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BROOKLYN — U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders kicked off his 2020 presidential bid from his hometown — Brooklyn — on Saturday with an uncompromising pledge to fight entrenched special interests and fundamentally transform America into a country defined by bold progressive action on economic, social and environmental issues.

“This struggle is about taking on the incredibly powerful institutions that control the economic and political life of this country,” Sanders bellowed to the crowd. “And I’m talking about Wall Street, the insurance companies, the drug companies, the military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex, the fossil fuel industry and a corrupt campaign finance system that enables billionaires to buy elections.”

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As Sanders’ knocked off his signature proposals — Medicare-for-all, a Green New Deal, free public college tuition — thousands of fans, many of whom have already donated $27 to Sanders and are prepared to knock doors and dial phones on his behalf, chanted along with his stock lines and screamed in approval. Sanders’ re-introduction as a presidential candidate conjured a mood similar to a much-awaited band reunion. There were signature lyrics, merchandise, and not enough portable toilets.

Sanders also pledged to pass bold gun safety laws, enact a federal job guarantee, open up access to the ballot, build new affordable housing, protect and secure abortion rights. He said he would end decline in rural America, and fight gentrification in America’s cities.

“If we stand together, if we don’t allow Trump and his friends to divide us up, there is nothing we cannot accomplish,” he said.

Sanders has envisioned a society with stronger social safety nets and weaker special interests since he formally entered politics as Burlington mayor nearly four decades ago. In those days, Sanders’ audience was small. Oftentimes, he made his pitch on Burlington’s public access television station, or in the pages of the Vanguard Press. While his 2016 campaign kickoff, held on the sunny shores of Lake Champlain in May 2015, was attended by thousands of Sanders’ devoted Vermont supporters, political pundits and national media outlets paid little attention.

While Sanders was clad in a Burton jacket on Saturday and joked that Mother Nature had imported Vermont weather into Brooklyn, his 2020 kickoff was a far cry from his 2016 Champlain speech.

Sanders strode onto the stage Saturday with swagger. Shortly after noon, Sanders emerged from a side door of Brooklyn College’s Boyland Hall into the cold winter air, where throngs of diehard supporters from across the country waved signs and screamed slogans. Two risers featured dozens of cameras with lenses trained on the Vermont senator. The palpable energy on the college quad, matched with Sanders’ monstrous $10 million fundraising haul] over the last week and strong showings in many polls, make it clear: Sanders is now a top Democratic leader, and the party’s current frontrunner for president.

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While Sanders’ major campaign promises have not changed since his last run, the Vermont senator is striking a new tone, highlighting his personal and political history in hopes of explaining how the struggles and triumphs of his life shaped his political ideology. Moreover, by highlighting his decades-long struggle for political and civil progress, Sanders and his surrogates hope to convince primary voters that while the Vermont senator’s presidential contenders are running on similar progressive platforms, Sanders is the authentic fighter, who has been in the trenches long before these policies were poll-tested, and popular.

In his speech, activist Shaun King called Sanders an “activist impersonating a politician,” while Nina Turner, a former Ohio state senator and current president of Our Revolution, invoked an iconic quote by Martin Luther King Jr., declaring “the ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

“When you are willing, in the 1980s, to be one of only two white elected officials to stand by the side of the Reverend Jesse Jackson when he was running for president — that’s the measure of a man,” Turner said. “When you are willing, at the age of 19, to know that, in Chicago, housing discrimination against African American folks was rotten to the core and you are willing to be chained to a black woman on the front lines — that’s the measure of a man. And when you are willing to go to Canton, Mississippi in 2017 to march on Mississippi with people like brother Danny Glover to say the Nissan workers who are trying to unionize that ‘you have a right to have a union and have a good life’ — that’s the measure of a man.”

On the white and snowy quad of Brooklyn College, Sanders spoke of his upbringing in a 3-and-a-half room rent-controlled apartment on East 26th Street and Kings Highway. His father, Elias Ben Yehuda Sanders, was a paint salesman who emigrated from Poland to escape anti-semitism. His mother, Dorothy Sanders, was a stay-at-home mom whose dream of owning a home was never realized. Sanders spoke of receiving a 25-cents-a-week allowance, playing stickball in the street and attending a good public high school, James Madison High School. (Sanders’ wife, Jane, also grew up in Brooklyn, though the two went to separate middle and high schools, and first connected in the Green Mountain State.)

“Coming from a lower middle class family I will never forget how money – or really lack of money – was always a point of stress in our home,” Sanders told the crowd in a relatively hushed and contemplative tone. “My mother’s dream was that someday our family would move out of that rent-controlled apartment to a home of our own. That dream was never fulfilled. She died young while we were still living in that rent-controlled apartment.”

Sanders contrasted his humble Brooklyn roots with those of President Donald Trump, a Queens boy made a millionaire by age 8.

“Unlike Donald Trump, who shut down the government and left 800,000 federal employees without income to pay the bills, I know what it’s like to be in a family that lives paycheck to paycheck,” he said.

While the first nominating event of 2020 — the Iowa caucuses — are 11 months away, Bernie’s Brooklyn kickoff represented the first step in a newly active campaign. In the coming days, Sanders will be traveling to Selma, Alabama, Chicago and, of course, Iowa.

Sanders’ Chicago event, scheduled for Sunday evening at the Navy Pier, is another opportunity for Vermont’s junior senator to plumb his past.

Sanders transferred to the University of Chicago after a year at Brooklyn College and became involved in the school’s chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality. He graduated in 1964 with a degree in political science and considerable experience in waging grassroots campaigns.

As president of CORE, he spearheaded sit-ins, pickets and protests related to racial inequality, the most visible of which was two weeks of sit-ins at the office of university President George Beadle over segregationist policies at university-owned apartments in Hyde Park. In August 1963, Sanders was arrested by Chicago Police after protesting against segregationist education policies.

“We feel it is an intolerable situation when Negro and white students of the University cannot live together in university owned apartments,” Sanders told the student newspaper, The Maroon, in January 1962. A year later, Sanders marched in King’s 1963 March on Washington.

By highlighting this history, Shaun King, Turner and other Sanders surrogates not only hope to prove Sanders’ bonafides, but offer a compelling case to voters of color, many of whom broke for Clinton in the 2016 race.

“Because most of us never heard these stories — about him growing up here in Brooklyn, or being a real activist in the civil rights movement in Chicago — because we never heard those stories, for most of us, in our minds, Bernie has always been a disheveled, gray-haired, bespectacled politician.”

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“Don’t get me wrong,” King continued, “I love who Bernie is today. But I need to tell you a little bit about how he got here.”

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