Bernie Sanders' message rings out clearly through the scorn Time attempts to pour on the senator in his interview with them:
The political philosophy of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is not wanting for boogeymen. He sees them everywhere, overrunning Washington, distorting democracy, beating down the working family. It’s hard to go more than a few minutes into conversation before he begins to list them off. “People with incredible wealth and power,” he says. “The pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry, Wall Street, the military industrial complex.”
His great regret of Barack Obama is that the President never stood up like Franklin Delano Roosevelt did in 1936 to denounce the “economic royalists” of finance and industry, to “welcome their hatred.” “Point the finger at the billionaire class to say, ‘You know what, they hate my guts, the Koch brothers hate me, it’s all right. But I’m with you, and this is what we’re going to do,’ ” Sanders says.
In that shift from Roosevelt’s “economic royalists” to Sanders’ “billionaire class” lie the seeds of a nascent “class-based” presidential campaign that Sanders says he may unfurl as early as March.
He's been traveling through New Hampshire and Iowa and making the TV rounds while he weighs up the tremendous odds in terms of money and name recognition stacked up against him. He'll only run if he thinks he can make a serious and credible run of it in order to avoid harming progressive policy positions in future.
He's also still considering whether to run as an independent, and how to deal with the disadvantages that would cause him, as well as its inherent dangers to the country:
“I have not yet made the decision of whether to run as an independent or within the Democratic primary system,” he cautions, before noting that it is almost impossible for an independent to get on the ballot in states such as North Carolina. “But what I will not do is to create a situation where we elect a right-wing Republican as president.”...
He has drawn up a 12-step “Economic Agenda for America”—No. 9, not surprisingly, is “Taking on Wall Street”—and deliberating upon the best way to highlight the inequities that threaten the American experiment, so as to spark a grassroots brushfire....
If he takes the dive, the political independent who caucuses with Democrats will not spare his adopted party, a fact that is sure to cause headaches for the current heir to the liberal crown, Hillary Clinton. “People see the Democratic Party, which really once was the party of the American working class, really isn’t anymore,” he says. “They have over the years supported trade agreements from corporate America. They have not been vigorous in standing up for the kind of tax system that we need. They have not been vigorous enough in fighting for the kind of jobs programs that we need.” There is more: The deregulation of Wall Street under President Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin—”not a Republican,” notes Sanders. The too-small 2009 stimulus of Obama after the great recession. The hesitancy of so many in the party to declare healthcare a basic American right.
And then
Time can't resist adding a little class-based campaigning of its own, mocking Sanders for his family origins and relative poverty compared to the "royalty" of politics like the Clintons or the Bushes or Obama:
Sanders’ dad sold paint in Brooklyn, and in Sanders’ last statewide campaign he raised only $7 million, about what the 2012 Obama campaign spent in a week during the 2012 election. But a true populist does not let odds get in his way. To quote FDR again, “The resolute enemy within our gates is ever ready to beat down our words unless in greater courage we will fight for them.” So Sanders, his hair always mussed, his Brooklyn accent unfaded, faces a choice, to fight on with his hat in the ring or from the safety of the Senate floor.
You go, Bernie. Show the fuckers how a paint salesman's son with messy hair and a non-privileged accent can still speak truth to power, though the time for that is running short, crushed by the power of money and its smirking circle of media courtiers.
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