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Bernie Explains His Campaigns Success So Far:
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said today he does not know whether new poll numbers putting him within 7 percentage points of Hillary Clinton in Iowa mean her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination is in trouble, but his campaign is "doing great."
“You know, it’s not just in Iowa. It’s in New Hampshire. It’s all across this country,” he said on "This Week." "I think people are responding to our message."
Sanders admitted that Clinton was “way ahead" of him in terms of her support among Democratic Party and institutional leaders, but argued that many of them might still support him in the end.
“Democratic leaders are not dumb," said Sanders, the longest-serving independent member of Congress. "What they want and what I want is to make sure that we do not see a Republican gain control over the White House.
“And I think as these look around the country and see the kind of energy and see the kind of huge turnouts we're getting, seeing the kind of young people who, for the first time, are getting involved in the political process ... I think what these leaders -- maybe not today but in a couple months -- will say, 'You know, we want to win.'"
More:
“This is pro-Bernie Sanders and a message that says, 'enough is enough,' " he told ABC. “This country and our government belong to all of us, not just a handful of very wealthy people.”
The 73-year-old Sanders, a self-proclaimed Socialist, also defended himself against criticism that he so far has focused too little on foreign policy and national security.
“We’ve only been in the race for three months,” he said. “We are going to spend more time on that.”
Sanders said he made the correct decision in voting against the war in Iraq because the aftermath led to destabilization across the region but argued he supports military force as an essential component of foreign policy.
“Using the military is always an option, but it’s the last option,” he said. “I believe the United States should have the strongest military in the world.”
CBS:
A new Iowa poll out Saturday showed Sen. Bernie Sanders, Vermont's independent Senator, coming within seven points of Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton. But pollster Ann Selzer, the president of Selzer & Company, said it's not motivated by anti-Clinton sentiment.
"Her support is going a little bit into the not-sure category with people being sort of waiting there. But the Bernie Sanders vote it certainly getting stronger," Selzer said on CBS' "Face the Nation" Sunday. "It isn't just that there's an anti-Clinton sentiment...When we ask Bernie Sander supporters is this because you align with Bernie Sanders, the person and his views, 96 percent say yes. Overwhelmingly, that's what they're up to."
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Sanders might still be losing to Clinton overall, but he's up among people who say they will participate in the Iowa caucus for the first time, those who consider themselves independent, and people under 45.
"That's the Obama coalition. Those are the groups that he put together that surprised Hillary Clinton in 2008," she said.
Sanders Believes We Need Issue Oriented Debates:
On Sunday, Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders spoke out about the need for issue-specific debates, saying his fellow Democratic presidential hopefuls should be debating multiple issues, including the environment.
“I think environmentalists deserve a debate so we could talk about how we move aggressively to transform our energy system away from fossil fuel,” Sanders said on CNN’s State of the Union.
Sanders’ comment came after he was asked about the Democratic National Committee’s decision to cap the number of primary debates. That decision drew fire from Democratic candidate Martin O’Malley on Friday.
“Four debates and only four debates — we are told, not asked — before voters in our earliest states make their decision,” the presidential candidate said at the DNC’s summer meeting. “This sort of rigged process has never been attempted before.”
Sanders noted on Sunday that he also wanted to see other issue-specific debates among the Democratic candidates, including how they’d deal with the high cost of college and income inequality in the country.
Politico Writes About 'Lil B':
randon McCartney, the rapper better known as Lil B or “The Based God,” is perhaps hip-hop’s biggest puzzle. His scattered oeuvre features thousands of offbeat and often-improvised songs on everything from Ellen DeGeneres to wonton soup to bar mitzvahs. He’s given surreal lectures on topics like veganism and Tinder at universities like MIT and NYU. On Twitter and ESPN, he places what he calls “Based God’s Curses” on NBA players who cross him, which some believe might just be the reason why the Houston Rockets’ James Harden choked in the last seconds of Game 2 in this year’s Western Conference Finals. Slate once described Lil B as the “weirdo rapper”—“a brilliantly warped, post-Lil Wayne deconstructionist.”
