Bernie Sanders: What is old is new again....

by Christian Schneider | In My Opinion

There's a hot new name in politics, and the kids are lining up to see his road show. When this up-and-comer graces a stage in your town, be sure to pick up your tickets quickly because they're going fast.

It just so happens that this scintillating new face, Bernie Sanders, is a 73-year-old socialist preaching from a populist playbook written well before these young voters' grandparents were born.

Politics, of course, is cyclical. Think of the music business — every few years an act comes along and takes advantage of all the young fans who aren't old enough to remember a virtually identical act just a few years before. One Direction fans are too young for the Backstreet Boys and N*Sync, whose fans are too young for New Kids on the Block. Miley is simply the natural progression from Madonna to Britney to Gaga to Katy Perry. For every emerging generation, it's all brand-new, as if nobody has ever mastered this formula before.

That's why the younger you are, the more likely you are to "Feel the Bern" in 2015. A July Economist/YouGov poll found Sanders dead even with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination among 18- to 29-year-olds. The frumpy septuagenarian has 1.3 million followers on Facebook — fewer than Donald Trump, who has 3.4 million, but still more than Hillary Clinton, who has been in the public eye for a quarter century.

And while Sanders first held elective office 34 years ago — longer than many of his supporters have been alive — they somehow see him as a political outsider. And in an election replete with Trumps and Carsons and Fiorinas on the right, being an "outsider" fighting against Washington, D.C., is worth more than a dozen Koch brothers.

But running against D.C. is as old of a gimmick as it gets. Similarly, Sanders' populist rhetoric far predates even his existence on this Earth. His desire to get money out of politics, tax the rich and regulate big business has strong roots in the populist movements of the late 19th century. In the 1890s, the federal government was widely believed to have been irreparably corrupted by moneyed interests working against blue-collar workers and farmers. This type of public sentiment played a strong role in the formation of the Progressive movement in Wisconsin around the turn of the century.

Read the rest of his crap here:

http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/bernie-sanders-what-is-old-is-new-again-b99568697z1-323782301.html