These Are the 6 Bold Ideas Fueling Bernie Sanders' "Political Revolution"
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It's more than seven months until the first votes will be cast in the Democratic presidential primaries, but much of the media has already written off Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont.
"He Won't Win, So Why Is Bernie Sanders Running?" asked Newsweek. Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer went so far as to say that "Kim Kardashian has a better shot at winning the presidency than Bernie Sanders."
Inside the East Coast political media bubble, outsiders running for president are often met with a special kind of disdain. Candidates who buck the status quo and show no interest in playing by the typical rules of Washington are effectively written out of the race before it even begins.
This tendency to dismiss candidates like Sanders is a good example of pundits equating unusual ideas with bad ones. It's particularly unfortunate given that Sanders, a self-described "democratic socialist," has been exceptionally substantive early on in his campaign about what kind of policies he would pursue if elected. And there's good bit of evidence that these policies appeal to many Americans, as exotic as some of them may seem to the beltway commentariat.
Rather than compulsively denounce Sanders' proposals based on the fact that they sound foreign, the media should instead focus on whether or not these strange ideas like free health care are actually good for the country — or better yet, educate the public about them and allow people to decide for themselves.
With that in mind, here's a breakdown of what Sanders has been focusing on so far in his campaign:
1. Fighting economic inequality
Addressing soaring inequality in America is the lynchpin of Sanders' campaign. "The issue of wealth and income inequality is the great moral issue of our time, it is the great economic issue of our time and it is the great political issue of our time," he said during his kickoff speech in Burlington, Vermont, last week. He proposes to address inequality in three ways.
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