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How Bernie Plans On Winning:
Confront Hillary Clinton on issues – not her email use – resist the lure of negative attacks, pull off an upset in an early primary contest and harness that momentum to catapult forward into a targeted state-based fight for delegates.
That's Bernie Sanders' game plan to take on the Democratic presidential front-runner in the coming months, as he looks to transform himself from a progressive movement candidate alone to a plausible major party nominee.
The Sanders strategy will test whether a contender who loathes attack ads and refuses to bless a super PAC to support him can compete in a system awash with unlimited money that often rewards bare-knuckled political tactics.
"His brand is about the rejection of the politics of our time, not the perpetuation of it," says Sanders' longtime top strategist, Tad Devine, who admits, "For a long-shot candidate to win, you have to have a few shoes to drop along the way."
The Vermont senator trails the former secretary of state by 18 points nationally, and in Iowa, which holds the first nominating contest, he lags by 19 points. He's shown the most progress in the first primary state of New Hampshire, where the most recent poll showed him overtaking Clinton. Increasingly, this looks like the most hospitable turf for Sanders to produce an earthshaking victory.
"We probably have to win somewhere early to be credible," Devine says.
But how Sanders wins is almost as important to him as the victory itself.
A Tale Of Two Rallies:
Trump’s rallies feel like a professional wrestling match, and not just because they often feature Hulk Hogan’s theme song, “Real American.” At a recent Trump-headlined fundraiser in Birch Run, Michigan, mullets were in style and Budweiser tallboys were on sale. In Alabama, Trump’s plane circled the stadium, drawing wild cheers from the crowd awaiting his arrival.
Trump’s supporters are angrier than he is. Outside the Birch Run event, they clashed with Mexican-American protesters. Outside a rally in Phoenix, Arizona, in July, his supporters also engaged in shouting matches with Hispanic protesters. One attendee walked by a protester as I was interviewing him and taunted him by shouting, “Vamos por Mexico.” Outside the convention center in Phoenix, Trump supporters even fought each other, jostling over a place in line until security staff broke up the scuffle.
...
Sanders is angrier than his supporters. When the Vermont senator, hoarse of voice, bellowed out for a “political revolution,” the crowd cheered. But minutes before they had milled about amiably on the lawn. A game of Frisbee seemed more likely to break out than a revolution. At Sanders’ campaign kickoff in May in Burlington, Vermont, 5,000 supporters snacked on free Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.
Should it arrive, the revolution will be mellow.
..
Trump’s rallies magnify the cult of personality of a would-be leader who promises to save the country through personal talent and integrity so great that they transcend any issue or ideology.
Sanders’ serve as rallying points for a mass movement that promises to save the country through specific reforms and to which Sanders, as leader, is almost incidental.
Its the same story I put up yesterday but Im linking it again for the change of venue. First was FOX, Now Sanders gets The DailyMail To Diss Kochs In A Headline:
Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders is making the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch the face of a 'corrupted' political and economic system that the Vermont senator wants to upend.
Sanders delighted a South Carolina rally of more than 3,000 people Saturday with his assertions that the Kochs and other 'greedy' billionaires are destroying American democracy by infusing huge sums of cash into campaigns and election.
The Vermont senator, who is pushing former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton from the left, called for publicly financed elections that would allow 'anyone' to seek public office without 'begging from billionaires.'
Shocker: Oligarchs Dont Like Sanders:
The current state of the Republican Party may seem like a demolition derby, but there’s an equally fascinating, if less well-understood, conflict within the Democratic Party. In this case, the disruptive force is largely Silicon Valley, a natural oligarchy that now funds a party teetering toward populism and even socialism.
The fundamental contradictions, as Karl Marx would have noted, lie in the collision of interests between a group that has come to epitomize self-consciously progressive megawealth and a mass base which is increasingly concerned about downward mobility. For all his occasional populist lapses, President Obama generally has embraced Silicon Valley as an intrinsic part of his political coalition. He has even enlisted several tech giants – including venture capitalist John Doerr, LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman and Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla – in helping plan out Obama’s no-doubt lavish and highly political retirement.
In contrast, Hillary Clinton is hardly the icon in the Valley and its San Francisco annex as are both her husband and President Obama. But her “technocratic liberalism,” albeit hard to pin down, and close ties to the financial oligarchs seems more congenial than the grass-roots populism identified with Bernie Sanders, her chief rival for the Democratic presidential nomination.
“They don’t like Sanders at all,” notes researcher Greg Ferenstein, who has been polling Internet company founders for an upcoming book. Sanders’ emphasis on income redistribution and protecting union privileges and pensions is hardly popular among the tech elite. “He’s an egalitarian liberal,” Ferenstein explains, “These people are tech liberals. Equality is a nonissue in Silicon Valley.”
