Is Sonoma County ready for Bernie?

Last week, hundreds of grassroots meet-ups for Bernie Sanders for President were held from coast to coast, with nearly 100,000 participants registered to confer on how to get Senator Bernie Sanders to be the Democratic Party nominee for the presidency. These live-stream meet-ups are sponsored by the ‘Bernie for President’ campaign and PDA (Progressive Democrats of America). This is an unprecedented level of civic engagement at this early stage of the nominating process. The local meeting at the Wine Bar Annex was packed to capacity. The enthusiastic audience clapped and cheered as they drank fine wine from the bar. It felt like a progressive tent revival meeting.

My shared excitement at the prospect of a truly transformational primary contest has renewed my faith in my fellow citizens. Watching a real-deal progressive like Bernie take on the corporate money system will be far more interesting than enduring another quadrennial Beltway horse race, focused on polls and campaign donation numbers and the utterly shameless daily manufactured Faux News mini-scandals. My personal goal, which I shared at the first in the county 2016 primary event that I initiated at the invitation of PDA, is to have the Sonoma Valley (1st Supervisory District) vote in Bernie as #1 in the Democratic primary.

Sanders is on track to change the dynamic of the 2016 campaign. This is the best opportunity we have had in many decades to insert progressive discourse into the public arena. We are energized by having a standard bearer like Bernie Sanders who can be supported straight-up without a lot of reservations and caveats.

Members of Bernie Sanders campaign see this as a golden opportunity to reserve a seat at the adult table for progressive values and to promote the progressive agenda. The conventional mainstream media political spread, which is on display on every Sunday political talk show, ranges from centrist Democrats to establishment Republicans, with the recent addition of Tea Party Republicans on the right end of the spectrum. Our goal is to add progressive Democrats to the mix, which is a more accurate depiction of actual U.S. politics.

This is also a great opportunity to build out a larger and more robust citizens action network. As Senator Sanders has stressed repeatedly, we are the change we’ve been looking for. He states that we need a political revolution in this country, which will only be achieved through co-creating a culture of civic engagement. This could be a lot of fun!