Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont speaks to a crowd of 3,800 Friday night at a Mesa stop on the “Come Together and Fight Back Tour.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders and Tom Perez presided over a raucous gathering of Democratic faithful in Mesa on Friday night, keeping the crowd on its feet and cheering by highlighting the party’s values and slamming President Donald Trump and other Republicans.
The duo touched on the party’s core 21stcentury priorities such as health care as a right, public education and free public college tuition, comprehensive immigration reform with a path to citizenship, raising the minimum wage, equal pay for women, supporting labor unions and working families, criminal-justice reform, and confronting climate change and discrimination.
“The Democratic Party will always have your back,” promised Perez, the Democratic National Committee chairman.
Sanders pounded Trump for failing to stand up for the working class as he promised and implored Americans not to despair and give up.
“The right response is we’re going to stand up, we’re going to fight back and we are going to create an economy and a government that works for all of us, not just the one percent,” Sanders told the adoring audience of 3,800.
Sanders, the left-leaning senator from Vermont, last year became an unlikely political star after his progressive challenge to the party’s establishment front-runner Hillary Clinton caught fire in the Democratic primaries, especially among Millennials.
He remains an unlikely savior for the
Democratic Party; he is listed as an “independent” with the Senate and, despite his bid for the 2016 Democratic nomination, still categorizes himself that way. Sanders describes himself as a democratic socialist.
Even so, the Mesa crowd appeared to be there largely for Sanders and his populist economic message, loudly chanting “Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!” every time Perez, who spoke first, mentioned his name. Sanders received a thunderous standing ovation when he came on stage.
“All those people in Arizona who voted for Trump must understand that he is an agent of the billionaire class and he’s going to sell the working people of this country out,” Sanders said.
Sanders repeatedly pounded the Republican agenda on Capitol Hill, which he said will be funded by cutting needed government programs, as well as what he called “a corrupt political system” that lets billionaires buy elections and “cowardly” Republican governors make it more difficult for people to vote.
“You do not have to have a Ph.D in economics to know you don’t give tax breaks to billionaires and cut programs for children,” Sanders said.
While Sanders was the crowd favorite, the audience also cheered Perez when he hit Trump and waxed nostalgic for former President Barack Obama.
“This first 100 days has been nothing less than carnage and chaos,” Perez said of Trump’s presidency.
Perez also lived up to his reputation for using earthy language to make his antiTrump points.
Trump’s proposed wall on the U.S.-Mexico border will need a garage door because of “all the (expletive) he makes in Mexico” needs to get into the United States, Perez said of Trump’s companies.
He also noted how voters recalled state Sen. Russell Pearce, the author of Arizona’s immigration-enforcement law known as Senate Bill 1070, and “kicked his (expletive).”
Perez also riffed on a report that the Trump administration has deported a “dreamer,” an undocumented immigrant brought into the country as a child.
“Dreamers shouldn’t be deported, they should be respected,” Perez shouted to more applause and cheers.
Sanders called immigration reform a personal issue for him because his father came from Poland. Undocumented immigrants “are living in fear, and living in the shadows, and many of them are being exploited every day on the job because their employers know that they have no legal rights,” he said.
“I say to Trump and his friends: Stop scapegoating undocumented people. Work with us to pass comprehensive immigration reform and a path toward citizenship,” Sanders said.
Perez, who earlier this year was elected DNC chairman, is Obama’s former secretary of Labor.