Bernie Sanders’s Legacy After 87 months of Obama, why are young liberals asking for ‘change’? Dan Henninger
http://www.wsj.com/articles/bernie-sanderss-legacy-1461194181
With Hillary Clinton and the party machinery back on track to a now-tarnished coronation, it’s worth assessing what Bernie Sanders’s campaign accomplished. I still can’t take the Vermont Socialist himself seriously, not with Larry David as his doppelgänger. But the Sanders phenomenon—embraced by a strong majority of liberals between the ages of 17 and 50—deserves attention.
Reporters have exhaustively plumbed the habitats and mental states of “the Trump voter.” Sen. Sanders’s supporters, by contrast, have floated through the primaries in a mist of keywords—millennials, college students, young professionals, actresses, “white people.”
One has to ask: Are they all actually socialists? I doubt it.
It’s no surprise Donald Trump in his New York victory speech about the “corrupt” Republican Party called Sen. Sanders a fellow “outsider.” The two great disrupters are remarkably similar, a kind of Tweedledon and Tweedleburn on trade and a “system” that’s “broken” and “failing” their supporters.
If one word attaches to the Sanders camp, it is “change.” But change what?
This isn’t meant to deride their desire for change, which is undoubtedly authentic, but only to ask how it’s possible that so many under-50 liberals have settled on Bernie Sanders as a change agent after living daily through more than 87 straight months of a Democratic president elected on a platform of “Hope and Change”?
As to Mrs. Clinton, President Obama’s presumed heir, The Wall Street Journal poll this week finds “just 22% of registered voters give her high marks for being able to bring real change to the country.”
What, exactly, is Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or even Bernie Sanders supposed to deliver that an infinity of politicians and public officials before them haven’t already delivered?
If change has any concrete meaning for Sen. Sanders’s supporters, it must have something to do with what the government or public sector does. CONTINUE AT SITE
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