Reprinted from www.dailykos.com by Phoebe Loosinhouse
Bernie Sanders
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I always admire people who have issued themselves the WTF license to say whatever they truly feel and believe without worries whether it is politic or polite. Today's "Damn the Torpedoes" Award for Political Discourse goes to Vermont Senator and potential Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders for his interview with Thomas Frank appearing today in Salon Magazine. (Thomas Frank is the well known author of "What's the Matter With Kansas).
Bernie Sanders: Longterm Democratic Straegy is "Pathetic"
Please read the interview and then join below for discussion.
What exactly is the pathetic part of the Democrats long-term strategy? Bernie defines it as the belief that inertia and demographics will carry the day in the not too distant future:
I've been to those meetings with very high-ranking campaign leaders. And that's exactly what they say. So what they say is, during the Obama campaign, "This is how we'll win this election. We're going to get a huge percentage of the African-American vote. We're going to get 67 percent of the Hispanic vote. We're going to get 58 percent of the women's vote. Et cetera, et cetera. All those trends are on our side. And that's how we win elections."During the course of that discussion, the issue of how the party that created Social Security and Medicare is losing the senior vote--or even the issue of seniors--was not there. They have a list of the 87 different categories, and kind of toward the bottom is seniors. The white working class of America, which now votes overwhelmingly for Republicans, was not mentioned. Now, how can it be that the party that is struggling to raise the minimum wage, to fight for pay equity, do reasonable things for working-class people -- not enough by any means -- is losing the white working class to the other side? Very little discussion about that.