Dave Bangert

Journal & Courier

Blake Valdez, decked out in “Feel the Bern” blue, bounded off the Purdue Co-Rec gym floor, bouncing off friends and totally jacked up by being that close to Bernie Sanders on Wednesday afternoon.

“Huge fan, biggest fan. I woke this morning feeling like Jewish Santa Claus was coming to Purdue — my campus,” Valdez, a Purdue senior, said after the Vermont senator’s 66-minute speech on the West Lafayette campus. “No way did he disappoint.”

But hanging over the first visit from a presidential candidate since the Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama days of 2008 was this: Can that feeling last? Or is this campaign — this political revolution Sanders has been preaching since the Iowa caucuses — closing in on game over even before Indiana’s May 3 primary gets here?

Valdez paused, as the floor cleared and Secret Service personnel kept an eye on the departing crowd.

“The window is closing, I know,” Valdez said. “I think God can do great miracles. I believe in Bernie.”

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Sanders arrived on campus six days before the Indiana primary, one step ahead of questions about whether a Hillary Clinton nomination was a foregone conclusion. Sanders said he wasn’t giving in.

“Let me also make it clear, so there is no confusion: We are in this campaign to win,” Sanders told a crowd estimated at more than 2,200 by a count by Córdova Recreation Center staff. It was the first of two university-town rallies for Sanders on Wednesday, with a second planned for Bloomington.

“I’m very good at arithmetic,” Sanders said. “And I can count delegates, and we are behind today. But you know what? Unusual things happen in politics.”

In the line that stretched around the Córdova Recreation Center well before daybreak, there was no shortage of faith in the sort of a-chip-and-a-chance math Sanders was lecturing about.

But with the odds getting longer after Clinton took four states to Sanders’ in Tuesday’s primaries, the subtext of the day was about finding spots to land in a Bernie-less November general election.

“First of all, this is Indiana, and this is our primary,” said Gina Billadeau, a West Lafayette resident. “I’m going to make my statement with my vote, and it’s not going to Hillary. We make a statement if Bernie wins or even does well here. Like Bernie said up there today, this is more than about getting Bernie Sanders to the White House. This is about a revolution — even if that revolution is making it to us like it is right now.”

Brandon Buikema, a Lafayette Jefferson High School graduate, drove from Muncie, where he is a junior at Ball State University.

“I think (the Indiana primary) did come a little too late to do a lot of good for Bernie,” Buikema said. “It does look like a dire situation. … But I’m here to support what Bernie Sanders is all about, maybe more than to support Bernie Sanders himself.”

Aside from vowing to stick with the campaign through the Democratic National Convention in July, Sanders went through a greatest hits version of his progressive stump speech. He pushed for an increase in the minimum wage, tougher controls on Wall Street, tighter clean water regulations, access to universal health care, an overhaul of U.S. trade policies and free tuition to the nation’s public universities.

His upshot?

"Change takes place when we are prepared to stand up and fight for that change," Sanders said, ticking off cases of suffrage rights a hundred years ago and gay marriage more recently. "It is the people at the grass-roots level, by the millions, who demand real change. That is what history always teaches us."

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The novelty of a presidential visit was evident as Howard Taylor, director of recreational sports at Purdue, walked the line Wednesday morning, counting heads and crossing his fingers that everyone could squeeze in the gym. (No one was turned away.)

Siddu Navaneetha said he was skipping a physics test — “My teacher said I could make it up” — as he joined a group of classmates from West Lafayette High School. Ben Hensel, a Ball State student, had a Bernie Sanders puppet on his arm. And the line to get in to see the senator from Vermont kept up the cat calls with a dozen or so protesters who stationed themselves across Martin Jischke Drive, carrying signs that read, “We are Boilermakers, not BoilerTakers,” among other conservative slogans aimed at Sanders.

“Basically, I’m happy Sen. Sanders came to help with the political conversation here on campus,” said Mike Thompson, a sophomore who helped organize the counter-rally. “But we’re here to say that not all millennials believe in a free lunch.”

Squinting to make out the signs from the conservative side of the street, Charles Calvin, a delivery man from Lafayette, said he wasn’t giving up on what he called an “unselfish vote for the man we’re coming to see.” He said Sanders’ promises of college tuition probably wouldn’t help him. Same with health care. (“I’m a pretty healthy guy,” he said.)

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“I mean, when I buy a pair of shoes, I’ll admit that I’m a bit selfish and I want them to look good on me,” Calvin said. “When I vote, I think about my country, and I want it to look good on all of us.”

But if Sanders isn’t around this fall, what’s the backup plan?

“Hold up,” Calvin said. “If you’re down in the fourth quarter, do you just give up? No, you go out and play. I believe in sports Hail Marys, why not political Hail Marys?”

Bangert is a columnist with the Journal & Courier. Contact him at dbangert@jconline.com. Follow on Twitter: @davebangert.

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