Revolution Televised: Surging Sanders Seeks New York Upset Win

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Bernie doesn’t want to stop winning….

[Toby Rogers Report]

The polls are tightening. The ads and rhetoric are sharpening. 

There is a debate in Brooklyn on Thursday and voters hit the voting booths a week from today.

In other words, the Democratic party April 19, New York Presidential Primary fight is poised to become the main event of the primary season.

What feeds the political drama in New York is one narrative the corporate press is doing everything it can to avoid; and that is that Sanders is putting up a remarkable fight in Hillary’s Clinton’s “home state.”

When HRC should be coasting she is campaigning as if she is on the ropes; and the reality is, she is on the ropes. 

If Sanders wins New York, his momentum will be unstoppable — or as a certain writer would have put it he’d be inexorable. 

The media ignores it, but Sanders is riding on a tsunami, vanquishing Clinton in the last seven out of eight state contests.  He has the momentum of a conquering lion coming into New York. 

The Clintons, the media and the Democratic party establishment are all scrambling; the New York political machine is in a panic and desperate to eek out a Clinton victory.

The fact that the race is this close demonstrates just how much support Bernie Sanders has in New York and around the country.

Sanders has repeatedly defied the polls. Like Bob Marley once put it, “There’s a natural mystic in the air. If you listen carefully you will hear.”

Sanders can win New York; but he needs 40% of the African-American and Latino vote for victory.

Hillary’s most vulnerable area is the catastrophic rise in the mass incarceration of African Americans and Latinos during her husband’s presidency, who signed the 1994 Crime Bill that ushered it in. 

Sanders can’t push too hard on that  because he voted for the bill. In fact, even Al Sharpton advocated the bill’s passage.

Mass incarceration of Blacks and Latinos started before the Clintons entered the White House in 1993. The Reagan/Bush era got it rolling, particularly in New York, when “progressive lion” Mario Cuomo reigned in Albany. 

With the already draconian Rockefeller drug laws in place, New York became the perfect storm for African American and Latino mass incarceration; first class high tech jails got more funding then New York’s third rate schools.

So far, Sanders is dancing around that issue.  He is fighting hard for the Black and Latino vote; his latest ad was directed by Spike Lee.

When it comes to race, the Clintons always ding themselves. Whether it’s Rudy Ray Rector, Sister Souljah, dissing Barack Obama in 2008 during the primaries, or the recent encounters with Black Lives Matter activists.

When Bill Clinton was challenged about the crime Bill last week he hurled a racially-charged retort about 13 year old Black kids “hopped up on crack”. He hasn’t apologized for the comment.

When I covered Clinton during the 1992 New York Presidential Primary, I noticed he always- and I mean always- high fived African Americans on the campaign trail. His laughing-switched-to-crying fit outside Ron Brown’s funeral also had racial tinge to it that disturbed me.

Progressives of all colors have a chance to help Sanders win. The stars are all aligning.

The history of progressive presidential campaigns- RFK ’68, McGovern ’72, Brown ’76 and ’92, Ted Kennedy ’80, Jackson ’88, Dean ’03- will forever smold in the ash heap of history.

Obama ’08 the only exception.

A Sanders victory in New York could make the exception the rule.

Clinton creamed Obama in New York in 2008; so for Sanders to even come within five points of Clinton would be a monumental victory in progressive presidential history.

A Sanders victory in New York would truly mark a new day in the American political landscape.

Can Sanders really beat the Empire State’s Democratic party political machine? Or is 2016 just another progressive “mission impossible?”

Sanders supporters need to heed the words of Mario Savio:

“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can’t take part. … And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.” 

Make sure you and everyone you bring to the polls are registered in the Democratic party, because if not, you will all be turned away. It is the ultimate irony in the 2016 “democratic process”; because in 2016 it is an independent candidate who transformed the Democratic party.

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