At Salon, Bill Curry is up with a brilliant, must-read piece on Bernie Sanders' win in the debate, and on how he now has to improve his performance. Even if you're a Hillary supporter, it's worth your time to read.
In 2000 Al Gore outshone George Bush in every debate but the press thought otherwise. To our emotionally arrested, intellectually undernourished reporters, politics is high school. We didn’t want to have a beer with Bush, they did. Gore struck them as a teacher’s pet and for that they were merciless to him. When he sighed audibly during one of Bush’s myriad lies, it got replayed a million times on TV. If you saw just that video, you thought Bush won. It helped him — not enough to win the election, but enough to steal it.
And it just gets better from there.
Bernie won not because he outpointed her but because he’s strong on the issues on which she’s weak — and because those are the issues that matter most to voters. Like our environment, our democracy and our middle class are at a tipping point.
But, Curry says, Bernie still needs to improve on how he communicates those issues. For example, the "socialist" label Bernie embraces. Curry calls out Bernie's response to Anderson Cooper's question on that point: "Rubbish."
Instead, Curry urges Sanders to explain what it means:
Capitalism never created a middle class here or anywhere else. It does a great job of creating wealth but an awful job of distributing it. We never had a broad middle class until labor and government together gave us Social Security, the GI bill, the 40-hour week, child labor laws, the minimum wage, a progressive income tax and workers’ rights. Later on, Medicare, Medicaid and historic civil rights, and consumer and environmental laws strengthened the social contract that is the true foundation of the American middle class. Shred that contract and you destroy the middle class. If you don’t believe, just take a look around. You can tell people you’re a socialist, but if you do you have to tell them what you mean.
Great stuff here, and much more that I can't quote without overstepping fair use.
Give him some eyeballs.