He primarily tied Pete Buttigieg within the Iowa caucuses and is barely favored to win the first on Tuesday in New Hampshire, the place he trounced Hillary Clinton 4 years in the past. He leads Buttigieg by vital margins in polls within the two states, Nevada after which South Carolina, that comply with it. In the meantime, it’s arduous to see how Elizabeth Warren pulls forward of him, and Joe Biden is struggling to beat a humiliating fourth-place end in Iowa. That makes Sanders as robust a wager as every other candidate to nab the Democratic nomination.
The explanations for his success embrace his similarities to Trump, however don’t get me unsuitable: There’s no alignment of agendas among the many two of them, no widespread set of political values and no ethical equivalence — not remotely. I’ve learn an excessive amount of journalism that comes too near suggesting that they’re variations of the identical outdated white man and have the identical sloppiness with info, expertise for bullying and intuition for demagogy. Trump is a tyrant all his personal.
However Sanders is a populist of the left as certainly as Trump is a populist of the suitable, with a well-recognized distaste for compromise and a comparable attraction to People outraged or disgusted by politics as regular and by the same old politicians.
He, like Trump, breaks the mould and defies the legal guidelines of political gravity: He had a coronary heart assault final fall, on the age of 78, and it didn’t scare away voters or gradual his stride. Whereas Trump claims management of “a motion the likes of which the world has by no means seen,” Sanders spearheads a “revolution,” to be caused by “probably the most unprecedented marketing campaign within the trendy historical past of this nation.” And facets of his pitch — on commerce, for instance — resonate with the blue-collar employees within the Rust Belt who had been vital to Trump’s election. Whereas a few of Trump’s advisers imagine that Sanders can be an simply caricatured foil, others imagine that he might be hassle.
Look carefully and also you see the spirit and classes of Trump all around the Democratic main and the Democratic Celebration. You see it within the Biden marketing campaign’s questioning of the legitimacy of the Iowa outcomes days earlier than The Instances found and reported on particular irregularities. You see it in Mike Bloomberg’s cruel trolling of Trump with commercials that make him look fats and unhinged, and statements that may be shockingly juvenile however for his or her mimicry of Trump’s taunts. Julie Wooden, a spokeswoman for Bloomberg’s marketing campaign, recently called the president “a pathological liar who lies about the whole lot: his pretend hair, his weight problems and his spray-on tan.”
You see it Nancy Pelosi’s theatrical ripping up of her copy of Trump’s State of the Union handle. And also you see it within the dive bar in Iowa the place, on the eve of the caucuses, one Sanders supporter led others in a crude call-and-response, as recounted by Shawn McCreesh in Rolling Stone. The supporter would say the F phrase, and everybody would reply “Biden!” or “Warren!” or such.
Is that this the rowdy highway to a Democratic victory in November 2020? My mind and intestine each say no, and people who suppose so — and who designate Sanders because the one to guide the stampede — overlook a number of dynamics, beginning with coverage. Polling exhibits that the majority People dislike a “Medicare for all” plan that eliminates personal insurance coverage, as Sanders’s signature proposal does. Polling additionally exhibits that the majority People wouldn’t need that plan to cowl undocumented immigrants. Sanders’s covers them.
The post Opinion | The Donald Trump Theory of Bernie Sanders appeared first on Down The Middle News.
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