opinion

Editorial: Bernie Sanders, in his own words

Editor’s note: The Burlington Free Press sat down for a conversation with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., on Nov. 1 at his campaign headquarters in Burlington about his run for the Democratic nomination for president. The following are excerpts from the conversation.

Running for president: What you realizes it that you are simultaneously running campaigns in Iowa, New Hampshire, I just got off the phone with our South California director, scheduler for South Carolina and Nevada, we’re setting up offices in many other states in America, so in a sense you are simultaneously putting together campaign organizations in a number of states when previously I’ve been involved in one state, a small state, a state I know very well. That’s pretty complicated stuff.

Courting African American voters: I’m running against a candidate who ran for president in 2008, so she has already established a number of relationships all over the country including the African American community and the Latino community. She also, as you may know, has a husband who used to be president of the United States, and he in his network, his campaigns established a lot of networks and is infact very popular in the African American community…. We started from zero. We are making a start, but I would be not honest with you you if i didn’t say we are starting quite far where Hillary Clinton is and we’ve got a lot of work to do.

Rallies vs. votes: The challenge is not just to bring people out to meetings, or to gain media attention, the challenge is to get these people to vote. And we’re spending a lot of energy to make that happen in a fairly sophisticated way. We have been very impressed with our ground organization in both Iowa and New Hampshire. We have a strong grassroots organization, we have many thousands of volunteers in both Iowa and in New Hampshire Nevada and South Carolina.

Lessons from last debate: We have to pay more attention now to differentiating our point of view on major issues from Hillary Clinton, and that you are going to see. Hillary Clinton I like and I respect. I’ve known her for 25 years. But she and I have very different points of view on a number of issues and how we came to our point of view and when we came to our point of view is something I think voters in the Democratic primary process should know about and they will know about.

Super PACs: If Hillary Clinton’s Super PACs start attacking us, maybe they will, maybe they won’t, I don’t know, we will deal with that accordingly. But we will also inform the American people what a Super PAC is and where Hillary Clinton’s money is coming from. I hope we don’t have to move in that direction and respond to Super PAC attacks, but if that happens, that happens. But I think it’s important to know who is funding those Super PACs.

Significance of voter turnout: If I win, by the way, that will mean there’s a very large voter turnout, that’s how I will win, and I suspect the Democrats will recapture the Senate and hopefully the House…. What I’m trying to do now with young people, with working class people, with low income people, with middle class people, is to say, you know what, United States government is your government. And they’re going to have to start representing you and not just the billionaires. but to do that you’re going to have to be involved in an unprecedented way. If we are successful in doing that, we will be able to bring about change. if we’re not, we will not.

Obama’s use of executive orders: We have had more obstructionism to a president than at any time in American history under Obama. He finally learned that lesson. And he finally learned that it was a waste of time to sit down and negotiate, negotiate, when it was clear that among other things the Republicans would never raise taxes by a nickel on the wealthiest people in this country. They would not deal seriously with the crisis of climate change, not about to raise the minimum wage, not about to do pay equity, and what he and his lawyers have done is researched what they could do ...in terms of what he could do utilizing the powers that he had under executive orders. Would I do that? Absolutely.

Join the conversation online at BurlingtonFreePress.com or send a letter to the editor to letters@freepressmedia.com. Contact Aki Soga at asoga@freepressmedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @asoga.

Online video

To see the video for the full Free Press interview with Sen. Bernie Sanders, go to: http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/videos/news/2015/11/05/75073216/