No one is dismissing Bernie Sanders now.
Even Hillary Clinton suddenly wants more debates with the rumpled firebrand senator from Vermont, this 74-year-old underdog who fought her to a virtual tie Monday in Iowa and who is ahead in the polls for New Hampshire’s vote next week.
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So much of the media coverage for months was about Donald Trump and the dogfight among all the Republican candidates seeking to grab the spotlight away from Donald and his hateful barbs.
Scant attention went to Bernie, the Senate’s only socialist, who everyone said didn’t have a chance against Hillary and her well-oiled machine.
But something strange happened on the way to the coronation.
The more Sanders railed on the campaign trail against Wall Street and our “billionaire class” and our nation’s obscene wealth inequality, the bigger his rallies grew. Legions of young people flocked to volunteer for him and small donations from ordinary Americans poured in like a river run wild.
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Then this week, the Democratic Party establishment agreed to add four more televised debates between Clinton and Sanders, beginning with the one in New Hampshire on Thursday night.
They did so even though the party’s veteran leaders keep saying that Sanders can’t possibly keep his momentum in the primaries to come.
Iowa and New Hampshire, they remind us, are rural states with largely white and highly educated populations. In big cities in Pennsylvania, Illinois, New York and California, and in the South and Southwest, Democrats are largely black or Hispanic and Clinton has always been popular among those minority groups.
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This won’t be a repeat of 2008, the experts say, when another underdog, Barack Obama, wrested many of those minority voters away from Clinton.
Don’t be so sure. The new debates, after all, will give millions of Americans an added chance to hear from Sanders directly.
“Hillary is already familiar in the black community,” Harlem state Sen. Bill Perkins said. “But as Bernie has performed and as he gets better known, people will find him more compatible than they realized.”
Perkins knows about underdogs changing minds. In 2008, he was the first black elected official in this town to support Obama when all the others were with Clinton. This time, only he and Queens state Sen. James Sanders have come out for Bernie.
On the national level, Ben Jealous, the former head of the NAACP, this week joined the tiny list of well-known African-American leaders who are feeling the Bern.
“Obama brought us the notion that change was possible,” Perkins said. “Bernie Sanders is a natural follow up to that. He’s talking about a living wage and progressive change, and that will resonate with black voters when they hear his message.”
But what about the young people flocking to Sanders? He won an astonishing 84% of the Iowa vote among people under 30.
They are a generation that came of age during the Great Recession, which brought so much suffering to millions of Americans. They are being crushed by college loan debt and an economy that has barely recovered 10 years later.
Many of them became politically involved during the Occupy Wall Street movement back in 2011. Anyone who bothers to look will find a straight line from Occupy to the movements for a living wage, for immigrant rights, for Black Lives Matter, and around climate change. Many of the participants in those movements see Sanders as the only White House hopeful they can trust.
None of this means Sanders will win the Democratic Party nomination. Clinton, after all, is a formidable leader, perhaps the most qualified of all the candidates for president.
But no matter what happens, Sanders has already transformed the 2016 race.
“Bernie is reshaping the national debate and putting working families right where they belong, at the center of it,” said Bill Lipton, head of New York’s small but influential Working Families Party that is backing Sanders.
So whether Bernie or Hillary triumphs in the end, American voters will emerge stronger and more energized from the contest between them.