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BERNIE_JIVE

                                             July 10, 2018


A full year after the 2017 polls showed Bernie Sanders
immense popularity, including among black people,
a "Bernie can't talk Black" story was going around:

I first saw Andrew Tannenbaum's version at electoral-vote.com:

   "Sanders and Harris Make Gaffes"                                 [link]

   "Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was in Jackson, MS, last week to
   honor the 50th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King
   Jr. Given his problems with black voters, going there was a
   smart move. In his remarks, he criticized the Democratic
   Party's business model, which made a bad impression on many of
   the people in attendance, who see Sanders still focused on
   economic issues (including the Party's reliance on wealthy
   donors), almost to the exclusion of the issue of racial
   justice, which is front and center with many black voters. In
   short, if Sanders runs in the 2020 primaries, he may be wiped
   out in the South (again) because about half the Democratic
   primary voters there are black and he still doesn't 'get it'
   from their point of view."

A few things are interesting about this: where Bernie Sanders is
concerned, it's apparently a "gaffe" for him to say the same
things he always does (you might call that "being consistent").

I went looking for some more details about what Bernie
said and who it supposedly annoyed....

At an MLK anniversary event, Sanders said something
critical about the Obama administration: Democrats lost
a lot of state legislature seats.  No one denies that
this is true, but there's supposed to be something
terrible about criticizing Obama at an MLK event...

The CNN story says:              [link]

    "Sanders' insistence on framing inequality as a chiefly economic
    matter, with racial concerns existing downstream from that core
    divide, effectively downplays the fight for racial justice."

                                                                    [link]
Over at the New York Times, The headline tells us:

  "Bernie Sanders Courts Black Voters
  Anew. But an Obama Reference Stings."

So, someone felt stung?  But If you
read far down in the story you learn:

  "Few in the audience responded adversely, many of them having
  witnessed firsthand the decline of the state and local party."

So who complained?  Well, the NYT quotes some
"tweets" from Jeffrey Wright and Imani Gandy.
And there's a buzzfeed story with some tweets
from ex-Obama staffers...  That's *it*.  The       That's almost as
whole story is "some people on twitter were        inane as "Trump said
*outraged*!"                                       something stupid
                                                   today" news.

The buzzfeed story has the headline:
                                                 [link]
  "Bernie Sanders' Revolution
  Needs Black Voters To Win. But
  Can He Talk To Them?"

Just going by polling data, the
answer would seem to be "hell yeah".


                           BERNIE_HAS_NO_BLACK_PROBLEM



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