The Bernie Sanders campaign is promising that its candidate will come out swinging against “unfettered capitalism” in an upcoming debate with former Vice President Joe Biden.
Campaign manager Faiz Shakir says the June 27 Democratic presidential nomination debate will allow Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders to highlight “the social ills that result from corporate greed,” he told Vanity Fair in an article published Thursday.
Democratic 2020 U.S. presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders attends a campaign event at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., U.S. June 12, 2019. REUTERS/Carlos Barria
“The debate is an opportunity for Senator Sanders to explain how his vision is different from everybody else’s, and one of the things you’ll see is unfettered capitalism having its reckoning,” Shakir promised.
Sanders was leading the huge pack of Democratic presidential candidates until Biden entered the race and immediately became the front-runner. Even before he officially announced his candidacy, Biden had declared himself the “most progressive” Democrat running for president. Shakir says Sanders has to show that he’s the most progressive. (RELATED: Sanders: ‘Corporate’ Democrats Are ‘Anybody But Bernie’)
Former vice president and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden speaks during a campaign event on June 11, 2019 in Davenport, Iowa. (Joshua Lott/Getty Images)
“How do people intend to deal with the social ills that result from corporate greed? And if your idea is, ‘Well, we just need to strike a middle-ground compromise and tweak at the margins and work with the private sector to try to do nice things for people’—we’ve tried that, and it has failed,” Shakir told Vanity Fair.
Despite moving to the left on issues like the pro-abortion Hyde Amendment, which he now opposes, Biden has a long history as a senator from Delaware backing very conservative policies from traditional marriage to the 1994 “three strikes” crime bill, which he authored, to working with southern Democrats who are anathema to the party today. Shakir says Sanders will highlight those inconsistencies without getting personal. (RELATED: The Key To Winning In 2020 Will Be Properly Explaining Socialism, Says Bernie Sanders)
“He’s not going to engage in mudslinging, but there are at least four areas where he’s raised policy disagreements with Joe Biden: the Iraq war, trade deals, climate change, health care. Tepid middle-ground status quo politics is failing the American public. We’ll see that play out in the debate.”