"The media’s lying to you about Bernie Sanders ..."

[Babel_17]

http://www.salon.com/2015/10/12/the_medias_lying_to_you_about_bernie_sanders_this_is_why_a_socialist_can_win_the_fox_loving_red_states/#

The media’s lying to you about Bernie Sanders: This is why a socialist can win the Fox-loving red states
I spent days with Sanders fans across red states. They watch Fox, live in the heartland, and are voting for Bernie
Rick Perlstein, Washington Spectator

Really inspiring journalism from an on the ground reporter.

I often wonder if there's a correlation between the compensation talking heads get now versus what they got 40 years ago, or even 20 years ago, that would go to explain the rightward shift in American politics.

Politics of the very wealthy, for the very wealthy, as reported on by the very wealthy.

Click the link for the Salon article to see that there's reason for lots of hope.

[Thinkingabout]

1. If the election was held with Republicans electing the DNC nominee, yes, Sanders would probably win.

The Republicans are hoping Sanders would be the nominee, except the DNC primary will be an election for Democrats, ergo, we will elect our nominee and not the Republicans.

[Fred Sanders]

2. Fox-loving Democratic Party members in Red States would vote for Bernie? How many are like that?

"Fox-loving" is a huge thing in the Democratic Party platform?

If you mean in the General Election Fox-loving Bible-thumping, reality divorced Republicans will vote for a Sanders over a Cruz or Trump or Bush in any meaningful numbers.....not likely.

In order to win hearts and minds there has to be something to win over!

Salon's staff writers are not A-Grade judging from articles linked to lately at DU.

[Babel_17]

4. "Rick Perlstein, Washington Spectator"

http://washingtonspectator.org/tag/rick-perlstein/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Perlstein

Perlstein graduated from the University of Chicago with a B.A. in History in 1992, and did graduate work in American Studies at the University of Michigan.[3] Until 2009 he was a Senior Fellow at the Campaign for America's Future where he wrote for their blog about the failures of conservative governance, The Big Con.[3][4]

Perlstein is the author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001), which won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for history,[5] and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008), which was named a notable book of the year by the New York Times Book Review. His next book, "about the rise of Reagan in the 1970s"[6] titled The Invisible Bridge, was released in August 2014.[7]

Just an FYI.

[Armstead]

5. And you call Sanders' supporters elitists?

The real world is not as binary as you think.

[in_cog_ni_to]

3. Bernie supporters - this is a MUST READ! It's looooong, but worth every minute. n/t

[Babel_17]

6. Thanks, maybe some quotes are appropriate?

I think some non-Sanders supporters might be skipping the article and going just by the snippet. It's also about liberals, and living in red states, and appealing to America's basic progressiveness that the Republicans try to dance around.

[in_cog_ni_to]

7. Here's just one of my favorite parts of the article, and there are many of them:

<snip>
In Griffith, I met a remarkable black retiree named Martha Harris. Her grandparents were slaves, and she remembers going into hiding at the age of three when her father was run off by the Klan for being “uppity.” She had been following the story of Sanders’s public encounters with Black Life Matters activists at the Netroots Nation gathering in Phoenix. She just wondered why people were still going on about it. “I saw him flub. And like any white man, his staff put him out there without his underwear on. So he ran home and he got his long johns on. And I’m okay with that. He’s learning.”

Harris was one of the Sanders supporters who, following that evening in Griffith, set up a storefront Sanders office in Hammond, Indiana. She had recently been a guest on a radio show in Gary, where the African-American population is 85 percent and one third of the houses are abandoned. She was scheduled for a half hour. The response was so enthusiastic the interview went on for an hour and a half.

Among the political class, the discussion of the supposed reverberations that followed Sanders’s encounter with Black Lives Matter activists in Phoenix was incessant. That kind of conflict is something the political media knows how to talk about. So they talk about it. What happened on the radio in Gary, not so much.
<snip>

[Babel_17]

9. Good stuff

This is a relatable campaign.

[Babel_17]

8. A quote from the article

I think the article is best taken in as a whole; a lot of skill and effort went into its narrative flow, imo.

But here's a snip that doesn't really take away from that. It serves more as an introduction, and which shows where the author sees the Sanders campaign coming from, and why it's resonating so well with so many voters. The makeup of some of these voters is interesting, it's like finding a new market for Democratic ideas and principles.

The theory suggests that when upwards of 60 percent of voters consistently agree that rich people should have their taxes raised, a candidate who promises to do so might be identified as what he actually is: middle of the road. That if Democrats give Democratic speeches on economic issues, voters suckered into Republicanism by refrains like Jihad! Jihad! Jihad! just might try something else. And that new voters might be attracted into politics if they could just hear a candidate cut to the radical quick of the actual problems that are ruining their lives. My new Republican friends didn’t know they were not “supposed” to like a “liberal” like Bernie Sanders. Then they heard what he was saying, and liked what they heard. How many are there like them? That’s what I’ve been trying to begin to find out.