If I Run (Bernie Sanders)
From Reader Supported News, by Bernie Sanders
et me take this opportunity to wish you a very happy holiday season and a wonderful new year.
Whenever I am asked about running for president in 2020, I answer that if I am the best candidate to beat Donald Trump, then I will probably run. That is the truth.
If that happens, the political, financial and media elite of this country will stop at nothing to defeat us. You know that. We’ve lived through it together once before. Our ideas terrify them. So what they will do is try to divide us up with attacks — some old, some new — and our political opponents will spend obscene sums of money on ads to defeat us.
I just did not expect the attack ads to begin before I even made a decision. But they have…
Right now, a group of Wall Street Democrats known as the Third Way is running ads in early primary states — Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada — calling me out by name and saying our ideas, like Medicare for all, are a path to defeat in 2020.
They not only want to discourage or defeat a Sanders candidacy, they want to make sure that the progressive agenda is not advanced by anyone. They want us to go back to their failed corporate approach which has led to a massive level of income and wealth inequality, a bloated military budget and a failure to address the crises of climate change, a broken criminal justice system and inhumane immigration policies.
Last time we ran, we made the financial elite pay a price for their attacks on our progressive agenda. It is just as important we do it again today.
Our agenda terrifies the political and financial establishment of this country.