THE DEMOCRATS' DILEMMA.

AuthorConniff, Ruth
PositionEconomic message that can unify the voters

"Power to the People!" blared over the speakers at Navy Pier Festival Hall in Chicago in early March, as U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders walked onstage in front of roughly 12,500 cheering supporters and declared, "We are gathered here tonight to complete the political revolution that we started three years ago."

With rocking campaign kick-off rallies in Brooklyn and Chicago, more than a million volunteers signed up, and $10 million raised in small-dollar donations within a week of his announcement, Sanders is making a serious bid to be the Democratic candidate who faces Donald Trump in 2020.

After all, he says, his 2016 campaign has already had a lasting impact on the Democratic Party.

"Three years ago, they thought we were kinda crazy and extreme," Sanders said in Chicago. "Not the case anymore. Three years ago, the ideas that we brought forth here in Illinois and all over the country were rejected by Democrats. Not anymore."

Indeed, the other Democratic candidates in a crowded primary field are beginning to sound a lot like Sanders. Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat of California, is backing a "Medicare for All" universal health care plan. Elizabeth Warren, who has always shared Sanders's concerns about income inequality, corporate welfare, and wrongdoing by Wall Street, is also pushing the Democratic debates to the left. Even Senator Amy Klobuchar, of Minnesota, a centrist candidate, talks about "getting to universal health care" and invoked the late community organizer and progressive Senator Paul Wellstone in her announcement speech.

Its a new day for Democrats.

Medicare for All and the Green New Deal have new champions in Congress--including progressive rock star Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democratic Socialist of New York, who was inspired to get into politics by Sanders.

But is Sanders, a seventy-seven-year-old white man, the best face for the new Democratic Party? When Vermont Public Radio reporter Bob Kinzel asked him that question, Sanders replied:

"We have got to look at candidates, you know, not by the color of their skin, not by their sexual orientation or their gender, and not by their age." Instead, he said, we need to move toward "a nondiscriminatory society which looks at people based on their abilities, based on what they stand for."

But surely representation of marginalized people means something in the era of Donald Trump, who was elected partly in a backlash against the nations first African American President...

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