In the midst of the media's never-ending horse race coverage of the Democratic Primary,
delivered by pundits who rarely leave the comfy confines of cable news green rooms to actually speak with the voters they pontificate about, a long-brewing simmer of struggle erupted.
It started with Democratic voters in 2008; so disheartened and angered by eight years of war, recklessness, and social-Darwinism-masked-as-economic-policy, they delivered Barack Obama the White House on the belief he'd usher in a new era of capital Progressivism.
Disenchanted with Obama and 30 years of trickle-down economics and corporate America's purchase of Washington, D.C., Occupy Wall Street spread in the heart of the corruption only to ultimately fizzle.
For all the punditry about the Vermont Senator's historic rise (or lack thereof), a simple truth has been missing. Quite the contrary from some radical, "pie in the sky" revolutionary,
Sanders is actually an FDR Democrat.
You know, the Democrat who brought America back from the brink of economic calamity. The Democrat whose New Deal programs led to the creation of the American middle class. The same Democrat whose policies in the 1930's and 40's led to the strongest decades of economic equality and prosperity for the majority of Americans—as opposed to those at the top—in the 1950's and 60s.
And the
Democratic Party and establishment, who beginning in the 1970's decided to begin a pivot away from the working class and New Deal era in favor or wealthier suburbanites and corporatists, has fought Sanders every step of the way.
Sure, party leaders and lawmakers have
delivered good lip service.
Hillary Clinton—whose big-money donors from Wall Street, corporate America, K Street, and other special interests have served as her political oxygen throughout her career—lauded Sanders for challenging the Party on unaccountable money.
But she, and the
Democratic establishment backing her, don't mean a damn word of it. No objective person can suggest Democrats haven't looked the other way as
inequality exploded.
From the Clintons to Chuck Schumer to Harry Reid and other corporate Democrats—
who love uttering the words middle class before heading to fundraisers with the same folks who've decimated it—the bottom line is clear.
When party leaders, even President Obama, talk about "
pragmatism" and "incremental change," they're using code words; ones that rationalize the
revolving door between corporate America, Wall Street, K Street, and Washington, D.C.—the one they've been complicit in swinging wide open.
But that sales pitch has been rejected by the voters the party needs to survive into the future—millennials, young African Americans and Latinos, and the working class. And from the hundreds I've met and interviewed on the campaign trail,
they are for Sanders and don't give a damn about Democratic Party unity.
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/02/bern...line|story&par=yahoo&doc=103684596&yptr=yahoo