http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/10/27/bernie-sanders-actually-quite-serious-about-political-revolution-thing
by John Nichols
[...]
What Sanders did was highlight
a series of issues on which, more often than not, he split with prominent
Democrats—including Clinton—to take positions that were considered politically
dangerous. Sanders pointed to his relatively lonely opposition in the 1990s to
the Defense of Marriage Act, which he dismissed as “simply homophobic
legislation,” and to gutting bank regulations with attacks on the
Glass-Steagall Act. He explained his opposition to authorizing George W. Bush
and Dick Cheney to take the country to war in Iraq, earning loud applause when
he told the crowd, “I am proud to tell you (that) when I came to that fork in
the road, I took the right road, even though it was not the popular road at the
time.” He mentioned his long crusade for a serious response to climate change
and his early opposition to the Keystone pipeline, arguing that, “Honestly,
it wasn’t that complicated. Should we support the construction of a pipeline
across America and accelerate the extraction of some of the dirtiest fossil
fuel in the world? To me, that was a no-brainer and that is why I have opposed
the Keystone Pipeline from the beginning.”
On the issue of trade policy,
Sanders was particularly blunt: “After I came to Congress (in 1990), corporate
America, Wall Street, the administration and virtually all of the corporate
media: they said you’ve got to vote for this NAFTA trade agreement…I didn’t
believe their arguments I voted against NAFTA. I voted against CAFTA. I voted
against PNTR (Permanent Normal Trade Relations) with China. And history has
proven those of us who opposed those agreements were right—because, in the last
14 years, this country lost 60,000 factories and millions of decent-paying
jobs.
“And let me be clear about the
current trade deal that we are debating in Congress, the Trans-Pacific
Partnership. That agreement is not now, nor has it ever been, the gold standard
of trade agreements. I did not support it yesterday. I do not support it today.
And I will not support it tomorrow.”
That reference to “the
gold standard” recalled a 2012 speech in which then–Secretary of State
Clinton, who now criticizes
the TPP, told an Australian audience, “This TPP sets the gold standard in
trade agreements to open free, transparent, fair trade, the kind of environment
that has the rule of law and a level playing field.” Sanders and his team had
to know that the “gold standard” reference would catch the ear not just of
labor and environmental activists who organize on trade issues but of pundits
who are always listening for political fireworks. But something else caught the
ear of the young Iowans in the Sanders bleachers at the Jefferson-Jackson
dinner, the ones who weren’t eating at the main tables where the party leaders
were seated. They were on their feet shouting their approval of the “not…
yesterday, not… today, not… tomorrow” steadiness of Sanders’ stance.
“Can Sanders win Iowa? I think
the answer is yes,” explained Ed Fallon, a former state legislator and
gubernatorial candidate, as he looked at the crowd of young Sanders backers in
the bleachers Saturday night. “But to do that, he has to get these people to
the caucuses. He has to get a lot of people to the caucuses who aren’t happy
with politics as usual. The way to do that is by making it very clear that he’s
never been a typical politician and that he’s not going to be a typical
politician now.”
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