Hi Folks. It’s your weekly Bernie Election and Revolution News (BERN), a collaboration of The Political Revolution group here at Daily Kos in support of Senator Sanders’ presidential campaign. It has been a big week, and I will just jump right into it without any further ado. My through-line for all of these news items is that Bernie is the undisputed front-runner at this point, fortunately for us, as he is also the best shot we’ve got to win against Donald Trump.
That small donor sum is so much more important for Bernie than the sum of its donations, because, combined with the fact that he is leading in said donations, i.e. total funds raised ($18.2 million in Q1, trailed by Kamala Harris’ $12 million), it means he is overwhelmingly leading the pack in total unique donors:
Speaking of which, Sanders released his tax returns yesterday, all 10 years’ worth, just before the [record 2.5 million-viewer] Fox News town hall, which opened up the opportunity for him to take this jab, right in front of Trump’s entire base (as well as Trump himself, of course):
"And by the way, why don't you get Donald Trump up here and ask him how much he pays in taxes? President Trump watches your network a little bit, right? Hey President Trump, my wife and I just released 10 years. Please do the same."
Lol. Trump, who has been more or less soft on Bernie since 2016, awkwardly attempting to belittle/befriend Bernie’s base/drive a Democratic wedge, lashed out at Fox last night. Guess Bernie got to him.
Vox has a good analysis of the town hall and Trump’s meltdown thereafter. As they point out, “the president isn’t used to watching himself get attacked on his favorite channel.” The Atlantic said the event “pierced the Fox News bubble” and “paid off”; and the Washington Post likewise published the following:
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) went where the Democratic Party is unwilling to tread on Monday, participating in a lengthy town hall interview on Fox News. The questions posed by Fox anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum aimed at poking holes in Sanders’s political rhetoric, but, by the time the event had ended, it was Fox News’s bubble that had been pierced.
...
Sanders came prepared to battle both his Democratic primary opponents and his hosts. The first question, posed by a member of the audience, centered on Sanders’s just-released tax returns, showing that his income had crossed the million-dollar mark after the 2016 election. (The person asking that question was a member of the conservative group Turning Point USA.)
“I guess on Fox News you said that it benefited from Trump’s tax bill,” Sanders said to Baier during his response. “Did you tell people I voted against Trump’s tax bill?”
"Sure," Baier replied, "but you did benefit from it."
"But I voted against it," Sanders continued. He noted that Trump had claimed the bill wouldn't benefit the wealthy. "Whether it's me or you are anybody else," he continued, "I think wealthy people and large corporations that are making billions of profits should start paying their fair share of taxes."
"So why not say I'm leading this revolution, I'm not going to take this?" Baier asked a bit later.
“Come on,” Sanders replied. “I pay the taxes that I owe, and by the way, why don’t you get Donald Trump up here and ask him how much he pays in taxes?”
Baier said they would. [editor’s note: they won’t]
…
The transcript notes 72 points at which the audience applauded.
At one point, after Sanders criticized Fox and other media outlets for focusing on presidential personalities instead of policies, Baier's patience seemed to run out.
National Polls show that Bernie has moved into the front runner position not only of declared primary candidates, but presumptive ones as well. This from the new Emerson poll:
Amazing as this is, given how far Bernie had to come to get there since breaking onto the national stage in 2016, something even more remarkable is lurking in the crosstabs of that poll that suggest he may not have as much trouble in the southeast as he did as a relatively-unknown candidate four years ago:
Lastly, I want to talk about Bernie standing with Ilhan Omar. As we all know Donald Trump posted a vile, racist and inciteful video this week splicing footage of her in an interview with footage of the Twin Towers being attacked on 9/11. I know we all know that Bernie was among the first major Democratic leaders to come to her defense. I just want to point out that Representative Omar has clearly paying been attention to who’s got her and Muslim Americans’ backs, as should we:
So with that, I leave you with two pleas: First, next week Bernie will have house parties all over the country to kick off his grassroots activity on the ground, and we would strongly encourage you to consider attending or hosting one of these:
Second of all, please, as always, consider donating. Bernie Sanders is unlike any other US politician where, in a country where politics is all about the $$$, he is managing to fundraise exclusively from the grassroots. Here is Noam Chomsky’s favorite political scientist on the question of how corporate money drives the US political system, Thomas Ferguson, on the historical significance of Sanders’ 2016 campaign:
With respect to the Sanders campaign, these tables show something we are confident is without precedent in American politics not just since the New Deal, but across virtually the whole of American history, waiving the dubious case of the legendary 1896 election: a major presidential candidate waging a strong, highly competitive campaign whose support from big business is essentially zero. We are hardly the first to notice this fact, but like many other others, we had trouble believing our eyes. Thus we checked carefully. Sanders stands out not only for the high percentage of small contributions, but the minuscule totals of large contributions in the aggregate. Later in this essay, when we consider the sectoral breakdown of contributions, we will see that the handful of small donations scattered among our counts of big business contributions to Sanders clearly derive from many lower level employees, not top management. The few large contributions arise from aggregated contributions from a handful of unions (the official union leadership of most unions supported Hillary Clinton, see below). In 2016, Bernie Sanders was sui generis – not at all comparable to Ron Paul, whose 2012 campaign was hoisted aloft in part by a Super PAC funded by Peter Thiel and other mega-donors (Ferguson et al., 2013). He was exactly what he appeared to be, something truly new under the American sun.
Let’s give him something to REALLY write about.