Looks like Michigan is feeling the Bern.
In what can only be described as a major upset for Sen. Hillary Clinton, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders turned in a narrow – and much needed – victory Tuesday night that gives him the momentum he was looking for to keep his campaign competitive. Although Michigan was not considered to be an absolute must-win state for Sanders, there is no question that Tuesday’s unexpected result is an energizing shot in the arm, and evidence that the young voters to whom he appeals most, including younger African American voters, turned out in the large numbers he needed. As for Clinton, this defeat is not enough to consider her frontrunner status to be in any kind of serious trouble, but no doubt her campaign has to be concerned after all of the extremely heavy campaigning she has done throughout this state.
Nate Silver’s 538 website, widely regarded as one of the most accurate polling/forecasting sites around, as late as Tuesday afternoon had predicted that Sanders had a less than 1 percent chance of prevailing in Michigan. Talk about going back to the drawing board…
During Sunday’s Democratic debate in Flint, Sanders gave a relatively strong performance where he continued to drill home his message against corporate greed and income inequality, using every opportunity to connect the dots between the devastation that has been wrought upon Flint and Detroit and those whom he refers to as the billionaire class who he paints as responsible for inflicting so much pain and anguish on the little guy.
While the first 20 minutes of the historic debate focused solely on the Flint water crisis, Sanders flexed his muscle, quickly moving to the Detroit public Schools crisis. “Not only is there this tragedy in Flint, in Detroit the public school system is collapsing.”
Several Flint residents asked both candidates how they would restore citizen trust in government if they were elected. Leann Walters one of the first to report the water problem in Flint after one of her twins stopped growing and her daughter lost her hair, implored candidates to address water contamination around the country.
Sanders said he would make sue the EPA test every public water system in the country. 10 million lead service pipes deliver water daily to Americans across the country.
Clinton responded that she would commit to removing lead from water, soil and homes within five years of her taking office.
And then the love fest ended.
Cooper’s statement about other ills facing Flint and the rest of the state, particularly the lack of jobs changed the tide of the conversation. “This city is also facing a jobs crisis, 75 percent of Flint’s manufacturing jobs have been lost in the last 25 years and about the same amount of time, Michigan lost 230,000 manufacturing jobs,” Cooper stated. And that’s when the gloves came off as Clinton sharply criticized Sanders for voting against the auto industry bail that President Obama urged approval of.
“Senator Sanders was against the auto bailout. In January of 2009, President-Elect Obama asked everybody in the Congress to vote for the bailout to keep the industry from collapsing and taking 4 million jobs with it,” Clinton said gesturing toward Sanders.
“You mean the Wall Street bail out”, Sanders shot back, adding, “And some of your friends were part of that Wall Street Bail out. I will be damned if it’s the working people of this country who should have to pay for Wall Street greed.”
Co-moderator Don Lemon changed the conversation as he asked the candidates about their racial blind spots. Sanders pointed to his long and storied involvement in the Civil Right Movement, while Clinton pointed to her record of creating working to improve quality of life for minorities and the poor.
“I think being a white person in the United States of America, I know that I have never had the experience that so many people … have had. And I think it’s incumbent upon me to urge white people to think about what it is like to have ‘the talk’ with your kids, scared that your sons or daughters, even, could get in trouble for no good reason whatsoever like Sandra Bland and end up dead in a jail in Texas,” Clinton said.
Sanders, who is popular among young African American voters for gave an equally poignant and frank response. “When you’re white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto. You don’t know what it’s like to be poor. You don’t know what it’s like to be hassled when you walk down the street or you get dragged out of a car,” he said adamantly. “I believe that as a nation in the year 2016, we must be firm in making it clear. We will end institutional racism and reform a broken criminal justice system.”
When a mother young mother from Detroit Shaniqua Kemp shared the story of her 8-year-daughter attending substandard schools and receiving an inadequate education both Clinton and Sanders were eager to address the issue of education in Detroit and other distressed communities.
“A great nation is judged not by how many millionaires and billionaires it has, but how it treats the least among them, which are children and the elderly. And we should be ashamed that we cannot come up with the money to fix Detroit’s broken educational system. We have to change the priorities and invest in our children to have the best public school system in the world,” Sanders said.
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