Bernie Sanders has announced that he will be seeking the Democrat nomination for president in the next election.
From the Guardian:
Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont whose 2016 presidential campaign helped energize the progressive movement and reshaped the Democratic party, has entered the 2020 race for the White House.
Sanders, a self-styled democratic socialist who spent much of his nearly 30-year congressional career on the political fringe, cast his candidacy as the best way to accomplish the mission he started three years ago when he ran against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination.
“Together, you and I and our 2016 campaign began the political revolution,” he said in an email to supporters on Tuesday morning. “Now, it is time to complete that revolution and implement the vision that we fought for.”
Sanders, 77, running as a Democrat again, believes he can prevail in a crowded and diverse field that includes several female and minority candidates, and then beat Donald Trump, whom he called on Tuesday “the most dangerous president in modern American history”.
Asked in an interview on CBS on Tuesday morning what would be different about his 2020 campaign, Sanders replied: “We’re gonna win.”
Whether he can once again capture grassroots support, and whether the energy of his past campaign will pass to other candidates, will likely be a central factor in determining who Democrats nominate to take on the sitting president.
And he was scathing about the current President. He described Trump in these terms:
Mr Sanders hit out at the president as a “pathological liar, a fraud, a racist, a sexist, a xenophobe and someone who is undermining American democracy as he leads us in an authoritarian direction”.
In an interview with Vermont Public Radio, where he first announced his bid, Mr Sanders also called Mr Trump “a homophobe” and “somebody who is gaining cheap political points by trying to pick on minorities, often undocumented immigrants.”
Don’t hold back Bernie.
Much as I like Bernie I wonder if he is as viable this time. He is aged 77. The thought of two septuagenarians duelling it out for the White House does not fill me with excitement.
Is there a young candidate in the US with the same or similar world view as Sanders, someone with cut through and energy, with a twitter game second to none, someone brave enough to say things as they are, probably female, preferably young and representative of America’s diversity?
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