Bernie Sanders was supposed to be deep behind enemy lines on Monday night. Fox News audience

He was in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, for a live town hall, hosted by Fox News, a network “not everyone thought [he] should come on”. It was a resounding success and a reminder that Bernie, not Trump, can actually rally together a majority of Americans.

The Fox News moderators Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum didn’t figure that out at first. Early on Baier asked those in the audience with employer-sponsored health insurance to raise their hands. Then he asked those among them who would be willing to switch to government-run health insurance to raise their hands. The hands stayed up, the crowd cheered.

Bernie Sanders didn’t shift his rhetoric to the right to accommodate his hosts, or what many would assume to be the preconceptions of his audience. Instead, he was simply Bernie. Straightforward, honest and pivoting brilliantly to his strongest talking points.

When faced right off the bat with questions about his tax returns, which showed that he had earned a healthy sum off book royalties, he joked that he couldn’t apologize for that and that it was a “pretty good book” that the Fox News hosts “might want to read”.

When an audience member asked him about why he calls himself a democratic socialist, he didn’t shy away from the term: “Democratic socialism to me is creating a government, and an economy, and a society that works for all rather than just the top 1%.” He denounced “absurd inequalities” and said that human beings were entitled to basic rights to health and education, things that shouldn’t be privileges, the result of accidents of birth. An audience that we’ve been told hated socialism, and feared government, applauded. Read More

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