The Sanders Campaign – From Sea to Shining Sea

[eridani]

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/04/29/sanders-campaign-sea-shining-sea

And it's no secret who constitute the bulk of the voters who do see things differently. While most anything may become a bone of contention in the midst of a presidential campaign, one point that no one argues is that Sanders has electrified the youth vote: Pennsylvania exit polls, for instance, showed him winning 83 percent of under-30 primary voters. Why? Perhaps it's because he has brought the U.S. up to speed with the rest of the world by introducing the idea of democratic socialism into the mainstream political whirl Or maybe it's because of the clarity of his positions: Whether he's advocating the $15 minimum wage; tuition-free public higher education; the need for a single-payer, Medicare-for-all health care system; the legalization of marijuana; the abolition of the death penalty; or his denunciation of the Iraq War as the country's greatest foreign policy disaster of the last forty years, when Sanders finishes talking you know clearly where he stands, something that is often not the case with the opposition.

One of the reasons for this clarity gap is also itself quite clear. By the time most politicians reach the point of seriously contending for the presidency, they likely face an ongoing conflict between what they or their constituents might think is best and what the big money people, whom they rely on for campaign funding, will let them get away with. But when you actually run a campaign against the politics of the big money interests, as Sanders has, and people support it with unprecedented amounts of small campaign contributions, you simply don't have to go through those contortions.

This contest pits two profoundly different visions for the American future against each other and those of us committed to dismantling the billionaires' rule are naturally committed to taking our case all the way to the convention, win, lose, or draw. Many in the Clinton camp, on the other hand, may have a hard time understanding this determination because they have never really understood what the Sanders campaign is all about. The candidate herself certainly appeared fairly clueless as to what's got us so exercised in this campaign, when she answered a question about why she charged $675,000 for giving speeches to the investment bankers at Goldman Sachs with the memorable words "That’s what they offered.”