This morning on my walk with the Mad Yellow Lab (we’ve got two Labs, two teacup toy poodles and two teacup toy yorkies), I listed to Bernie Sanders’ interview on the podcast Pod Save America. As I’ve said before, I’m not a fan of Bernie’s necessarily. I’ll vote for him over the other guy, but he’s farther down my list of preferred candidates for the Democratic nomination. He’ll be 79 years old on election day in 2020. Not the right generation, in my opinion, when we’re going against another septuagenarian. He also calls himself a Democratic Socialist. Republicans are gonna call any of the Democrats socialist at the end of the day, but it’ll be harder to divert from that to real issues if the candidate is Bernie.
But, I admire Bernie for having his point of view and sticking to it. He’s for a political revolution and he doesn’t apologize for it. He’s also not a candidate who tries to polish his platform with the help of political consultants. In the interview I listened to, I thought he did a good job of getting his point across and defending his positions. If he’s the candidate, I won’t hesitate to vote for him. In the end, I don’t think he’ll be the nominee, but still…
The Quote of the Day comes from the podcast. One of the things that I think Bernie is doing pretty well is his take on Trump. He focuses on his agenda, but he doesn’t shy from saying what he thinks about the current occupant. He’s very effective when he says what he said in the interview, because he’s matter of fact about it, but doesn’t let himself get bogged down in the Trumpy muck. He said, “Trump is a very formidable opponent. He lies all of the time. He will use the power of government to help his campaign. Obviously, this man has no scruples at all. And the billionaire class will be behind him with endless amounts of money.” Here, Bernie was able to take a shot at Trump and tie it into his larger point about the billionaire class and how we need a political revolution. I think some of the other candidates should think about how they can do the same.