of girls they caught). The Mexicans decided to lay claim to it after American settlers tamed it. Naturally the Texans objected to this.

Uka sha na.

You ever consider writing a history book?  Would be fascinating...

[vonbach]

You ever consider writing a history book?  Would be fascinating...

Its already been written down already. Actually.

[Rusty Edge]

The polls have re-arranged some since I last discussed them.

[Sleezebag] and Carson are competitive, and NBC has taken to calling Carson the frontrunner.
Joining them in the Double-Digit Group are Rubio and Cruz.

Then there's the Single Digit Group.
Bush, Fiorina, Paul, Kasich, Huckabee, and Christie. Christie and Huckabee barely qualify for the Milwaukee debate now, another weak poll and they could miss it.

Then there's the Negligible Group. They haven't polled above 1% in the last several polls.
Jindal, Graham, Santorum, Pataki. None of them even registered in the last poll, and it's not the first time.

[Dio]

Why do people follow the clowns known as politicians? What opportunties can they provide for the people?

[Rusty Edge]

I find it interesting.

More importantly, I think that the less that people pay attention, the more entitled the politicians feel to do as they themselves please.  I find that public indifference leads to corruption and abuses such as Gitmo and the Patriot Act. That's my opinion.

Perhaps you meant "follow" in a different sense. Rather than "watch", you meant "assist".
Sometimes it's idealism, or making connections, or doing something to put on a resume. Sometimes they expect access or spoils, same as the contributors, such as jobs and contracts. Sometimes people are training to run a campaign of their own.

[Buster's Uncle]

The top 5 takeaways from Bernie Sanders' big speech
Hunter Walker  National Correspondent  November 19, 2015



Sen. Bernie Sanders gave one of the most important speeches of his presidential campaign in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, outlining his “democratic socialist ideals.”

Speaking at Georgetown University, the Democratic candidate battled perceptions his ideas are foreign or “radical” and framed his proposals as a modern version of Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

His remarks included much of his standard stump speech embedded in a broader narrative framework seeking to situate his policy pronouncements within a broader political vision and American historical context.

Sanders also discussed foreign policy in the wake of the Paris terror attacks that left 129 people dead last Friday.

Here are five key points from the address:


1. Sanders doesn’t think his ideas are radical.

A core issue for Sanders as he has mounted a surprisingly strong challenge to frontrunner Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary has been electability and the question of whether voters can get comfortable with his unorthodox political identity. In his speech, Sanders attempted to argue his “democratic socialist” views are in line with American traditions and ideals.

Sanders repeatedly referred to F.D.R. and claimed his policies are similar and face similar opposition from the “ruling class.”

“He redefined the relationship of the federal government to the people of our nation. He combated cynicism, fear and despair. He reinvigorated democracy. He transformed our country,” Sanders said of Roosevelt. “And that is exactly what we have to do today. And by the way, almost everything he proposed, almost every program, every idea he introduced was called ‘socialist.’”

Sanders also invoked Martin Luther King Jr. and Pope Francis as he made his case.

In addition to arguing his ideas are not unprecedented within the country, Sanders pointed out that many of them are already in place abroad. When he discussed his plan for universal health insurance, Sanders noted that some people consider it “incredibly radical.” He pushed back against that characterization.

“This is not a radical idea. It is a conservative idea. It is an idea and a practice that exists in every other major country on Earth,” Sanders said.


2. Sanders thinks the system is rigged.

Fighting income inequality and pushing for campaign finance reform are the two cornerstones of Sanders’ platform.

In his speech, Sanders attempted to link these two things together and argued there is a “corrupt” and “rigged” political system that allows the incredibly wealthy and major corporations to solidify their position at the expense of the majority.

“The bottom line is that today in America, we not only have massive wealth and income inequality, but a power structure built around that inequality, which protects those who have the money,” Sanders said. “Today, a handful of superwealthy campaign contributors have enormous influence over the political process, while their lobbyists determine much of what goes on in Congress.“


3. Sanders doesn’t necessarily think this is a free country.

Sanders pointed to Roosevelt’s call for a “Second Bill of Rights” as he outlined his proposals. He noted Roosevelt believed “true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.”

“In other words, real freedom must include economic security,” said Sanders. “That was Roosevelt’s vision 70 years ago. It is my vision today. It is a vision that we have not yet achieved, and it is time that we did.”

Sanders described a suite of policies that he said would give people a “living wage.” They included universal health coverage, free tuition at public colleges, paid sick and family leave, raising the minimum wage to $15 and prison reform. He also called for a “full-employment economy” and vowed to generate jobs by rebuilding our “crumbling infrastructure.”

“So, the next time that you hear me attacked as a socialist — like tomorrow,” Sanders said, provoking laughs from the audience, “remember this: I don’t believe government should take over, you know, the grocery store down the street. But I do believe that the middle class and the working class of this country, who produce the wealth of this country, deserve a decent standard of living.”


4. Sanders believes America has made serious foreign policy mistakes.

The last part of Sanders’ speech was focused on foreign policy. In it, he vowed not to remake “the failed foreign policy decisions of the past.”

“I will never send our sons and daughters to war under false pretense or pretenses about dubious battles with no end in sight,” Sanders declared.

Sanders went on to reiterate his longstanding opinion that the Iraq War, which Clinton voted for as a member of the U.S. Senate, was one of these mistakes.

“Unilateral military action should be a last resort, not a first resort,” he said. “Ill-conceived military decisions such as the invasion of Iraq can wreak far-reaching devastation and destabilization over regions for decades.”

Sanders has faced questions about his relative lack of foreign policy experience compared to Clinton. By making the argument our past policies have failed, he seems poised to use Clinton’s experience as a former senator and secretary of state against her.


5. The Bernie doctrine

Sanders also detailed his plan to combat the jihadist group Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS. 

He outlined a multilateral approach to military action, calling for the creation of “a new organization like NATO to confront the security threats of the 21st century.” He also argued America should take a supporting role in the fight against ISIS and let Muslim nations lead the effort.

“The fight against ISIS is a struggle for the soul of Islam,” Sanders said. “Countering violent extremism and destroying ISIS must be done primarily by Muslim nations with the strong support of their global partners.”

https://www.yahoo.com/politics/the-top-5-takeaways-from-bernie-sanders-big-014821822.html