opinion

For Democrats, Bernie Sanders is the one to watch for

In the first Democratic presidential debate just days away, all eyes, presumably, will be on Hillary Clinton.

But Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who has been fast gaining ground, is the one to watch for.

It is interesting to see that Sanders, in a broad sense, is the Donald Trump of the left: he’s been shaking things up on the Democratic side, and has been giving the “establishment” candidate a run for her money.

He has also been making the Democratic establishment jittery because he’s perceived to be too liberal to get the Democratic nomination, and too liberal to win the general election if he is their nominee.

But a significant portion of the Democratic base — which I’m a part of — loves him. This base is disenchanted with Hillary Clinton for a long and obvious laundry list of reasons.

Meanwhile, the media, in general, give Sanders relative short shrift — they don’t take him seriously because they think his “socialist” label dooms his candidacy before he gets to first base with voters.

On a non-serious note, in a welcome change we’ve been talking about male presidential candidates’ hair: Donald Trump’s coiffure and Sanders’ rumpled hair.

There is much to like about Bernie Sanders. Let’s start with his campaign — he’s rewriting the rules of most presidential campaigns. He shuns big fundraisers and big donors, has amassed a million online individual contributions and 650,000 contributors and says he doesn’t want a super PAC of his own.

If I were to write his campaign slogan, it’d be: “Make government work for everybody, and not just for the top 1 percent”

We often get too hung up over political labels and then reflexively dismiss the person. Sanders calls himself a “democratic socialist,” but what he stands for is actually more mainstream than people realize.

He wants to expand Social Security, invest massively to repair America’s crumbling infrastructure, provide Medicare for all, make public college tuition free, break up banks that are too big to fail, and combat climate change, among other things.

If you follow the figures, large percentages of Americans agree with many of these positions.

In his words: “To me, socialism doesn’t mean state ownership of everything, by any means, it means creating a nation, and a world, in which all human beings have a decent standard of living.

“I think (democratic socialism),” he has said “means the government has got to play a very important role in making sure that as a right of citizenship all of our people have health care; that as a right, all of our kids, regardless of income, have quality child care, are able to go to college without going deeply into debt; that it means we do not allow large corporations and moneyed interests to destroy our environment; that we create a government in which it is not dominated by big money interest. I mean, to me, it means democracy, frankly. That’s all it means.”

The big difference between Sanders and Clinton is that elusive quality: authenticity, which in my definition, is when what you say and what you do and how you’ve lived your life are congruent.

Unlike Clinton, Sanders doesn’t seem to have profited from the big money he rails against. With his credit card debt, less-than-$2K 2014 speaking-fee income and consistently held political views, he cuts an authentic figure.

Meanwhile, her populist positions ring hollow, and for multiple reasons her moral authority seems moot.

Interestingly, Sanders’ agenda is more in sync with what Pope Francis delineated in his recent messages to America.

Looking at Sanders, a Gandhi quote comes to mind: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Saritha Prabhu of Clarksville is a Tennessean columnist. Reach her at sprabhu@charter.net.