When you hear him talk you can begin to understand why Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is drawing such huge crowds for his appearances. There is none of that political mumbo-jumbo and party line fakery like some of the comments on the nuclear agreement with Iran. Just a frankness, sometimes even a bluntness, that to some extent hits all sides.
He doesn’t say the Affordable Care Act—Obamacare—has solved our medical coverage problems, for example. He says it has offered modest gains, but points out that 35 million people are still uninsured and many more are underinsured, and argues for a system that adequately covers everyone. He points out that we are the only major country that does not guarantee health care for all.
Ditto for college education. As withdrawal of state financial support (UK gets only about 8 percent of its budget from the state) has left universities making up part of the gap by charging higher and higher tuition, students are either not going to college or graduating with a staggering amount of debt.
Bernie thinks higher education should be free, as it is in a number of advanced countries. (Having argued in this column that we could provide both college education and medical care free for about what it costs to administer and support our present programs, I heartily agree with him.)
He lays out what seem to me to be reasonable positions on many more topics: climate change, Social Security and Medicare, reforming Wall Street, campaign finance reform, war and peace, and fixing our crumbling infrastructure, to name several he has mentioned, all in a sensible, achievable manner.
In the beginning none of the pundits took his announcement of a run for the presidency seriously. His presentation of issues would simply pull Hillary Clinton off dead center, they said, and that would help the middle class. But that would be about it. No Wall Street or individual billionaires were backing him and it takes an incredible amount of money to run a campaign in post-Citizens United America.
Since then, he has been drawing these big crowds and the picture has changed a little. I have been getting mail and internet solicitations from him and am strongly tempted to send a contribution, although Hillary still stands a far better chance of getting the nomination and maybe of winning the general election in November next year.
My contribution wouldn’t add much of a boost to his war chest, of course, but if a lot of other people decide to contribute it would keep him going until he gets through some debates and gets his thoughts expressed, who knows?
Well, he is presenting the issues—very clearly for all to hear. And his message is drawing much larger than expected crowds. He is telling it like it is, and offering solutions to the very serious problems confronting our country.
He seems to be as much of a pull no punches guy as Donald Trump, only Bernie offers sensible solutions compared to Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip pronouncements. If Trump can move up in the polls to become leader of the Republican pack because of his bluntness on immigration, will Bernie do the same among Democrats?
Stranger things have happened.
Lewis Donohew retired from the University of Kentucky College of Communications in 1999 after nearly 35 years of service and having earned a national reputation as a communications scholar and researcher. Now down on his farm growing grapes and living close to the earth, he contemplates issues of the day from a lifetime of experience and a love of the land.
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