BERNIE LAUNCHES 2020 BID, CALLS TRUMP ‘EMBARRASSMENT’
WASHINGTON: Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders announced on Tuesday he was taking another shot at the Democratic presidential nomination, entering a crowded field of hopefuls most of whom are running on issues that he had first championed in his unsuccessful 2016 run.
“We’re gonna win”, Sanders,77, told CBS news, when asked what will be different this time. Sanders, an independent senator who tends to caucus with Democrats, lost the 2016 primaries to Hillary Clinton, who lost the election to Donald Trump.
“It is absolutely imperative that Donald Trump be defeated, because I think it is unacceptable and un-american...that we have a president who is a pathological liar,” Sanders said. “We have a president who is a racist, who is a sexist, who is a xenophobe, who is doing what no president in our lifetimes has come close to doing, and that is trying to divide us up.”
He enters the 2020 race as a leading contender for the nomination, figuring in the top five in every poll, and mostly in the No 2 slot behind former vice president Joe Biden, who is said to be considering a run. The field so far has made headlines for diversity. Four women — Senators Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Kirsten Gillibrand and Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard; one African American Senator Cory Booker; and one Hispanic, Julian Castro. Waiting in the wings is Beto O’rourke, a former congressman and a rising star in the Democratic party who has not announced yet, but is fin- ishing in the top five in polls.
Sanders had conceded the 2016 primaries to Clinton after a contentious and closely contested fight going right up to the party convention in Philadelphia.by the time he was done, his key issues — Medicare (single-payer government-run healthcare, such as in Canada and the UK) for all, free education at public colleges and universities and raising minimum wage to $15 — had moved to centre-stage from being viewed as too far to the left. They have been embraced by most of the 2020 hopefuls and are now described as key issues.
In the eyes of Republicans, they remain socialist issues. The Trump campaign said in a statement on Sander’s entry: “Bernie Sanders has already won the debate in the Democrat primary, because every candidate is embracing his brand of socialism. But the American people will reject an agenda of sky-high tax rates, government-run health care and coddling dictators like those in Venezuela. Only President Trump will keep America free, prosperous and safe.”