Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

How Bernie trumps Hillary

They’re both very old – but he’s retro

‘Anybody here got any student debt?’ asks Bernie Sanders halfway through his speech at a rally in a small university on Monday. He then starts conducting a fake auction. ‘What are some of the numbers you got? You? 35,000. You? 55,000? Who else? A young lady here… 100,000 dollars. You win! I don’t know what you win, but you win!’ The students all hoot and chant. ‘Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!’ Sanders cracks an avuncular smile, then starts talking again about how rich the rich are.

It’s hard not to like Sanders. It’s hard not to ‘Feel the Bern’, as the mantra goes. He is 74 years old, and angry at the injustice of the world in a lovable old-codger way. The kids like that. The combination of his age and his affability, more than anything else, is the reason he is beating Hillary Clinton in the race for the Democratic Nomination. It’s why he trounced her in New Hampshire on Tuesday. Clinton, 68, is also old. But people don’t like her. She can’t match Bernie’s retro appeal.

Bernie is a socialist progressive, yes, but he’s old-school. Young people compete to sound Bernier-than-thou. Jamal, a twenty-something half-Libyan from Vermont, takes pride in telling me that he first heard Sanders speak when he was ten years old, at a reggae festival. ‘This guy was talking about legalising weed and stuff,’ he says. ‘And I was like, wow, this guy is something else.’

Sanders’s appeal is enhanced by an -ironic appreciation of his outdatedness. His politics are so unmodern it is funny. He doesn’t do spin, not in the 1990s Clinton-Blair sense, and he would never dream of occupying the -centre ground. He has been raging against the same monsters — Wall Street! The corporations! The military–industrial complex! Big Pharma! — for more than 50 years, and he’s still going.

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