Senator Bernie Sanders refuses to go down without a fight. During a press conference from Burlington, Vermont, Wednesday afternoon, Sanders acknowledged that Tuesday’s primary results did not go quite as his campaign had planned. Sanders lost every county in Michigan, a state he won in the 2016 primary against Hillary Clinton. He was also defeated by his challenger, Former Vice President Joe Biden, in Mississippi, Missouri, and Idaho. Sanders won North Dakota, and he appears poised to eke out a narrow victory in Washington state, but to call it cold comfort would be an understatement. Still, Sanders maintained that Biden is winning the electability argument, his campaign is winning the ideological debate.
“I cannot tell you how many people our campaign has spoken to who have said, ‘I like what your campaign stands for, I agree with what your campaign stands for, but I’m gonna vote for Joe Biden because I think Joe is the best candidate to defeat Donald Trump,” Sanders said.“Needless to say, I strongly disagree with that assertion. But that is what millions of Democrats and Independents today believe.”
Sanders also noted that while Biden is performing well among older voters, particularly voters aged 65 and older, voters in their 20s, 30s, and even 40s—the prospective future of the Democratic party—lean toward the values and policies the Sanders campaign is selling. And it’s those policies that Sanders challenged Biden to answer to on Sunday’s upcoming debate. Sanders addressed him directly in a lengthy and assertive hit:
“Joe, what are you going to do for the 500,000 people who go bankrupt in this country because of medically related debt, and what are you going to do for the working people of this country and small business people who are paying an average 20 percent of their incomes to healthcare?
Joe, what are you going to do to end the absurdity of the United States being the only major country on earth where healthcare is not a human right?
Are you really going to veto a Medicare For All bill if it is passed in Congress? Joe, how are you going to respond to the scientists who tell us we have seven or eight years remaining to transform our energy system before irreparable harm takes place to this planet because of the ravages of climate change?
Joe, at a time when most young people need a higher education need a higher education to make it into the middle class, what are you going to do to make sure that all of our people can go to college or trade school regardless of their income? And what are you going to do about the millions of people who are struggling with outrageous levels of student debt?
Joe, at a time when we have more people in jail than Communist China, a nation four times our size, what are you going to do to end mass incarceration and a racist criminal justice system? What are you going to do to end the terror that millions of undocumented people experience right now because of our broken and inhumane immigration system?
Joe, what are you going to do about the fact that we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country on earth and are living with the fact that 500,000 people tonight are homeless, and 18 million families are spending half of their income to put a roof over their heads?
Joe, importantly, what are you going to do to end the absurdity of billionaires buying elections and the three wealthiest people in America owning more wealth than the bottom half of our people?”
Looks like Joe has some homework tonight.
Meanwhile, my father, a Biden voter, had this to say in response to Sanders’s “fuck it, mask off” moment:
