'Straight-up BS': Democratic leader attacks Bernie Sanders' election criticism | US elections 2024

As Democrats mourned their presidential election loss to Donald Trump, the party leader risked deepening already-growing divisions by rebuking left-leaning Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders for saying Democrats “have working-class people in the United States.” Left in the lurch.”

“This is complete nonsense,” Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison said Thursday. “(Joe) Biden was the most pro-worker president of my lifetime — saving union pensions, creating millions of good-paying jobs and even marching on a picket line.”

Harrison also defended Kamala Harris, the vice president who lost the election to Trump, for proposing policies that would have “fundamentally transformed the quality of life and closed the racial wealth gap for working people in this country.”

He said, “From child tax credits to $25,000 for a down payment on a home to Medicare covering the cost of health care for seniors in their homes.” There are many post-election settings, and this one is not good.”

Such words appeared to draw a chilly reception in Vermont, where Sanders was re-elected Tuesday to a fourth six-year term in the Senate, at the end of which he will be 89 years old.

Sanders runs as an independent but caucuses with Democrats and ran for the party's presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020. In doing so, he posed major challenges to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and was very popular with progressive voters.

As Harris gave her concession speech in Washington on Wednesday, her party continued to digest defeats in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, the Rust Belt “blue wall” states that have now gone for Trump in his two presidential victories, despite Biden she won in 2020.

At the same time, Sanders made a detailed statement.

“It should come as no surprise that a Democratic Party that has failed the working class is finding that the working class has failed them,” Sanders said.

“First it was the white working class, and now it's Latino and black workers too. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they are right.

“While the super-rich are doing phenomenally well today, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and we have more income and wealth inequality than ever before. Incredibly, the real, inflation-adjusted weekly wages of the average American worker are actually lower today than they were 50 years ago.

“Despite explosive growth in technology and labor productivity, many young people today will have worse living standards than their parents. And many of them fear that artificial intelligence and robotics will make the bad situation even worse.

“Although we now spend far more per capita than other countries, we remain the only wealthy nation that does not guarantee health care for all as a human right, and we pay by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. We are the only country among major countries that cannot even guarantee paid family and medical leave.”

Sanders also condemned US funding and support of Israel in its “total war against the Palestinian people.”

The question is whether “the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party” “learn real lessons” or “understand the pain and political alienation” of millions of Americans or “have any idea how we can deal with it.” “. “The ever more powerful oligarchy that has so much… power,” Sanders concluded sharply.

“Probably not.”

Harrison has reportedly decided not to continue as DNC chairman, but his rejection of Sanders' statement sparked anger of his own, including from reporter and columnist Glenn Greenwald.

“You and the corporatist and militarist party you lead have just turned your asses off in the United States because Americans see that all you care about is enriching yourself at the bottom of the corporate lobby,” Greenwald wrote. “If the humiliation you just suffered doesn’t lead to humility and self-reflection, nothing will happen.”

Elsewhere, a political historian's claim that Democrats should have listened to Sanders spread quickly on social media, with videos viewed millions of times.

“One of the things that Bernie Sanders has been saying since at least 2014 is that the Democratic Party … needs to talk about bread-and-butter issues,” Leah Wright Rigueur, an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said CNN.

In Tuesday's exit polls, fundamental issues such as inflation and the cost of living took center stage in the election, giving Trump a clear victory over Vice President Kamala Harris.

“A lot of people attacked him for that and said, 'Are you saying that cultural policy doesn't matter?' He didn't say that. He said, 'We need to focus on these things.'”

As of midday Thursday, a video of Rigueur's remarks had been viewed more than 6.5 million times on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

Read more of the Guardian's coverage of the 2024 US election