A diverse crowd of several thousand showed up to hear Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders deliver a rousing, hour-and-a-half speech at Caras Park in Missoula on Wednesday.
A huge line formed hours ahead of the rally, with people backed up all the way down the Riverfront Trail and across the Orange Street Bridge. When the U.S. senator from Vermont finally took the stage at about 1 p.m., the sign-waving, flag-carrying crowd erupted into chants of "Bern, baby, Bern!"
With his signature hand gestures and forceful speaking style, Sanders delivered a wide-ranging treatise on everything from his proposal to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour in every state to an assertion that the U.S. will no longer imprison more people than any other country on Earth if he is elected.
Before the rally, Sanders told the Missoulian how he would transition Montana away from a fossil fuel-dependent energy economy to a clean-energy economy without killing jobs.
"The debate is over. Climate change is real, and it is caused by human activity," Sanders said, adding that he has spoken with scientists all over the world. "It is already causing devastating problems in our country and around the world.”
Sanders, a member of the Senate committee on the environment, said that humans have a moral responsibility as custodians of this planet to leave it healthy and habitable for future generations.
Caras Park saw a roaring crowd of more than 9,000 Bernie Sanders supporters, all to see the Vermont senator speak in a last-minute push to sway voters before Montana's June 7 primary.
Some people waited in line for more than six hours to watch the one hour and 14 minute speech, a wait they say was worth it.
"I was here at 6 a.m.," said University of Montana student Corri Smith, one of the first in line for the rally. "I'm very excited, I think this is going to be an awesome opportunity for Missoula, and I know there's a lot of Bernie fans here, and I know especially college students want to hear someone talk who we feel cares about us," she said.
"I was here at 6 a.m.," said University of Montana student Corri Smith, one of the first in line for the rally. "I'm very excited, I think this is going to be an awesome opportunity for Missoula, and I know there's a lot of Bernie fans here, and I know especially college students want to hear someone talk who we feel cares about us," she said.
While Sanders’ Montana speech highlighted cornerstones like free college education, some people said it was about more than that.
"Being in a red state, he's the opposite of what traditional conservatives go for," said Missoula resident Tom Breck. "I think this will be a telling moment for a red state such as ours."
Billings had a Berning love for Sen. Sanders on Wednesday night.
A standing room only crowd of 3,008 at MetraPark punctuated Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders' every sentence and roared at his call for grassroots political reform.
"What we are doing is shaping America and the Democratic Party. Our agenda is the future of this country!" The Vermont senator said.
The former mayor turned independent senator was in true form with his long stove-piped sleeves displayed in full wingspan and his head somewhat bowed toward the microphone. He displayed full control of a crowd with a tidal roar.
The only time Sanders, 74, drew boos was when he called out the beneficiaries of income inequality. He called out the Walton family, which founded Wal-Mart, for having more wealth than 40 percent of the rest of society.
"A hundred years ago, workers fought for a 40-hour work week and we still haven't achieved a 40-hour work week," Sanders said. "If you work a 40-hour week you should not live in poverty."
"What I'm very proud of, in virtually all of the primaries and caucuses so far, we end up winning and by a large margin - younger people."
"What does that mean? That means our vision of economic justice, social justice, racial justice and environmental justice, that is the vision for the future of our country."
Sanders hammered home his continued pledge for a $15 an hour minimum wage and closing the gender pay gap.
"That is why I know every man in this room will stand with the woman in the fight for pay equity for women workers," Sanders said to a cheering crowd. "But it's not just making sure people are earning decent wages. We have to create millions of decent paying jobs in this country because real unemployment is not what you see in the newspapers. What you see is official employment at five percent, that's not real unemployment because real employment includes the people who've quit looking for work and there are millions of people working part-time who want to work full-time."
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Healthcare has become another topic ripe for discussion in his campaign. Sanders once again pledged support for universal healthcare for Americans while calling out the "greed" among pharmaceutical companies.
With both hands wrapped around the podium, Sanders repeated: "Real change" comes the "bottom on up."
"Nobody at the top every gives you what you need," he said. "You're going to have to stand up and fight for it."
Taylor Real Bird, attended the event with his wife, Coty Real Bird. Taylor Real Bird, an undecided voter, said he had heard Sanders spoke at events about treaty rights and was hoping to hear more. “Education is key,” Real Bird said, adding that he likes Sanders’ desire to help not just Native Americans, but all people.
Vanessa McNeil, 48, described herself as a struggling single mom with significant debt. McNeil fell down an icy staircase a few years ago and fractured her spine. She tried to work through her numerous injuries at the Bozeman tech business she was an employee of at the time but found herself increasingly dissatisfied with her medical treatment.
Bills piled up, and McNeil eventually lost her home. “Bernie is looking out for the little guys,” McNeil said of her support for Sanders.
Having recently acquired a graduate degree in psychology research, McNeil said she was impressed when she heard Sanders had discussed the state’s suicide rate at an earlier rally in Missoula.
