Tag: Sanders

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SANDERS PREDICTS DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION WILL BE CONTESTED

Bernie Sanders

BY KEN THOMAS
ASSOCIATED PRESS

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Nearing the end of the primary season, a defiant Bernie Sanders predicted Saturday that the Democratic presidential process would lead to a contested summer convention against Hillary Clinton, pushing back against the likelihood that the former secretary of state will soon declare victory.

Speaking to reporters three days before the California primary, Sanders showed few signs of surrender, vowing to take his bid to the Philadelphia convention in July. He urged news organizations not to anoint Clinton as the presumptive nominee through a combination of pledged delegates and superdelegates.

“It is extremely unlikely that Secretary Clinton will have the requisite number of pledged delegates to claim victory on Tuesday night,” Sanders said. “Now I have heard reports that Secretary Clinton has said it’s all going to be over on Tuesday night. I have reports that the media, after the New Jersey results come in, are going to declare that it is all over. That simply is not accurate.”

By nightfall, Sanders was rallying supporters outside the entrance of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, where he pointed to his differences with Clinton on super PACs, the federal minimum wage and the Iraq War.

https://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_DEM_2016_SANDERS_FUTURE?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2016-06-04-12-55-53

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Iowa Will Gauge Ardor to Upend Politics as Usual

dont-tread-on-me-meaning

By PATRICK HEALYJAN. 30, 2016

DES MOINES — The presidential race hurtled over the weekend toward a watershed moment: voting that will start to reveal the true depth of Americans’ desire to cast aside traditional politicians and Washington-style compromise and embrace disruptive outsiders appealing to their passions.

After a year of countless and often conflicting polls, more than 250,000 Iowans are expected to attend caucuses on a relatively mild Monday night and render judgment on insurgent candidates who would bar Muslims from the country (Donald J. Trump), oppose concessions to Democrats (Senator Ted Cruz of Texas) and pursue a high-tax, big-government agenda (Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont). Voters are poised to bring order to the race, or reorder politics, as in no other recent election.

Money, experience and endorsements — advantages that usually turn candidates like Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, into inevitable nominees — will be tested against the potent messages of rivals promising upheaval.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/us/iowa-will-gauge-ardor-to-upend-politics-as-usual.html

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America is due for a revolution

storm the bastille

By Michael Goodwin

October 17, 2015 | 10:52pm

Here’s the good news: The chaos and upheaval we see all around us have historical precedents and yet America survived. The bad news: Everything likely will get worse before it gets better again.

That’s my chief takeaway from “Shattered Consensus,”a meticulously argued analysis of the growing disorder. Author James Piereson persuasively makes the case there is an inevitable “revolution” coming because our politics, culture, education, economics and even philanthropy are so polarized that the country can no longer resolve its differences.

To my knowledge, no current book makes more sense about the great unraveling we see in each day’s headlines. Piereson captures and explains the alienation arising from the sense that something important in American life is ending, but that nothing better has emerged to replace it.

The impact is not restricted by our borders. Growing global conflict is related to America’s failure to agree on how we should govern ourselves and relate to the world.

Piereson describes the endgame this way: “The problems will mount to a point of crisis where either they will be addressed through a ‘fourth revolution’ or the polity will begin to disintegrate for lack of fundamental agreement.”

He identifies two previous eras where a general consensus prevailed, and collapsed. Each lasted about as long as an individual’s lifetime, was dominated by a single political party and ended dramatically.

First came the era that stretched from 1800 until slavery and sectionalism led to the Civil War. The second consensus, which he calls the capitalist-industrial era, lasted from the end of the Civil War until the Great Depression.

https://nypost.com/2015/10/17/history-is-repeating-itself-america-is-due-for-a-revolution/

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Webb: CNN ‘rigged’ Dem debate for Clinton, Sanders

Jim Webb

October 16, 2015, 12:23 pm
By Mark Hensch

Former Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) believes that CNN stacked the odds for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) during the Democratic presidential debate on Tuesday.

“Online poll: Was the CNN #DemDebate rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton?” he tweeted Friday, referencing a Daily Caller sampling that shows 98 percent answering “yes.”

Webb’s post follows his insistence late Thursday that CNN moderator Anderson Cooper helped the network’s coverage skew toward Clinton and Sanders.

“I’m going to be very frank, it was rigged in terms of who was going to get the time on the floor by the way that Anderson Cooper was selecting people to supposedly respond to something someone else said,” he said during an address atthe Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

“It’s very difficult to win a debate when you don’t have the opportunity to speak the same amount of time on issues as the others did,” the long-shot Democratic White House hopeful said.

“It’s a reality that the debate was being portrayed as a showdown between Mrs. Clinton and Bernie, but if you’re going to be invited to participate and people are going to judge whether you, quote, ‘won’ or not, at least you should be able to have the kind of time that’s necessary to discuss the issues that you care about, that you’ve worked on,” Webb added.

https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/257154-webb-cnn-rigged-dem-debate-for-clinton-sanders

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Sanders tries to broaden support in White House bid

Bernie Sanders

Gina Chon in Columbia, South Carolina and Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington

In the 25 years they have known each other, US Senator Bernie Sanders has met with Ben Cohen, one of the founders of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, numerous times to talk about causes they support.

But Mr Cohen cannot recall a time when they had dinner just to hang out, even though he is one of the wealthiest people in the senator’s home state of Vermont, and has endorsed his presidential run.

