The Washington Post does a piece on Bernie Sanders doing a early 2019 Democratic Presidential primary trip thru the nations’ MidWest….
Interesting….
A non-Democrat looking for Democratic votes in Trump country….
The streets of downtown Gary were mostly empty except for Bernie Sanders, a camera crew, and a whole lot of reporters. The senator from Vermont, joined by local police and elected officials, walked half a mile through the blighted downtown of a city that has become synonymous with Midwestern industrial decline.
“It used to be a big steel town, correct?” Sanders asked as he passed by boarded-up stores, colorful murals, and a Popeye’s chicken restaurant that was undergoing repair. “Back in the day, was it a diverse community?”
A campaign team trotted backward, cameras rolling, as Sanders learned some grim local history. When he arrived at the city’s Genesis Center, he asked the Hoosiers gathered around a table what they were concerned about, then began to explain how their government had failed them.
“We are, in the United States of America today, the wealthiest country in the history of the world,” Sanders said. “If I came before you today and I said, you know, well, America, we’re a poor country, and we can’t do this, and we can’t do that, that’s not the truth. This is a country that, a year and a half ago, gave a trillion and a half dollars in tax breaks to the top one percent.”
Rather than tailoring his remarks to Gary, Sanders was giving his stump speech; the assumption was that it was exactly what a struggling and forgotten city needed to hear. The candidate’s commitment to “the message” — not “a message,” but the outlook he’s been sharing for more than 30 years — is unlike anything offered in the 18-candidate Democratic presidential field.
Sanders’s four-day swing through five Midwestern states was designed to demonstrate why that message is the one that can defeat President Trump in 2020…..
image…Paul Sancya/AP