USA Today: Iowa activists welcome Bernie Sanders to race [View all]

[Omaha Steve]

Last edited Fri May 1, 2015, 10:01 AM - Edit history (1)

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. arrives at a town hall meeting on Dec. 16, 2014, in Ames, Iowa. (Charlie Neibergall, AP)

http://onpolitics.usatoday.com/2015/04/30/bernie-sanders-iowa/

By Jennifer Jacobs 16 hours ago

On one recent Iowa visit, Bernie Sanders showed he’s the kind of presidential contender who’s perfectly comfortable speaking at a podium that’s actually an overturned milk crate on a tabletop.

Sanders, a no-frills man of the people, will be welcome in the presidential race because he’s so sincere about his ideas for making working-class Americans’ lives better, some Iowa Democratic activists said Thursday. It’s possible the Vermont second-term U.S. senator can become a real contender here — and peel away votes from frontrunner Hillary Clinton — if he can explain himself to enough voters, they said.

Instead of dwelling on “Canadian birth certificates and pants suits,” Sanders gets to the heart of problems that bog down the national economy, said Ken Sagar, president of the Iowa AFL-CIO.

“All the labeling about, ‘Oh, he’s a left-wing person’ — if you just set that aside for a second and listen to him talk about the issues, a lot of the stuff he talks about is pretty important,” Sagar told The Des Moines Register Thursday morning. “If you’re a Republican, you have kids who have student loan debt, too. If you’re an independent, you’re worried about retirement, too.”

FULL story at link.