Some peeps here on the kos are saying that Bernie won't be able to work a Republican congress and I highly disagree. (actually if we can get Bernie elected I don't think there will be a Republican congress but let's assume there will be for now)

Bernie will mobilize the American public and have them march into Washington and demand change.



Bernie Sanders, presidential candidate and firebrand of the left, has a lot of respect for President Obama. But he believes the president made a major mistake after running “one of the great campaigns in American history”: He left his activist supporters behind. “The biggest mistake that Barack Obama made” was essentially to tell his supporters, “Thank you very much for electing me, I’ll take it from here,” Senator Sanders told reporters at a Monitor-hosted breakfast Thursday. “I will not make that mistake.”

http://www.csmonitor.com/...

Imagine Bernie fighting for the American public. And the American public fighting for Bernie. Imaging that image of people marching on Washington and the Republicans saying no Bernie's Family Values agenda, his jobs agenda, or anything else that he is proposing. The Republicans will buckle.

How do we know this? He did this as Mayor of Burlington. The city council fought him at every turn (sound familiar) but the people saw that he was fighting for the people and the council was fighting against the people and guess what happened? A more progressive council was voted in:



In his first two years in office, the City Council refused to allow Sanders to hire more than a handful of staff, while the entrenched bureaucrats in City Hall sought to thwart his initiatives. Randy Kamerbeek, the city’s planning director, “tried to sabotage everything that Bernie proposed,” recalled Michael Monte, who worked in that agency. “He told us not to allow Bernie to have any visible successes. He figured Bernie would be out of office after his first term.” After he was re-elected in 1983, and voters swept in a more progressive City Council, Sanders gained a stronger foothold in City Hall. With the support of local Republicans and business leaders, he created the Community and Economic Development Office (CEDO) to carry out his vision for more affordable housing, more locally owned small businesses, greater community engagement in planning, and job development.

“When Bernie first got elected, the local media said he was anti-business,” recalled Bruce Seifer, an architect of Sanders’s economic development efforts. “They called us the ‘Sanderistas.’” After Sanders’s re-election victory in 1983, business groups concluded they could not defeat him and thus had to work with him. But many businesspeople also saw that Sanders shared their interest in “development”—what he saw as “good development”—while opposing projects that would hurt middle- and working-class neighborhoods or victimize low-wage workers. “Bernie was never anti-growth, anti-development, or anti-business,” explained Monte. “He just wanted businesses to be responsible toward their employees and the community. He wanted local entrepreneurs to thrive. He wanted people to have good jobs that pay a living wage. If you could deal with that, you could deal with Bernie and Bernie would deal with you.”

Sanders’s solutions are controversial – a reflection of his belief in Scandinavian-style Democratic socialism. He wants “Medicare for all,” free tuition at all public universities, a $15-an-hour minimum wage, paid leave for parents of newborns, paid sick leave, and paid vacation. Sanders acknowledges that his health-care proposal would require higher taxes, but Americans would come out ahead, he says. “Yes, of course taxes would go up to pay for health care,” Sanders says. “But you know what would go down? Private insurance. You would not be paying private insurance. So if I said to you, ‘Well, you’re not going to pay Blue Cross $12,000 a year but you’re going to pay $10,000 more in taxes, are you going to be crying? No.”

And as a bonus gem... I found this in the CS Monitor article which I found my saying "PREACH IT!" to. :)Preach it Bernie. We love you and we're going to win this.

Aim for the stars people. It's the only way to correct the rightward lurch that the Republicans have foisted on this country.