Bernie's Running Again
PoliticsBernie Sanders is running for president for a second time, baby. In an email sent to supporters on Tuesday morning, the Vermont senator wrote:
Make no mistake about it. The powerful special interests in this country have unbelievable power and they want to maintain the status quo. They have unlimited amounts of money to spend on campaigns and lobbying and have huge influence over the media and political parties.
The only way we will win this election and create a government and economy that works for all is with a grassroots movement – the likes of which has never been seen in American history.
They may have the money and power. We have the people.
The 2020 field (among those who have already declared and those considering a run) is currently a weird combination of people who are all, in some way, reacting to the popular movement that developed in response to Sanders’s transformative 2016 campaign: you have Democratic politicians responding to the groundswell of support for progressive policies like Medicare for All by trying to move left, you have more front-facing centrists styling themselves as some kind of cure for leftist popular momentum, and then you have—Howard Shultz?
Sanders addressed the latter maybe-candidate, created in a lab to try to scare people away from (or toward?) socialism, in an interview with CBS News on Tuesday morning. “Why is Howard Shultz on every television station in this country?” Sanders said. “Why are you quoting Howard Shultz? Because he’s a billionaire.”
That sounds about right.