Socialising with prominent supporters is virtually a requirement for politicians, but Mr Sanders, who has held public office for more than 30 years, has won elections by being the anti-politician politician.

“I sometimes run into him at the airport, but Bernie’s not a schmoozer. It’s an oxymoron for Bernie to have an image consultant,” said Mr Cohen, who laughed heartily at the idea of Mr Sanders changing his unruly white hair to appeal to voters. “What you see is what you get. And he has a history of confounding the pundits for it.”

He is doing just that in his bid to unseat Hillary Clinton as the Democrat’s nominee to be the next US president, leading in primary polls in the key states of Iowa and New Hampshire. The support marks a stunning turn of events for a candidate who was written off a few months ago as a fringe politician.

 

https://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fc9fd43a-5e41-11e5-9846-de406ccb37f2.html#axzz3mMIRcOSc

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What have Bush, Clinton learned from voters’ attraction to the outsiders?

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By Dan Balz Chief correspondent September 5 at 11:32 AM

At the beginning of this year, the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania sponsored a focus group in the Denver suburbs composed of a dozen adults — Republicans, Democrats and independents. Looking back almost nine months later, the two-hour discussion proved to be a prescient guide to the surprising politics of 2015.

For any conventional politician paying attention, what was said there should have been unnerving. The name Donald Trump was never mentioned, nor was that of Ben Carson or Bernie Sanders. But the sentiments expressed that evening help explain why those three candidates are in the forefront of the political conversation on this Labor Day weekend.

Dan Balz is Chief Correspondent at The Washington Post. He has served as the paper’s National Editor, Political Editor, White House correspondent and Southwest correspondent.View Archive

The participants made it clear that they were fed up with politics as usual. They were harsh in their judgments about most traditional politicians, the political establishment and the way Washington works. They had no particular appetite for a clash-of-dynasties presidential campaign pitting a Bush against a Clinton.

They were especially critical in their assessments of Jeb Bush. They were tepid toward Hillary Rodham Clinton, although judgments fell more predictably along partisan lines. The participants longed for someone who seemed different and who they believed understood their lives. The name Elizabeth Warren, the populist senator from Massachusetts, sparked positive comments, even from some of the Republicans.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/what-have-bush-clinton-learned-from-voters-attraction-to-the-outsiders/2015/09/05/3500ba66-532e-11e5-8c19-0b6825aa4a3a_story.html

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Sanders Surges, Clinton Sags in U.S. Favorability

Bernie Sanders

by Lydia Saad

PRINCETON, N.J. — Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ favorable rating among Americans has doubled since Gallup’s initial reading in March, rising to 24% from 12% as he has become better known. Hillary Clinton’s rating has slipped to 43% from 48% in April. At the same time, Clinton’s unfavorable rating increased to 46%, tilting her image negative and producing her worst net favorable score since December 2007.

Sanders’ increased favorability reflects the broader increase in the public’s familiarity with him since March. Overall, 44% of Americans are able to rate him today, up from 24% in March. Not only has the percentage viewing him favorably increased, but also the percentage viewing him unfavorably has risen, up eight percentage points to 20%.

Clinton’s Inauspicious Rivals

Clinton maintains a higher absolute favorable rating from Americans than any of her official rivals for the 2016 Democratic nomination. In contrast to the relative prominence of numerous candidates on the Republican side, she remains the only Democratic candidate known well enough by a majority of Americans for them to rate her, which helps Clinton maintain a higher overall favorable score.

Sanders is still an unknown to a majority of Americans, with just 44% able to rate him compared with Clinton’s 89%. Total familiarity drops still further among the other three announced Democratic candidates: to 23% for former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb at 23%, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley at 22% and former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee at 17%. With slightly more Americans viewing each of these candidates unfavorably than favorably, their favorable scores reach no more than 11%.

https://www.gallup.com/poll/184346/sanders-surges-clinton-sags-favorability.aspx

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Straight Talk of Steroids

trump_ralley_theridgewoodblog

David Catanese is senior politics writer for U.S. News & World Report

The most meaningful moment of Donald Trump’s spectacle of a presidential campaign thus far may have come during a solemn evening news conference last Friday in Los Angeles, when he stood silently behind the family members of crime victims.

One after another, a father or mother or aunt spoke emotionally about the death of a son or nephew at the hands of someone who was in the country illegally.

“Nobody wants to hear from us,” lamented Don Rosenberg, whose 25-year-old son was struck and then run over three times by a car driven by an unlicensed man from Honduras. “We get ignored constantly.”

Lupe Moreno, a Hispanic woman who wore a button with a photograph of her deceased nephew, Ruben Morfin, fought back tears while describing his death: Gunned down at age 13 in Salinas, California, by an immigrant without the proper legal documents.

[READ: The Second-Quarter Game Changers]

“Our children are dying every day. They’re being raped. They’re being brutalized,” Moreno said in raw remarks that echoed Trump’s controversial missive about Mexican immigrants last month. Her sister had gone to Capitol Hill 20 years ago to deliver congressional testimony she hoped would spur action to move against those who broke the law to get to the U.S. They’re still grieving, and still waiting.

Moreno thanked Trump for speaking hard truths. Then, with a pained look on her face, she scolded the reporters in the room for failing to adequately cover the deaths or describe the perpetrators’ legal status: “You’re not helping at all; those other candidates aren’t helping, either. I wish they had the cojones of our forefathers.”

https://www.usnews.com/news/the-report/articles/2015/07/17/donald-trump-and-bernie-sanders-straight-talk-on-steroids