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Sanders Embraces Democratic Socialism as Weapon to Beat Trump

Sanders Embraces Democratic Socialism as Weapon to Beat Trump

(Bloomberg) -- Bernie Sanders gave his fullest definition to date of democratic socialism, embracing a label that’s been used as a cudgel by President Donald Trump and Republicans, and attempting to reassure voters that his long-held political beliefs don’t make him unelectable.

The Vermont senator ventured into territory avoided by all the other Democratic presidential hopefuls in a speech Wednesday in Washington. He said democratic socialism belongs to a long U.S. tradition of guaranteeing “basic economic rights” thanks to programs like Social Security, unemployment compensation and regulation of Wall Street that “are considered pillars of American society.”

“Over 80 years ago Franklin Delano Roosevelt helped create a government that made transformative progress in protecting the needs of working families,” he said. “Today in the second decade of the 21st century we must take up the unfinished business of the New Deal and carry it to completion. This is the unfinished business of the Democratic Party and the vision we must accomplish.”

He said now that the U.S. has guaranteed civil rights for all, the next step would be to bring about guaranteed health-care coverage, a clean environment and the right to “as much education as one needs to succeed in our society.”

Sanders Embraces Democratic Socialism as Weapon to Beat Trump

“We must recognize that in the 21st century, in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, economic rights are human rights,” he said. “This is what I mean by democratic socialism.”

Sanders also took the opportunity to take on Trump and other critics who have attacked him as too radical. Trump has frequently mocked Sanders by calling him “crazy Bernie” and has tried to slap the socialist label on other Democratic candidates and their proposals.

“While President Trump and his fellow oligarchs attack us for our support of democratic socialism, they don’t really oppose all forms of socialism,” he said. “They may hate democratic socialism because it benefits working people, but they absolutely love corporate socialism that enriches Trump and other billionaires.”

The address at George Washington University gave Sanders a chance to stand apart in a race with 23 candidates, and assert that many of the proposals and causes he’s championed for years are now mainstream and increasingly popular.

Yet his embrace of the socialism label further attaches him to an ideology “with a lot of baggage” and plays into a Republican attack line, said Zac Petkanas, a Democratic strategist who isn’t affiliated with any of the Democratic campaigns.

“A lot of his policies are popular with the American people if they don’t come under the ‘socialism’ banner,” Petkanas said. “To lean into that label has risks in the general election and may not have the benefits he thinks it does in the primary.”

Earlier, Sanders lashed out at Jamie Dimon on Twitter after the chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co. criticized socialism during an appearance in Washington.

Dimon said giving the government control of companies allows them to be used for political purposes, leading to deterioration. He said it would be a “huge mistake” for the U.S. to go down that path.

Sanders shot back in a tweet:“I didn’t hear Jamie Dimon criticizing socialism when Wall Street begged for the largest federal bailout in American history—some $700 billion from the Treasury and even more from the Fed.”

Dimon has previously said JPMorgan, which expanded during the crisis by acquiring collapsing rivals, didn’t need a bailout to survive. In 2012, he told the Senate his firm temporarily accepted money from a Treasury Department program because “we were asked to” so weaker rivals could tap it without being singled out.

Standing Apart

Sanders has trailed former Vice President Joe Biden in national polls and voter surveys in early primary states. He’s also under pressure to draw a distinction with Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, his biggest competitor in the contest for the loyalty of the party’s left wing, who has been gaining in recent weeks.

An Economist/YouGov national poll released Wednesday showed Warren ahead of Sanders, 16% to 12%. She also overtook Sanders in two polls of Nevada Democratic caucus-goers.

A self-described democratic socialist and progressive, Sanders is campaigning on curbing economic inequality in the U.S. He’s calling for a series of government interventions, including higher taxes on the wealthy, free college tuition, Medicare for all, and stricter consumer and environmental protections.

Republicans have intensified attacks on him and the other Democratic candidates. Trump has warned that the U.S. risks falling into the chaos that abounds in Venezuela if a Democrat takes the White House. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, makes frequent reference to the “socialist” tendencies of 2020 Democratic contenders. He forced a vote on the Democrats’ Green New Deal climate-change outline in an effort to corner the seven senators vying for the Democratic nod.

McConnell, in a radio interview Tuesday with the conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt, accused the Democrats of peddling “full-scale socialism.”

‘Trojan Horse’

“They want to turn us into sort of a Western European socialist country,” he said. “Remember what Margaret Thatcher said about socialism. She said ‘the problem with socialism is pretty soon you run out of other people’s money.’ That’s where they are and that’s why we need to beat them next year.”

On Wednesday, Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, said “so-called ‘democratic socialism’ is nothing more than a Trojan horse, and it would destroy our country and destroy our way of life. And most fundamentally of all, it would destroy the American dream.”

Sanders also has been confronted with news reports revisiting his 10-day honeymoon in the Soviet Union in 1988, when as a just-married mayor of Burlington, Vermont, he was captured on camera at a table filled with vodka bottles and told Soviet hosts he wanted to “take the strengths of both systems” of government and “learn from each other.”

The trip came up during his unsuccessful run for the Democratic nomination in 2016, and the video could be used against him if he were to be the nominee in 2020.

Polls show the public is split on socialism, although Democrats are more open to it and a candidate who embraces it.

A recent Monmouth University poll found that 57% of adult Americans said socialism wasn’t compatible with American values, and just 29% said that it was. At the same time, the April 11-15 poll found that just 42% have a negative view of socialism in general, while 45% had a neutral opinion and 10% had a positive view of socialism.

Democrats More Favorable

Not surprisingly, the poll found that Democratic voters were more favorable to socialism than Republicans or independent voters, with just 32% of Democrats saying it wasn’t compatible with American values and 50% saying it was.

Among the Democratic candidates running for the 2020 nomination, only Sanders calls himself a socialist. Warren has rejected the term, saying she embraces capitalism with rules to protect the working class.

While campaigning in Iowa last weekend, Warren laughed when she was told Sanders would argue the only way to address authoritarianism and oligarchy is democratic socialism.

“I haven’t heard the speech yet, if that makes sense to you that that’s the only way,” she told reporters. “I’ll have to hear the speech.”

Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, another Democratic contender, said in an interview she rejects the label, favoring a free-market system that has improved “checks and balances” such as better antitrust enforcement.

“We are the Democratic Party and my own belief is that our nation is strong when we have an economy that works for everyone, and that means not stifling entrepreneurship,” she said.

A number of Senate Democrats said Sanders is free to detail his own views on the matter, but some of the more moderate Democrats in the chamber had little to say. Senator Doug Jones, an Alabama Democrat who is the top target of Senate Republicans in 2020, said only that “I am not a socialist” when asked about Sanders’s planned remarks.

--With assistance from David Scheer and Shawn Donnan.

To contact the reporter on this story: Laura Litvan in Washington at llitvan@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Joe Sobczyk at jsobczyk@bloomberg.net, Max Berley, Laurie Asséo

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