An old grey-haired man steps onto the stage leaving his comb somewhere lost in the 1970's. It seems like a town square of prophets professing their views of social reform onto thousands of uninterested passersby. He looks out on them claiming that we could climb out of the hole we're in. We could break out. All we have to do is distribute the pie a little better and ask that the rich help the poor.
Socialist. Radical. The opposite coin to Donald Trump. Too old.
To wrap it up, he's freaking nuts!
These are the things that many would like to think about Bernie Sanders. Actually, he's what Republican strategists are hoping that the fervency of democrats will push through to their nomination. Recently I was watching an interview with the all-believable and most genuine candidate out there, Ted Cruz, blatantly put against the secretive liberal Chris Matthews. The senator was pushing and pushing with a smirk on his face for the legitimacy of liberals to nominate Bernie Sanders. Chris Matthews immediate sniffed out this plan and tried to pull out a true explanation from the innocent-looking southerner. He only smiled and professed his love again. Why does Teddy like Bernie? It's because he believes that any Republican candidate would smash the Vermont Senator right back in his current place of being a non-president.
Why does Bernie have this immense battle to be seen as a moderate fighting for the middle class and not as a welfare king seeking to make America into a freaky-deaky stepbrother of Sweden?
You always have to remember this: politicians will only try to bat something down when they see it as a threat. Republican strategists see Bernie's candidacy as exactly such. A $15 dollar minimum wage? Higher taxes on the rich? More racial justice (Sanders seems to be the only candidate giving this any real thought)? 12 weeks of paid family leave? Signing a law that legalizes 11 million undocumented workers?
God, this sounds like a paradise! A Swedish paradise that would make any red-blooded Republican puke at the very smell of it.
First things first. Let's take off our political hats and just look at these things. Bernie wants to cut up the pie by taking more from the rich and passing it down to the poor. Is this scary? It should be to anyone who is on the upper border between being upper and middle class. I get that. What I don't get is how anyone else could be against these policies. Are we scared of being called socialists? News flash: we already are socialists. We just suck at being them.
One of the best things about democracy is how we all can come together to divvy up the spoils. We've seen a lot of recent anger in the form of Occupy and other movements about how these spoils are divided up, but did you know really how much more we give handouts to the rich than the poor? Corporate welfare, yes that is CORPORATE welfare and not just welfare, is WAY more than just plain old social welfare. Our current government says that we should give more free money to corporations (already extremely profitable ones at that) than to social welfare programs. Would most Americans agree to this if they knew about it? My guess is no.
Again, we suck at being socialists, and Bernie is trying to make us realize this.
Bernie Sanders has a lot of support. He's not the opposite of the coin to The Donald. Far from it, he's a man trying to wake people up from the bliss of ignorance to the way their government cuts up the pie. Trump is just a man spitting epithets. Bernie wants a more equally cut up pie, but can he de-stigmitize the word "socialism" enough to grab enough of the middle class? If Bernie loses, will Hillary or Biden (if he does decide to encroach on The Bulldog's territory) benefit from Sander's attempt to bring social equality back into the political debates?
Tune in next time for answers. Same bat time. Same messed-up democracy.
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