Now, the “weirdo rapper” is taking up another unexpected venture: the underdog presidential candidacy of a self-declared socialist senator from Vermont. If you thought Donald Trump giving out Lindsey Graham’s cell phone number or Lincoln Chafee embracing a metric system platform had made 2016 quirky enough, now Lil B has emerged as one of Bernie Sanders’ most ardent supporters, taking to Twitter and getting booked as a TV talking head campaigning for the senator. For an underestimated insurgent candidate who’s drawing some of the biggest crowds of the primary, it’s perhaps a fitting pairing: While Hillary Clinton has been taking selfies with Kanye West and attracting official and unofficial endorsements from Snoop Dogg and Beyoncé, Sanders’ hip hop supporters tend to be more underground figures. (Killer Mike, a politically outspoken anti-establishment rapper and activist, has also endorsed the senator.) Like Sanders, Lil B, whose music was often dismissed and harshly maligned early in his career, finds himself getting more and more attention from onlookers who are delighted with his Dadaist antics.
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His foray into politics, however, is relatively recent. He admits he doesn’t know much about policy yet; throughout our interview, he asked me to send him news articles so he could “get a real, non-biased, non-judgmental opinion of these candidates so I can get something truthful.” But he knows he has an audience, and wants to make use of it. “Rappers are definitely role models and definitely should get involved,” he says. “They’re involved in politics whether they like it or not.”
Bernie is Going Back To Iowa:
Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders will make several campaign stops in Iowa this week.
Sanders, whose support has recently cut into that of Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton, will hold events in Grinnell, Burlington, Tama and Cedar Rapids.
THURSDAY
Grinnell: 2 p.m. town meeting at Grinnell Community Center, 927 Fourth Ave.
Burlington: 7:30 p.m. town meeting at the Des Moines County Fairgrounds livestock arena.
FRIDAY
Tama: 2 p.m. town meeting at Meskwaki Tribal Center, 349 Meskwaki Road.
Cedar Rapids: 7 p.m. town meeting at Coe College's Sinclair Auditorium, First Avenue East.
Surrogates start making stuff up again:
U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, stumping here Sunday for Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton, questioned her chief primary opponent's commitment to the Latino community, saying U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders has "hardly at all" reached out to the growing voting bloc.
"I want to say this in all frankness. I didn't come here to knock any of the candidates, but Sen. Sanders has not reached out to the Hispanic caucus in Congress, has not reached out to me. I've never met the gentleman. [He] has not visited Texas or the Rio Grande Valley," Castro, a San Antonio Democrat, said during a stop at a Mexican restaurant in Des Moines. "That's a bit of a concern."
Contrary to Castro's statement, Sanders has visited Texas as a candidate, holding July rallies in Dallas and Houston that drew thousands of supporters.
Castro went on to suggest Sanders, a Vermont independent running for president as a Democrat, has been missing in action as some Republican candidates, including bomb-throwing businessman Donald Trump, have intensified their attacks on people in the country illegally. Earlier in the event, Castro said Latinos "have become a piñata" in the 2016 race.
Sanders Is Changing Minds:
The Rev. Frantz Whitfield was ready for Hillary before she announced her second bid for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president. But now he’s feeling the Bern.
Whitfield, a pastor at Mount Carmel Baptist Church, had been a vocal and loyal supporter of the Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton since her first bid in 2008, but as of last week, he’s decided to back her main challenger Bernie Sanders.
Whitfield’s decision, announced on social media site Twitter, did not come lightly. He remembers being impressed with Sanders when he heard the Vermont independent speak at a conference in New York in April, but he still maintained his loyalty to Clinton. It wasn’t until Whitfield recently looked at Sanders’ priorities -- at the urging of a local organizer -- that his support began to waver.
“One of the big reasons and the main reasons that I switched my support isn’t because of the fact that Hillary is a bad person, you know, but it’s just because of the fact that Bernie has so much more issues that he is running on, and he’s just genuine in what he does,” Whitfield said.
When Whitfield began to peruse Sanders’ issues on his website, two things immediately jumped out to him: that Sanders is a believer in getting big money out of politics and that he had a detailed plan for racial justice.
Unsung Heroes Of The Sanders Campaign:
When Aidan King walks down the street in Montpelier, he goes unrecognized. Hardly a soul realizes, he is what some are calling a vital piece of the political revolution Bernie Sanders seeks across the country.
"We could pretend that we're expert political organizers and we know what we're doing and we're doing a good job, but it's not," King says. "It's Bernie."
By day, King works at a winery. In his free time, he is the man behind an online community of over 90,000 Sanders supporters, running an online page that gets over 500,000 views per month.
The idea was born after a political discussion on the social networking site Reddit turned into activism. King and David Frederick of San Jose, California, formed a Reddit page for Bernie Sanders supporters.
At that time, Sanders was a little known Senator in Vermont with no presidential campaign to speak of.
"We decided that well, if Bernie Sanders is going to run for president, we want to be ready," King said.