Why Liberals Separate Race from Class

[kwassa]

86. and here is the rest of Bernie's problem, from today's NYT.

But while Mr. Sanders went out of his way at both stops to reach out to black leaders, the thousands of people who came to hear him bellow, “We are going to end institutional racism,” as he did here on Saturday night, were overwhelmingly white.

And that poses a problem. If Mr. Sanders, who is climbing in polls and attracting the largest crowds of the campaign, hopes to broaden his support and be more than a footnote in the story of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s road to the Democratic nomination, he must demonstrate a capacity to draw support from African-American voters. And that is likely to require a more targeted effort here in South Carolina.

South Carolina “could be up for grabs if Secretary Clinton is overconfident and thinks that the African-American community will just support her, and especially if Senator Sanders continues to show his commitment and interest in the community,” Earl Simmons, a senior pastor at the Maple Creek Missionary Baptist Church in Greer, said after the private meeting in Greenville.

But Mr. Sanders gives essentially the same populist speech wherever he goes, whether his audience members are Iowan or South Carolinian, black or white.

Mr. Sanders said in an interview after an event in Sumter on Saturday that African-Americans “should vote for me” because they would benefit from his war on income inequality and because of his civil rights record. Asked if he needed to hit issues of racial justice harder, Mr. Sanders referred testily to a passage on criminal justice reform in his hour-and-15-minute stump speech: “What do you think I just spent 15 minutes talking about?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/23/us/politics/a-shift-in-tone-as-bernie-sanders-speaks-on-criminal-justice-in-south-carolina.html?_r=0