As Bernie Sanders has risen in the polls, he has been taking increasing heat for some of his apparently vague foreign policy positions and the fact that his campaign does not have a team of establishment foreign policy advisers, unlike typical front-running candidates.
Instead of just questioning Sanders’ choice, we should really be questioning why any of the candidates of either party are employing the same old foreign policy advisers – many of whom not only supported the Iraq war but every disastrous military intervention since. These are the same people who now think that yet another regional war will somehow fix the chaos in the Middle East.
After a series of disastrous wars overseas, we should be looking for someone who has better “judgment” rather than candidates who have “experience” but are calling for more of the same policies in the Middle East that have led us into the mess we’re in now in the first place.
...
it’s actually quite refreshing that Sanders has refused to play into this game. This doesn’t mean reporters shouldn’t sharply question Sanders about his depth of knowledge on global affairs; some of his policy proposals that do seem quite vague. However, the people who are repeatedly asking Sanders about his “we’ll get Arab country soldiers to fight Isis” talking point refuse to question Clinton’s equally vague “let’s set up a no-fly zone in Syria” policy, which we have absolutely no details on beyond the fact that it will require tens of thousands of US service members and will almost certainly drag the US into an even larger war in the region.
It’s also true, as his detractors claim, that Sanders often falls back on his opposition to the Iraq war when asked about his foreign policy expertise. But pretty much everything he said before the war did come to pass. He also refused to support the Libyan intervention in 2011, which has led to the chaos that engulfs Libya today and has us on the precipice of yet another war (an intervention, mind you, that Clinton was the key architect of inside the Obama administration). Clinton’s long “experience” as secretary of state doesn’t replace this lack of judgment, which is arguably much more important.
Bernie Sanders has a 2-to-1 edge in the latest CNN/WMUR New Hampshire tracking poll, but the Vermont senator believes Tuesday's primary will be a close one.
"We think it's gonna be a close election, we're working really hard," Sanders told CNN's Jake Tapper on Saturday at Franklin Pierce University here.
It's a sentiment Sanders has echoed for the past five days in the Granite State.
..
Both Democratic campaigns have tried to manage expectations for the primary. Hillary Clinton has pushed the narrative that Sanders hails from Vermont and thus has an edge with his New England neighbors. In turn, Sanders reminded voters that Clinton won the state in the 2008 primary when she ran against then-Sen. Barack Obama.
The Sanders campaign has said it's insulting to New Hampshire voters to suggest that they would only support him because he's from the New England area.
"Well, in this sense it is. Look, I mean, obviously, Vermont and New Hampshire are separated by a river, we are close states," he told Tapper. "But you know what? Secretary Clinton won this state in 2008. Her husband ran several campaigns in this state. When we began this campaign here in New Hampshire, we were 30 points down in the polls and she was much better known in this state than I was."
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont made his first appearance on “Saturday Night Live,” playing a Jewish Democratic socialist immigrant coming to America on a sinking ship. It wasn’t such a stretch.
In the sketch, in which he appeared next to the show’s host and his doppelgänger, Larry David, Mr. Sanders protests the way Mr. David seeks special treatment over women and children because he is wealthy.
That was when Mr. Sanders made a surprise appearance from steerage.
“Hold on, hold on, wait a second,” Mr. Sanders said to applause from the crowd. “I’m so sick of the one percent getting this preferential treatment,” he said, adding a familiar line from his stump speech. “Enough is enough.”
Mr. David, who was putting on an accent that dipped between Irish and Flatbush, told Mr. Sanders that his ideas “sound like socialism to me.”
“Democratic socialism,” corrected Mr. Sanders.
Mr. Sanders’s character then introduced himself as “Bernie Sanderswitsky.” But, he added, “We are going to change it when we get to America so it doesn’t sound so Jewish.”
..
The skit followed an earlier, and frankly funnier, sketch called “Bern Your Enthusiasm,” in which Mr. David revisited the familiar plotlines and characters of his show “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” but in the character of Mr. Sanders.
