Story by Zach Cartwright
After his decisive win in Wisconsin, Bernie Sanders delivered a fiery speech in Laramie, Wyoming, destroying all of his critics’ arguments.
Throughout the speech, Sanders made distinctions between the message of his campaign and Hillary Clinton’s as one of vision and boldness vs. a continuation of the status quo. The speech eloquently described the Vermont senator’s surging momentum in the second half of the Democratic primary, having won 7 of the last 8 contests by landslide margins and defying the expectations of pollsters and pundits.
“Momentum is starting this campaign eleven months ago with the media determining we were a fringe candidacy… 60 to 70 points behind Secretary Clinton,” Sanders said. “Momentum is, over the last couple of weeks, national polls have had us one point up or one point down.”
But Sanders went beyond the polls, framing his candidacy as just the latest notch of a progressive movement that’s endured for over a century, built on the determination of people organizing to overcome establishment thinking and win major victories.
“Real change in our country’s history, whether it is the trade union movement, whether it is the civil rights movement, whether it is the women’s movement, whether it is the gay rights movement, they understand that real change never, ever takes place from the top on down, it always takes place from the bottom on up,” Sanders said to cheers and applause.
In a 5-minute segment of his victory speech in Wyoming tonight, Sanders compared his phenomenal momentum to the Fight for $15 campaign. While a $15/hour minimum wage very recently became reality in two of the most populous states in the country, Fight for $15 organizers had been consistently told, since 2012, to lower expectations and settle for what was deemed “realistic.”
“If we were here in this beautiful auditorium 5 years ago, not a long time from an historical perspective, and someone were to jump up and say, you know, I think the $7.25 minimum wage is a starvation wage and it has to be raised to $15 an hour.” If someone stood up and said that 5 years ago, the guy next to him would say, ‘You’re nuts! 15 bucks an hour? You want to more than double the current minimum wage. You’re crazy. Maybe, maybe, we can get up to 8 or 9 bucks an hour, but 15 bucks an hour? You’re dreaming. Too big.’ Sound familiar? ‘You are unrealistic. It can’t be done. Think smaller.’”
Sanders then used the success of the $15/hour movement to frame his success as an insurgent candidate, proving that anything is possible when people organize and think big.
“But then what happened is fast-food workers went out on strike… and I was very proud to join with those workers in Washington. And they went out and told Americans we can’t live on $7/hour, you gotta raise the minimum wage to 15 bucks an hour. And they fought and fought. Then Seattle, Washington, 15 bucks an hour. Los Angeles, San Francisco, 15 bucks an hour. Oregon, 15 bucks an hour. And in the last several weeks, in both California and New York, both governors signed legislation for 15 bucks an hour. My point is that, yes, we can change the status quo when we think big and when we have a vision.”
While acknowledging the power of the opposition, he doubled down on the hope that the movement he was part of could overcome the establishment and make change happen, citing various movement victories throughout modern history.
“I am not naive. I know the power of Wall Street, and their endless supplies of money. I know that corporate America will shut down plants in America and move to Mexico or China if they can make another $5 in profit… I know about the corporate media that will give us all the information we need, except what is most important for working families. I know about all of that.
But this is what I also know. I know that history is about when people stand up and say that status quo is not acceptable, we will not have children working in factories, we will not have working people on the job who have no power over those jobs. We will not continue to have segregation, or racism, or bigotry. We will not have women unable to vote or go to the schools they want or do the work they want. We will pass gay marriage in 50 states across this country.
So that is what I have learned from history, is that when we are prepared to think big, when we are prepared to take on the greed and recklessness of Wall Street, when we stand together and we don’t let the Donald Trumps of the world divide us, whether we are born in America or abroad, whether we are Muslim, or Jewish, or Christian, when we stand together, whether we’re gay or straight, male or female, yes we can create a government that represents all of us, and not just for a handful of wealthy campaign contributors.”
Sanders’ bid for the presidency is indeed a defining moment in the history of the progressive movement. Throughout the decades of Sanders’ career as a public official, he’s consistently been on the right side of history, even when it was not politically sound. While Hillary Clinton voted in favor of Iraq, then-U.S. Representative Bernie Sanders vehemently opposed it. When Clinton voted for the bank bailout package, Sen. Sanders spoke against it.
Sanders was also able to pass the most sweeping veterans’ bill in modern history and an amendment that restricted bailout funds from being used to displace American workers. And even though Hillary Clinton has chided Bernie Sanders for being too idealistic and not pragmatic enough, Sanders’ consistent pushing for a $15/hour federal minimum wage is one of the main reasons that a $15/hour minimum wage made it into the official 2016 platform of the Democratic Party. Clinton still only supports a $12 minimum wage.
Sanders has also predicted the outcomes of policy decisions years ahead of time. Ten years before the 2008 financial crisis, Sanders accurately predicted that the Fed’s policy of bailing out reckless Wall Street investors would encourage financial sector gambling on a scale that would affect the entire global economy. Over a decade before the rise of ISIS, Sanders predicted that ousting Saddam Hussein would enable violent extremists to seize power in Iraq. As US Uncut recently reported, Sen. Sanders correctly predicted that the Panama free trade pact, which Clinton praised as Secretary of State, would worsen the problem of offshore tax dodging. And if that isn’t enough, Sanders even predicted his own 2016 presidential campaign in 1988.
The momentum of the Bernie Sanders campaign is unprecedented, as he’s consistently broken fundraising records in consecutive months while simultaneously rejecting the same billionaire-sponsored campaign finance system all other candidates depend upon. That fact is often ignored and underplayed by the very same corporate-owned media that has given $2 billion in free media to Donald Trump. This is the same corporate-owned media establishment that refused to cover Sanders’ surging campaign in its early stages, which might have won him some of the earlier states had more voters been made aware of his positions.
Sanders is continuing to close the gap in his home state of New York. While Hillary Clinton polled as much as 48 points higher than Sanders in mid-March, Sanders has narrowed that lead down to 10 points in recent polls. His momentum may very well continue if his legions of grassroots supporters continue to defy expectations.