“We need Bernie. I need Bernie,” McNeil said.
Billings resident Terry Zollinger attended the event with his wife, Marietta Zollinger. As they walked into the event, Marietta Zollinger called over her shoulder the reason she was supporting Sanders.
"He's the only honest one."
Fresh off a big win in the West Virginia primary, Sen. Bernard Sanders‘ campaign said Wednesday the Democratic Party would be courting “disaster” if it nominates Hillary Clinton as its presidential nominee.
In a fundraising email to supporters, Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver cited recent polls showing the Vermont senator performing better against Republican Donald Trump in general election match-ups. Recent surveys have shown Mrs. Clinton virtually tied with Mr. Trump in the key battleground states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida.
Citing those troubling figures, Mr. Weaver said the Democratic Party — and its superdelegates who are free to support either candidate — must reject Mrs. Clinton and embrace Mr. Sanders, or face a crushing defeat in November.
“For months, Bernie Sanders has out-polled Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump, and often by extraordinarily large margins. Because we must do everything we can to defeat Trump in November, our mission is to win as many pledged delegates as we can between now and June 14,” when the primary season ends, Mr. Weaver said. “Then we’re going to have a contested convention where the Democratic Party must decide if they want the candidate with the momentum who is best positioned to beat Trump, or if they are willing to roll the dice and court disaster simply to protect the status quo for the political and financial establishment of this country.”
Mr. Weaver also dismissed the notion that his candidate fares better against Mr. Trump only because he hasn’t been under the same white-hot spotlight Mrs. Clinton has faced for years.
“Some people say we do better against Trump because we haven’t faced the Republican attack machine yet. But we’ve been told our goals for the future are utopian, and that our plans would raise taxes on middle class families. We just never thought those attacks would come in a Democratic primary. Yet somehow we keep winning,” he said. “We are the best chance to defeat Trump because people united can never be defeated. That is why we must keep fighting.”
Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign replaced its California state director Wednesday, less than a month before voters in the delegate-rich state cast their primary ballots.
Michael Ceraso, who had been directing the campaign’s efforts in the state, will be replaced by Robert Becker, who has run the Sanders campaign’s operations in other states.
Mr. Ceraso, 34, said in an interview Wednesday that he wanted the campaign in California to devote more resources on supporting volunteers, digital initiatives and field organizing than on buying expensive television advertising.
“I felt that we should be spending more on digital and more on the grassroots team,” Mr. Ceraso said. “It just came down to a disagreement.”
When asked about the change, Michael Briggs, a spokesman for the Sanders campaign, did not provide details on why Mr. Ceraso was no longer with the campaign, but he praised Mr. Becker as “one of the most seasoned and savvy people working on our campaign or any campaign.”
Mr. Becker was the campaign’s Iowa state director and also worked for the campaign in New York. Recently, he had been helping Mr. Ceraso with Mr. Sanders’s efforts in California, which holds its primary on June 7.
"We'll see," said Tad Devine, Sanders' top strategist and ad-maker. "For many weeks we have talked about barnstorming California as our communications strategy, and I think that's probably what we're going to do. But we will always reserve the option to do other things as well."
Sanders told the Sacramento Bee Monday that he wasn't sure TV would be worth it, adding the campaign was "in reasonably good financial shape."
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Still, Sanders may be able to skirt by on free media attention from a hungry press corps.
"If I'm Bernie Sanders and I don't have the resources I need to run TV ads, I would not give up hope," said Darry Sragow, a longtime California Democratic strategist.
"I think that a lot of voters have a pretty strong sense that they'll able to make judgements about Bernie Sanders. And that means that the conventional wisdom - the conventional wisdom almost always being wrong — that he can't win CA without a huge TV buy is something that I think people should be skeptical of," said Sragow.
Already, the Vermont senator has made up an impressive ground in California.
"I'm looking at the trend line - we've done five polls between Clinton and Sanders - and he's closed the gap in each of those," said Mark DiCamillo, the director of the Field Poll.
Sanders started at just six percent in that first poll in January, but has since risen to within striking distance of Clinton.
The Urban Institute and the Tax Policy Center have released an analysis of the costs of Bernie Sanders' domestic policy proposals, including single-payer national health insurance.They claim that proposals would raise the federal deficit by $18 trillion over the next decade.
We won't address all of the issues covered in these analyses, just single payer, Medicare-for-all. To put it bluntly, the estimates are ridiculous. They posit outlandish increases in the utilization of medical care, and ignore vast savings under single-payer reform, and ignore the extensive and well documented experience with single-payer systems in other nations — which all spend far less per person on health care than we do.
The report also makes incredible claims that physicians' incomes would be squeezed (which contradicts their own estimates positing a sharp rise in spending on physician services), and that patients would suffer huge disruptions, despite the fact that the implementation of single-payer systems elsewhere, as well as the start-up of Medicare, were disruption-free.
We outline below some of the most glaring errors in the analysis regarding health care spending under the Sanders plan:
1. Administrative savings - insurance: The analysis assumes that insurance overhead would be reduced to 6 percent of total health spending from the current level of 9.5 percent. They base this 6-percent estimate on figures for Medicare's current overhead, which include the extraordinarily high overhead costs of private Medicare HMOs run by UnitedHealthCare and other insurance firms.
However, Sen. Sanders' proposal would exclude these for-profit insurers, and instead build on the traditional Medicare program, whose overhead is less than 3 percent. Moreover, even this 3-percent figure is probably too high, since Sanders' plan would simplify hospital payment by funding them through global budgets (similar to the way fire departments are paid), rather than the current patient-by-patient payments. Hence a more realistic estimate would assume that insurance overhead would drop to Canada's level of about 1.8 percent. Cutting insurance overhead to 2 percent (rather than the 6 percent that the analysis posits) would save an additional $1.7 trillion over the next 10 years.
Surely one study can’t be this important?
It’s not news that the Washington Post’s editorial board has been lobbying against Sen. Bernie Sanders since the beginning of his improbable presidential campaign. Sometimes this editorial ethos seems to extend to other parts of the paper, as it did in March, when the Post managed to run 16 negative stories about Sanders in 16 hours (FAIR.org, 3/8/16).
While the Post has published the occasional pro-Sanders piece, the Jeff Bezos–owned publication was back at it yesterday when it pounced on a tax study by the Urban Institute, running four pieces (two by Post writers, one by the editorial board and one by the AP) in one afternoon:
The study was irresistible for editors looking for viral outrage: huge, scary national debt numbers by a tax-and-spend liberal (entirely without any context), complete with innuendo that the campaign had been lying about its projections.
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Why would so much ink be spilled on a candidate who, by the Post’s estimation, can’t possibly win? The objective is, of course, to further stigmatize Sanders’ ideas and platform goals—all of which are deeply antithetical to the editorial and financial bottom line of the paper and its sole owner, Jeff Bezos, whose net worth is over $45 billion.
It’s not enough for Sanders to lose, as the Post’s editorial board has been expressly rooting for for months; his ideas and the influence he maintains in the party must be snuffed out as well.
Bismarck will briefly be on the map for the Democratic presidential nomination fight with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders making a campaign stop Friday evening with the North Dakota caucus quickly approaching.
The Sanders campaign confirmed Wednesday evening that Sanders will be in town Friday at the Bismarck Depot, 401 E. Main Ave. Doors open at 6 p.m. and those interested in attending are encouraged to RSVP through www.berniesanders.com.
Sanders will also be holding a rally at 11 a.m. Friday in Fargo.
Vinod Seth, a member of the Bismarck for Bernie Facebook group, was elated at the news.
“We are so excited that the candidate we’ve been waiting for all of our lives is finally here,” Seth said in a phone interview. “We finally have a candidate we can get 1,000 percent behind.”
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Dem-NPL Party Executive Director Robert Haider said in a statement both campaign’s interest in North Dakota highlights the tight presidential nomination fight and the importance the state may have in determining the party’s nominee.
“North Dakota Democrats are energized about this election and the excitement surrounding the Democratic campaigns coming to North Dakota reinforces that. The momentum and messages of the Democratic candidates contrast with those of Donald Trump, the expected Republican presidential nominee,” Haider said. “We need a presidential candidate who stands up and fights for all North Dakotans as both Democratic candidates do, not someone marginalizing women, minorities, and many others with hate-filled, misleading statements like Donald Trump.”
Wielding a scoop and the political muscle behind the ice cream company that bears his name, Ben & Jerry's co-founder Jerry Greenfield drew a crowd supporting 2016 presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders and free ice cream downtown Wednesday.
"Bernie supports the average person in the country. He is not supporting the super wealthy," Greenfield said. "He is not supporting the mega corporations and the corrosive influence of money in politics that has really undermined democracy."
Although he and co-founder Ben Cohen sold the brand to Unilever more than a decade ago for $326 million, Greenfield said he never took a turn right in his politics. In jeans, tennis shoes and a Bernie Sanders t-shirt, he traveled solo in a minivan to Louisville to stand in for the Democratic Socialist candidate in advance of Tuesday's primary contest versus Hillary Clinton.
"Ben and I have always been motivated by values," Greenfield, 65, said. "We always try and do that in our personal lives. We've been really lucky to integrate those values into a business."
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Democrat Darrell Rhodes, 24, took a break from his job as an enrollment specialist at The Learning House, an online higher education provider, for a scoop of hope and Cherry Garcia.
"I have $64,000 in student loans from Western Kentucky University," Rhodes said. "I make enough to get by but I still live check to check."
Sanders' proposals to make higher education and healthcare affordable to working class and middle-income Americans also motivated his co-worker Amy Holladay to line up for ice cream and show support.