One has to assume, certainly at the present time, that it is unlikely that US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders will make it to the White House. But about the policies Sanders has espoused and the following they have garnered? The take on that by at least one writer in The New Yorker in "How California made Bernie Sanders a better Candidate".....
"This morning, just before endorsing Clinton for President, Barack Obama met with Sanders to try to persuade the Vermonter to abandon the race and support Clinton’s candidacy. In trying to find common ground, Obama surely drew on the similarities between his and Sanders’s Presidential campaigns: the swell of young voters, the tenacious optimism. The stories that are already being told about the Sanders campaign are about young people for whom socialism is now a source of inspiration rather than fear, and about the Democratic Party, which Sanders has raged against for decades, now coming to the left to meet him.
But another project seemed to emerge in Sanders’s California tour, one that will also outlast his campaign: the marriage of democratic socialism with the American experience. He stopped talking so much about the Nordic ideal; he became more finely attuned to what was exceptional, for good and bad, about this place. Sanders’s own evolution made you wonder what might have happened if the campaign had reached California earlier. The most obvious casualties of the Presidential-primary calendar, with its early emphasis on very white states (Iowa, New Hampshire), are candidates whose appeal is strongest among minority voters. But it is also not hard to see how those places limited Sanders at the same time that they propelled him, and to wonder what exactly his campaign might have looked like if he had not spent its formative days in icy, ethnically homogeneous small cities, conjuring dreams of Copenhagen."
"This morning, just before endorsing Clinton for President, Barack Obama met with Sanders to try to persuade the Vermonter to abandon the race and support Clinton’s candidacy. In trying to find common ground, Obama surely drew on the similarities between his and Sanders’s Presidential campaigns: the swell of young voters, the tenacious optimism. The stories that are already being told about the Sanders campaign are about young people for whom socialism is now a source of inspiration rather than fear, and about the Democratic Party, which Sanders has raged against for decades, now coming to the left to meet him.
But another project seemed to emerge in Sanders’s California tour, one that will also outlast his campaign: the marriage of democratic socialism with the American experience. He stopped talking so much about the Nordic ideal; he became more finely attuned to what was exceptional, for good and bad, about this place. Sanders’s own evolution made you wonder what might have happened if the campaign had reached California earlier. The most obvious casualties of the Presidential-primary calendar, with its early emphasis on very white states (Iowa, New Hampshire), are candidates whose appeal is strongest among minority voters. But it is also not hard to see how those places limited Sanders at the same time that they propelled him, and to wonder what exactly his campaign might have looked like if he had not spent its formative days in icy, ethnically homogeneous small cities, conjuring dreams of Copenhagen."
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