Weekend at Bernie's

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

The greatest irony in our democracy is that our elected officials fear that the true power rests in the hands of the people that put them in power in the first place. Most politicians fear that fact. Bernie Sanders embraces and counts on it.

     Sanders raised over $10,000,000 in less than a week. In fact, Sanders' second day of fund raising was better than the first day of any other Democratic candidate. Most tellingly, 39% of those who'd donated were from email addresses that Sanders' 2016 campaign hadn't had in its data base. And the average donation has been just under $26, hewing pretty closely to the $27 average donation given to Sanders that year. Only a little over a dozen had donated the maximum $2800, meaning Sanders can go back and ask for more donations from literally 99.99% of his donors.

     Naturally, this has resulted in the usual MSM spin about how Bernie raising all that money isn't really that consequential. They're using the same ragged, dog-eared playbook they'd trotted out three years ago. Ignore Bernie but when you can't, disparage everything about his campaign.

     And then, there was yesterday at Brooklyn College and 13,000 who'd packed themselves into the quad like cigarettes in a new pack. They gave us a small, partial visual of the sort of people who gave to Sanders' latest campaign and will continue giving. It was a powerful synecdoche of the cross-section of people to whom Bernie had appealed three years ago- Young and old, black, white, brown, red and yellow across all economic strata well below the 1% that Bernie has relentlessly targeted for decades.

     Save for a couple of microphone failures, the Sanders campaign ran a clinic on how a presidential campaign should be launched. He did it not from his adopted state of Vermont that he represents in the Senate but from his roots in Brooklyn. His wife Jane warmed up the crowd by telling stories about how they met and talked about their four kids and seven grandkids without trotting them up on stage. Nina Turner practically whipped the crowd into a frenzy with her "the measure of a man speech" then activist Shaun King did much the same before introducing the man of the hour.

     The stage was perfectly set for the rumpled man bundled in an overcoat and his thinning hair, typically, flying all over the place. And Bernie reminded us why we'd voted for him in the primaries and, I imagine, even in the general election as a write-in even though he wasn't on the ballot. He reminded us why it was a good idea to leave the Democratic Party as I had here in Massachusetts. And it was exhilarating to feel hope again after the nightmare of having an unabashed crook in the White House for two years of impunity.

No Sleep After Brooklyn

Bernie's now at the Navy Pier in Chicago. That's the very epicenter of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama country in which last week ultimate entrenched machine Democrat Bill Daley had to drop out of the mayoral election (Chicago, in fact, is poised to elect Lori Lightfoot as its first African American female mayor.).

     His speech is expected to be about tackling racism and Chicago is the perfect place to give such a speech. In the post-Laquan McDonald Windy City and the infamously racist and brutal Chicago PD, racism is always a hot button issue. But it has added significance for Bernie. As many of us now know, Bernie put his freedom and maybe even his life on the line by chaining himself to two African American women to protest public school segregation at the corner of 74th and Lowe. It's a story that, as Shaun King pointed out in Brooklyn yesterday, Bernie doesn't like to use and one almost understands why. But now he should dust off those old stories about his civil rights past.

     It was 1963, specifically August 13, and the protest took place on Chicago's South Side. Sanders and several other students were there that day to protest the deployment of the "Willis wagons" that were named after the Chicago School Superintendent Benjamin Willis. It was the brainchild of not only Willis but Mayor Richard Daley. They were so many little Cabrini Greens into which overflow African American students were to be stuffed regardless of seating capacity or ventilation or the lack thereof. It was a well-meaning but racist and out of touch response to school over crowding and these miserable little shacks that were commissioned by Willis and Daley were considered a much better alternative than school integration (in the white school districts, many classrooms were reported as being completely vacant).

     Sanders was arrested and the pictures and films of it made the rounds of the internet three years ago. And Bernie still didn't use it.

     He didn't use it even as Camp Clinton scoffed at the very notion that he had a past of civil rights activism. And deluded black voters three years ago, still under the mystique of her husband Bill being "the first black president", were as quick to scoff at Bernie's activist past as they were to forget that while he was getting arrested for standing up for them and their forebears, their girl Hillary was a Goldwater Girl and supporting a man who wanted to nuke North Vietnam.

     Those black voters remained deluded, refusing to even remember their Goldwater Girl's "super-predator" remarks the year after that despicable crime bill went into effect. They even strenuously overlooked Hillary's contemptuous reaction to a Black Lives Matter protester who confronted her about that very same comment. Hillary went on to mop the floor with Sanders among black voters who apparently were too smart to vote for Trump but not smart enough to not vote for a right wing huckster like Hillary Clinton who'd probably put some of their relatives in prison.

     Hopefully, Hillary won't run again and will sit in her mansion in Chappaqua dreaming of bombing Iran, Russia or any other nation that for some reason displeases her. But Bernie, despite his massive early support and growing war chest, will not have a prayer of winning this election or even the nomination, without that demographic. In 2016, Sanders did much better than Clinton across racial lines in the under-30 group. But there are a lot of black and Hispanic voters who are older than 30. And some of them may even be old enough to remember Bernie's sacrifices on their behalf.

     It's time he uses it while Kamala Harris is trying, and failing, to pander to the black base by saying she used to smoke weed and listen to hip hop. Bernie says he counts on the support of the people. It's time for him to reach out to all of them, with every weapon at his disposal.