The Bernie Revolution: What’s so appealing about a grumpy 74-year-old?
The Bernie Revolution: What’s so appealing about a grumpy 74-year-old?
Andy Kroll for Yahoo News
December 3, 2015
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I spent several weeks following Sanders on the campaign trail and interviewing dozens of his supporters, Berniacs of all ages, races, ideologies and backgrounds. I met a man who had traveled from Finland to see Sanders in the flesh. I spoke to a family that had attended almost every single Sanders campaign event in the state of New Hampshire. I learned of a woman with terminal cancer who loved Sanders so much she’d decided to spend her final months volunteering for his campaign.
No two Berniacs are the same. Each discovered Sanders in his or her own way, and each has his or her own reasons for feeling the Bern. But what unites them is something larger, a deep rejection of a government that doesn’t tackle their everyday needs and problems. You hear a version of this on the Republican side, where Trump, for all his bullying and lies and vitriol, has tapped into a similar populist vein that cares more about offshoring American jobs, corporate mergers and too-big-to-fail banks than most of the rhetoric used by the current crop of presidential candidates. The Sanders-Trump crossover is real: Out on the trail, I lost track of how many times Berniacs brought up Trump as proof of something larger at play. One supporter I met in Nashua told me: “I’m kinda looking for Trump versus Sanders.”
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The other theme that comes up at Sanders events is an appreciation of his granular focus on the rising costs of getting by in America today. In the parking lot before a press conference at a local union hall, a third-generation union member named Zack Smith, 35, brings up — of all things — Sanders’ effort to reduce debit card transaction fees. “It’s the average person’s issues he brings up,” Smith said. He dismissed the notion that reforming debit card fees — an issue most visibly championed by then comedian (and future senator) Al Franken in his satirical 1999 campaign book Why Not Me? — wasn’t a winning issue with voters. “It is a big deal,” he insisted. “Four dollars and 52 cents is the average transaction for an ATM. That is absolutely ridiculous. People take out $20 a lot of the time, and 20 percent of that goes to an ATM fee?”
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https://www.yahoo.com/politics/the-bernie-revolution-hes-not-going-anywhere-100050258.html
Nice article.
Z
= new reply since forum marked as read
interpret that as personally as you choose .
