Sanders pushes criminal justice reform, income inequality work in S.C. pitch
GREENVILLE, S.C. — Throughout his surging campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders has delivered the same message, regardless of his audience.
Meeting with about 50 mostly black pastors and community leaders at the Springfield Baptist Church here Friday afternoon, he made a pitch that was virtually identical to the ones he gave to white supporters the same day.
In it, he argued that income inequality is the moral issue of our time and the people it hurts most are African-Americans.
He said the criminal justice system should be reformed and that the murder of nine black churchgoers at the Emanuel AMEChurch in Charleston made it clear that the government needed to do more to break up hate groups.
If Sanders, who is climbing in polls and attracting the largest crowds of the campaign, hopes to broaden his support and be more than a footnote in the story of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s road to the Democratic nomination, he must demonstrate a capacity to draw support from African-American voters.
That is especially critical here in South Carolina, the third state after Iowa and New Hampshire to hold an early primary, and where African-Americans constitute the dominant Democratic voting bloc. And that is likely to require a more targeted effort.
South Carolina “could be up for grabs if Secretary Clinton is overconfident and thinks that the African-American community will just support her, and especially if Sen. Sanders continues to show his commitment and interest in the community,” Earl Simmons, a senior pastor at the Maple Creek Baptist Church in Greer, said after the meeting.
Sanders’ campaign insists that African-Americans are responding to his increased focus on criminal justice issues in recent weeks and point to movement in a recent CNN poll of increased support among nonwhite voters.
And yet, despite his status as the ascendant liberal alternative to Clinton, it has been Sanders, the product of radical leftist politics but who is from Vermont, which has a small African-American population, who has run into the most difficulty with the Black Lives Matter movement.
At a Netroots event in July, Black Lives Matter activists first attacked another Democratic challenger to Clinton, Martin O’Malley, a former Maryland governor, for saying that “all lives matter.”
But the activists, who prefer a racial justicebased critique of U.S. society to Sanders’ class-based prism, gave Sanders an especially hard time, and he clearly resented it.
“I’ve spent 50 years of my life fighting for civil rights,” he said at the time, adding that “if you don’t want me to be here, that’s OK.”
It was Sanders who became the target of protesters. It did not help that the vigorous online defense of the candidate by his often white, male supporters (called the “bro-gressives” by their detractors) resulted in the mocking hash tag #BernieSoBlack.