Bernie & Biden:
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders talked about everything but Joe Biden yesterday — and supporters don’t seem worried despite news over the weekend that the vice president met with progressive darling U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
“What we are trying to do ... is to make sure this campaign is not about Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump or anyone else,” Sanders told a packed crowd at the Woodbury School yesterday. “This campaign has got to be about you.”
But some backers at the muggy, hourlong rally admitted they could be won over by the veep.
“Right now I support Bernie, but if Biden were to get in I’d support Biden,” said Josh O’Neil, a student who attended the event. “I think Biden is more electable in the general election and I think he is the best person to beat Hillary, and I do not want Hillary to win the nomination.”
Sanders, who was largely dismissed as a fringe candidate early in the race, has become a force to be reckoned with over the past few months and has surged past Clinton in New Hampshire, according to a poll by Franklin Pierce University and the Boston Herald that showed him ahead 44 to 37 percent.
But Sanders supporter Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream dismissed Biden as a potential threat.
“I think Joe Biden jumping in is actually a real help to Bernie. He’s going to take votes from Hillary that cuts down her lead,” Cohen said. “I think Bernie’s policies are just head and shoulders beyond what Biden would propose.”
Sanders In Salem:
Bernie Sanders took the microphone at Woodbury School in Salem on Sunday night and didn’t relinquish it for the next hour and a half – his stump speech covering everything from income inequality to international trade to free public education without so much as a break.
At the end, the Democratic presidential candidate apologized to the crowd of about 1,000.
“You have been so patient, I keep going on forever, and I apologize,” he said. But they weren’t tired yet.
“Keep going!” several people called out from the crowd.
“Give ’em hell, Bernie!” one man yelled.
Sanders laughed and made a nod to former president Harry Truman. He recalled Truman used to say, “They think I’m giving them hell, but I’m just telling the truth."
The Sanders Revolution Is All Inclusive:
The senator from Vermont whipped up packed crowds at venues in Greenville, Columbia and Charleston in a powerful weekend tour. In his Columbia address, Sanders declared, “This is a campaign on the move!” He wasn’t lying, as the campaign reported crowds of over 2,000 in Greenville and Columbia on Friday, and another 3,000 in Charleston. Perhaps more important than the large numbers, these Sanders crowds were comprised of a variety of demographics.
The over-capacity crowd cheering for Sanders was not a group of simply politically active students (both college and high school students were in attendance). The audience in Columbia Friday evening featured a wide spectrum of potential Sanders supporters, and the candidate demonstrated an ability to get all of them to their feet.
It was impossible to tell from where I was standing if the man who screamed out “I love you, Bernie!” halfway through the speech was a young father, a middle-aged biker or manual laborer. And when Sanders replied, “I love you too!” in his hoarse, powerful, New Englander voice it was a diverse crowd of southerners that jumped to their feet.
Local station WPTZ has a story & video on Sanders crowds:
Earlier this month at a Bernie Sanders rally in Los Angeles, more than 27,000 people showed up. Large crowds are showing up for his events all over the country.
Garrison Nelson, a political analyst, says Sanders has messages that resonate with many Americans.
"There is great prosperity and wealth that we presumably Americans are supposed to enjoy and they have basically been deprived. And Bernie is able to speak to that particular group of people who feel somewhat displaced and really underserved by the government," Nelson said.
Sometimes a Movement Needs a Leader: The Bernie Sanders Campaign:
According to a recent above-the-fold, front-page article in the New York Times by Jason Horowitz, Senator Bernie Sanders "bellows" "snarls" and "glares" his way through campaign appearances. His candidacy, Horowitz writes, amounts to little more than giving "disaffected Democrats" the opportunity "to vent their anger at the list of national ills they believe are caused by big business and its conservative allies."
The dismissive tone of such reportage tells us more about what ruling elites would like to sweep under the rug than it does about anything of substance relating to Sanders' critique of American society.
The only good thing about the corporate media's horse race coverage of the 2016 race over a year before the voting is that it gives Bernie Sanders and the social movements he represents ample time to coalesce and bring real progressive policy proposals into the nation's political consciousness.
Despite the plutocrats' largely successful deployment of their wealth to skew the playing field, given the chance, activists can unite with the Sanders campaign to focus the agenda, and maybe even punch a hole in the sealed discourse of Washington-think and lead a long march into the realm of electoral politics.
The most potent ideas for addressing the urgent problems facing the country don't come out of the air-conditioned offices of the American Enterprise Institute, but arise from the kind of unity of thought and action the Sanders campaign embodies. There exists the potential to take the goals of the wider social justice movement and bake them right into the Democratic Party platform for 2016.