Can Bernie Sanders really beat Hillary Clinton in Iowa?
Bernie Sanders is on his third speech of the day, drenched in sweat, and losing his voice from calling for the overthrow of America’s “billionaire class”.
“Brothers and sisters, you are not living in a democracy; you are living in an oligarchy,” the leftwing Democratic presidential candidate tells an audience of Iowa supporters enthralled by his stinging attack on campaign finance and corporate lobbying. “People fought and died to defend American democracy and I will be damned if I am going to let them take that away from us.”
In theory, Sanders’s campaign for the presidential nomination in 2016 breaks all the rules of modern politics. He is angry, dishevelled and making no attempt to soften his message for the tiny handful of TV cameras that have shown up.
This unabashed “democratic socialist” from Brooklyn via Vermont, which he represents as an independent US senator, talks about class, corruption and the pathological greed of the rich. Yet the middle-aged, midwestern audience greeting him here in one of the most conservative states in the country cannot get enough of it. “Welcome to the political revolution,” Sanders says to another loud cheer.
The large, adoring crowds are not new. Sanders first captured national attention this summer by filling venues with up to 20,000 supporters in liberal bastions like Portland, Oregon.
A succession of opinion polls showed him catching and then overtaking the establishment frontrunner Hillary Clinton in the early primary state of New Hampshire – injecting sudden drama into a race that most pundits had initially decided was barely worth following compared with the excitement of the enormous Republican field, currently dominated by businessman and TV personality Donald Trump.
But what is new is the sight of Sanders challenging Clinton in Iowa, the first state to choose a candidate – in caucuses held on 1 February – and the scene of her humiliating defeat by Barack Obama in 2008.
In a shock poll this week conducted in Iowa for the Des Moines Register, Sanders moved to within seven percentage points of the former secretary of state, on 30% to her 37%. Only recently, Clinton commanded impregnable leads in Iowa of more than 50 points.
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Indeed, some of his ideas for fixing this broken American dream echo Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s – most notably a $1tn investment in public infrastructure, which Sanders claims would create 16m new jobs.
Other ideas draw inspiration from modern industrialised countries, including establishing America’s first system of paid family and medical leave, universal healthcare, free college tuition and public funding of elections.
All would be a radical departure for the US, and additional proposals to break up Wall Street banks and overturn free trade deals would no doubt cause consternation in corporate America were Sanders ever elected to the White House.
But, crucially, he argues that none of these ideas are extreme by international or historical standards – only in comparison with the unfettered turbo-capitalism that has taken root in recent US history.
“These are not radical ideas,” insists Sanders. “They are understood in virtually every major country on earth.”
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“Bernie is Bernie, he’s down to earth and he’s not for special interests,” explains Chris Uhlenhopp, a 67-year-old former labourer at the nearby Maytag appliances factory, which once employed 2,000 people. “I won’t go from Bernie to Hillary,” he adds. “I’d stay in bed if we had Hillary [on general election day].”
More here: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/04/bernie-sanders-revolutionary-rhetoric-resonating-conservative-iowa?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
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