Bernie Sanders 2016

Big crowd for Bernie in Burlington. pic.twitter.com/sHqgFiYklw

— Dylan Stableford (@stableford) May 26, 2015

Bernie’s buzzing — here’s his official campaign website. You can also buy tshirts and yard signs and stickers, but not (yet) propeller beanies. (Maybe I’m the only one who would totally buy a Bernie beanie?) Per the Washington Post:

BURLINGTON, Vt. — Challenging Hillary Rodham Clinton from the left, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders kicked off his presidential bid Tuesday with a pitch to liberals to join him in a “political revolution” to transform the nation’s economy and politics.

Sanders, who entered the Democratic race in late April, formally opened his White House campaign in Burlington, where he was first elected mayor by defeating a longtime Democratic incumbent by 10 votes. Three decades later, Sanders is the underdog again, vowing to campaign on an agenda to elevate issues like income inequality, campaign finance and climate change.

“With your support and the support of millions of people throughout this country, we begin a political revolution to transform our country economically, politically, socially and environmentally,” Sanders declared to about 5,000 supporters along the shore of Lake Champlain…

Sanders, an independent in the Senate who often votes with the Democrats, has raised more than $4 million since announcing his campaign in late April and suggested in an interview with The Associated Press last week that raising $50 million for the primaries was a possibility.

In his address, Sanders made clear he would seek to be on the forefront of liberal causes. He described the economic system as “rigged” against middle-class families and vowed to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations and to oppose trade deals that would ship jobs overseas. To counter big money in politics, he said he would push for the public financing of elections.

To build upon President Barack Obama’s health care law, Sanders supports a single-payer health care system. Instead of cutting Social Security, he said, the nation should expand Social Security benefits. To address climate change, he said, Congress should pass a carbon tax to help transition off fossil fuels.

He noted that he voted against the invasion of Iraq in 2003 — Clinton has disavowed her vote in support of it — and said the U.S. should be part of an international coalition to defeat the Islamic State group…

The NYTimes was considerably sniffier:

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont began drawing implicit contrasts with Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday in the race for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, as he played the liberal purist in throwing down policy gauntlet after gauntlet – a $15 minimum wage, $1 trillion for public works jobs, a “Medicare-for-all” system of universal health care — in his first campaign rally since declaring his candidacy last month.

While he referred to Mrs. Clinton by name only once, Mr. Sanders, an avowed socialist and former mayor of this bucolic sanctuary for political progressives, took so many emphatic and uncompromising stands that he made Mrs. Clinton look like a pretender for her recent shifts to the left on gay marriage and free trade. At the same time, however, Mr. Sanders offered nothing in the way of strategies for getting his left-wing policy ideas through the politically gridlocked Congress — other than promising (like generations of candidates have) to “build a movement of millions of Americans who are prepared to stand up and fight back.”

show full post on front page

Bernie Sanders (Officially) Joins the RacePost + Comments (61)