Augusta County resident Mark Poe said it was curiosity that prompted him to walk through the door at the “Sanders on Saturdays” confab in Staunton. “I just wanted to see what y’all were up to,” he said tentatively.
The dozen or so Bernie-backers gathered at campaign headquarters, 240 N. Central Ave., welcomed the newcomer warmly, offering coffee and donuts. Local campaigners for Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders gather every Saturday morning at 10 at the area headquarters across from the Howard Johnson motel parking lot.
They’re a diverse group of about 75 men and women when all are present, and they range in age from the 30s to the 80s. Most are Democrats but some claim no party affiliation. What they have in common is a “Yearn for the Bern,” declares Middlebrook’s Mark Kersey with a grin.
It’s not only Sanders’ policy and philosophy that attract them, but the man himself. “He’s honest,” said Charlotte Mathis of Fishersville. “For the first time in my life I’m not going to have to vote for the lesser of two evils.” For Don Vovakes of Staunton, it’s Sanders’ candor. “Bernie comes across to me as straightforward. He doesn’t need to think up an answer when he’s asked a question.”
Two Staunton residents, Suzanne Fisher and Nick MacNeil, agree on that. MacNeil brought up Sanders’ description as a Democratic Socialist. “Sometimes that scares people off,” he said. “But to me, it means he puts society first instead of the stock market. It’s there in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, that citizens are to ‘…promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity…’ Bernie would do that.”
Keane Schwarz is certain he knows the outcome of the vote in his precinct: He was the lone caucusgoer in Woodbury County No. 43.
But the Iowa Democratic Party's final results state that Hillary Clinton won one county delegate and Bernie Sanders received zero.
"I voted for Bernie," Schwarz, 36, of Oto, told The Des Moines Register. “It was really suspicious … I’m actually pretty irate about it.”
Some complaints that Iowa Democrats have shared with the Register about discrepancies in caucus results appear to be valid. Others stem from confusion over how the math-heavy delegate-awarding system works in the Democrats' caucus process.
Party officials on Friday night were still reviewing reports and correcting errors and hadn’t yet shared candidates' updated totals of state delegate equivalents, which determine the winner of the caucuses.
Sanders’ backers are more likely than Clinton’s to think the political system is rigged, polling has found. So it might not come as a surprise, especially since he lost by a hairsbreadth, that some think the Democratic caucus system is rigged. It also doesn't help the optics that the state party chairwoman drove around for years in a car with “HRC2016” license plates.
At CNN's Democratic town hall this week, Hillary Clinton highlighted the biggest problem for her campaign in one answer: "That's what they offered."
The question was why she took a whopping $675,000 fee to speak to the Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs. To be sure, for a once-proclaimed moderate and newly branded progressive, there is no good answer to this question. But as bad ones go, the only worse response would have been "because I really, really love money."
Particularly as Hillary struggles to get out in front of the formidable challenge from Bernie Sanders.
But it's not just the dissonance between her record and her image that is giving Bernie oxygen in what should have been a much easier primary. It's that he is cool. And she is not.
That's not my opinion, mind you. I am not cool, nor do I pretend to know what is cool. But the standard-bearing arbiters of cool -- millennials, or people whose souls have yet to be crushed by later life -- do know. And they have anointed Bernie as the ultimate hipster.
..
And that's because there's nothing that appeals more to millennials than authenticity, and Bernie has got that in spades. When he talks about two Americas, he sounds like an activist. She could give the same speech, but she sounds like a salesman. Not cool.
Bernie is a true believer. He's local, where she's global.
Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Bernie Sanders has had a long and apparently often critical relationship with Israel
One mystery that surrounded the 74-year-old senator’s past links to the Jewish state was the identity of the kibbutz on which he spent several months in 1963 as a volunteer. On Thursday, veteran Israeli journalist Yossi Melman announced that the Democratic hopeful had named it in an interview with him more than 25 years ago.
In 1990, on the eve of his election to the US House of Representatives as a socialist, Sanders named the kibbutz where he volunteered as Sha’ar HaAmakim, a fact Melman published in his Haaretz interview.
Sanders has long been critical of Israeli settlement building and its conduct of recent fighting against Hamas in Gaza, but has also been vocal about Israel’s right to defend itself against attack.
The republication of the 1990 interview last week suggests that Sanders’s criticism is not new.
“I’d like to see the United States pressing Israel more on the Palestinian issue,” he said in 1990, according to an English translation of the Hebrew translation of Sanders’s original English-language interview with Melman.
he Democratic near-deadlock in the Iowa caucus was certainly a surprise — and in many ways a loss — for Hillary Clinton, who assumed a coronation once before, back in 2008. Now that she’s barely squeezed out a victory, the primaries ahead will require an extra push from her.
That extra push is likely to feature the following argument, which is especially effective on voters who are on the fence: Bernie Sanders may be progressive, bold and interesting, but Clinton’s time as secretary of state, first lady and senator, along with her sharp political instincts, ensures that she would be the best executive in a tumultuous time. Clinton has the ability to flip votes and to bring together stakeholders to reach consensus, while Sanders’s administration would have little to show for it because his quixotic idealism would lose to the competing forces of organized Republican resistance and heavy corporate lobbying.
It sounds like a good argument, but it’s deeply flawed, because it ignores a lingering problem for the party. The Democrats have expressed optimism that the party will recapture the House of Representatives. It remains to be seen how much those feelings reflect reality, but analysts know this much: If the party doesn’t succeed in taking over Congress, then extending the party’s stay in the White House means little. No Democratic president is going to have much success pushing through policy as long as Republicans have a majority, or even a sizable minority, in Congress.
..
This is the long slog that the Democrats will have to face in the years to come, no matter what happens this November. Sure, there’s a feeling that Hillary Clinton might be not only a competent manager of executive affairs, but also the best hope to save the nation from Trump or an unhinged Tea Partier like Cruz. It’s at best a short-term fix to a long-term problem.
Some see the reinvestment in urban areas as the new breeding ground for the next generation of liberalism. It’s a start, but the Democratic Party’s hardest sell has always been in so-called flyover country, the areas far flung from concentrated commerce. Winning that part of America is the most pressing thing right now. The party has hardly any long-term vision of whom it might run in the future, or of how to create the kind of Congress that would either deliver Democratic-friendly legislation or blunt an extremist Republican if one came to power.
What this boils down to is that Democratic voters shouldn’t vote for the candidate the pundit class says is most suitable. Instead, you may as well vote for the person who best represents your interests.
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders is counting down to the New Hampshire primary on Snapchat.
The Sanders campaign is advertising its platform with a series of “geo-filter” ads, only visible to people who are in the Granite State.
The ads lack the permanence of a campaign sign or even a viral video — they are only a visible when Snapchat users take a photo, apply the filter and share the image with friends — and then the image disappears in 24 hours.
Each day, those using the social network will see a a carton version of the senator with his signature flyaway hair alongside a sign that emphasizes a different part of the senator’s platform. On Saturday, the sign said “free college.” On Sunday, the sign will change to “pay equity lane,” a nod to equal pay for men and women.Then it shifts to Wall Street on Monday.
The Sanders campaign did a nine-day countdown in Iowa that was more focused on variations of the “feel the Bern” slogan. Mr. Sanders’s rival Hillary Clinton posts on Snapchat daily, but has yet to buy any ads. In New Hampshire, Mr. Sanders is up by 20 points, according to the WSJ/NBC/Marist poll released Thursday.
The Bernie News Roundup is a voluntary, non-campaign associated roundup of news, media, & other information related to Bernie Sanders' run for President.
Visit the BNR group page to join or find past editions.
More information about Bernie & The Issues @ feelthebern.org
|