President Barack Obama told you why he thought Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump would not be elected. “He is, you know, the classic reality-TV character,” Obama said on CBS’ 60 Minutes.
In case you’ve been asleep, haven’t had access to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, or don’t use the internet, ever, you might know by now that Vermont Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders is running for president. In fact, there is really no concrete evidence that he is even officially a Democrat, now that I think about it.
Sanders has positioned himself as a hero of America’s downtrodden workers. He doesn’t run from the label “socialist,” but instead embraces it in his condemnations of corporate greed. He even has a portrait of the great Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs hanging in his office.
Mr. Sanders will bring all sorts of issues to the Democratic primaries that Mrs. Clinton would prefer to tiptoe around or avoid altogether. He has promised to call attention to inequality in the United States, the corporate dominance of American politics, and the imminent climate change crisis.
Some of Mr. Sanders’ political stances have included supporting a Medicare-like, government-run health insurance program for all Americans. He has a particular way he’d like to handle the problems on Wall Street as well.
It is time to break up the largest financial institutions in the country. The six largest financial institutions in this country today hold assets equal to about 60% of the nation’s gross domestic product. They control 95 percent of all derivatives and hold more than 40 percent of all bank deposits in the United States.
We must break up too-big-to-fail financial institutions. Those institutions received a $700 billion bailout from the US taxpayer, and more than $16 trillion in virtually zero interest loans from the Federal Reserve.
In short, he is anti-big business. Along with his proposals for the nation’s largest banks, he also favors increasing Social Security benefits — neither Obama or fellow Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton currently support these ideas, nor am I sure they would ever.
Either way, he is not going to win.
The most obvious could describe why his campaign, in reality, is a complete waste of his, and the rest of America’s time. He has never led, or proven to be a leader in any capacity.
Prior to Elizabeth Warren becoming a Senator, it’s highly likely that few of the 25% of supporters he was polling at one point had ever heard of him. Warren guided the progressive movement in just over two years — while Mr. Sanders spent almost 20 years in Congress trying to advance it. In simple politics, this means no one would listen to Mr. Sanders; or he couldn’t get anyone to. No leadership skills.
This becomes perpetuated when you consider the fact that almost all of Mr. Sanders’ colleagues — the people who know him best, and have worked with him — are lining up their support for Mrs. Clinton. This extends beyond Washington. Two of Vermont’s biggest political leaders, Governor Peter Shumlin and Senator Patrick Leahy have also endorsed Mrs. Clinton. Imagine you ran for president, and your mother didn’t vote for you.
The year 2016 won’t be so much about electing a new president, as it will be a discussion of the future of the Supreme Court.
Next year, Mr. Sanders will be 75 years old. The average retirement age for a Supreme Court Justice is 78.7. So that could mean Mr. Sanders is, as a socialist, a 75-year-old presidential candidate that wants to redistribute your wealth, and appoint some new Justices in his spare time.
Here is a quick look at what foreign policy in a Sanders administration might sound like.
Mr. Sanders could be quickly described at the surface as an ideological purist. He says a lot of wonderful things that have been captivating the minds of Americans for the past few months. Every pillar of his campaign stands at about a zero percent chance of ever making it through Congress’ doors, let alone passing.
In an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Mr. Sanders said, “we need a political revolution in this country involving millions of people who are prepared to stand up and say, ‘Enough is enough,’ and I want to help lead that effort.”
In his own home state of Vermont, the Democratic gubernatorial incumbent Peter Shmulin has betrayed his own promises to create green and union jobs, and implement a single-payer health care system. Shmulin and Vermont’s Democrats refused to raise taxes to combat a growing budget crisis, and instead imposed cuts in social services, education and laid off a large number of state employees. Mr. Sanders is by far Vermont’s most popular politician. Why not start there?
Mr. Sanders’s decision to jump into Democratic Party presidential politics represents a decisive break from the man he calls his hero: Eugene V. Debs. Debs spent his whole life building the Socialist Party as an alternative to the two capitalist parties. Year in and year out, he insisted that “the differences between the Republican and Democratic Parties involve no issue, no principle in which the working class have any interest.”
He is a fraud.
His campaign is admirable, and really, Mr. Sanders seems like a fine-meaning fellow. But fairy tales don’t exist in real life, or in politics for that matter.
