Salon.com: Bernie Sanders Must Bring It

[LiberalElite]

http://www.salon.com/2015/06/03/bernie_sanders_must_bring_it_between_gop_obfuscation_and_hillarys_evasions_someone_needs_to_be_serious/

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With eight official entrants, the GOP presidential race looks like the running of the bulls. Seven more candidates are expected; eight if you count Donald Trump. If they all run, it’ll be the biggest presidential field in any political party in American history.

Last Wednesday Rick Santorum got in. Like most politicians now, he shuns policy specifics in favor of long riffs on his own life, or his parents’ lives. Presidential candidates live privileged lives, so we hear a lot about hardships their parents suffered. Santorum’s dad was a coal miner; Marco Rubio’s was a bartender; Mike Huckabee’s a fireman. George Pataki got in on Thursday. His dad was a mailman and his mom a waitress, but he went to Yale and got a law degree at Columbia.

Republicans tell tales of humble origins in hopes of relating to a humbled middle-class. Santorum and Huckabee once connected with wedge issues sharpened by the religious right, but when that stopped working, they moved on. Odd as it may seem, both men now present as tribunes of working families, posing as populists the only way they can, by conflating their own and their parents’ life stories.
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xposted in Bernie Sanders group and Good Reads