Bernie Sanders Calls Out ‘Failed’ Democratic Party Agenda [Video]

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders apparently believes that the agenda of the Democratic Party has been an “ultimate failure.”

An independent socialist who ran for president as a Democrat and waged an unsuccessful primary contest against Hillary Clinton, Sanders expressed these sentiments in an interview with Sam Stein of the Huffington Post this week. In the U.S. Senate, he caucuses with the Democrats, which means that he votes with them most of the time.

Sanders, who endorsed Clinton on July 12, 2016, in New Hampshire, has been making speaking appearances in several red states recently and heads to West Virginia next week as part of his effort to win back Trump voters to the progressive column.

A vocal critic of President Trump before, during, and after Election 2016, Sanders made the former New York real estate mogul feel the Bern in the Huff Post interview by describing him as a phony, a liar, a demagogue, and someone who is supposedly seeking to advance an extremist agenda.

Sen. Sanders acknowledged, however, that he is willing to support Trump’s infrastructure rebuild if a spending bill is crafted to his satisfaction. In the past, he has indicated a willingness to work with the president on bringing down prescription drug prices.

Sanders didn’t mince words about the Democrats’ electoral failures either, Breitbart News reported.

“The truth is, and I think anyone who objectively assesses the situation has to appreciate, that the model the Democrats have followed for the last 10 to 20 years has been an ultimate failure. That’s just the objective evidence. We are taking on a right-wing extremist party whose agenda is opposed time after time, issue after issue, by the vast majority of the American people. Yet we have lost the White House, the U.S. House, the U.S. Senate, almost two-thirds of the governors’ chairs and close to 900 legislative seats all over this country. How can anybody not conclude that the Democratic agenda and approach has been a failure?”

Trump himself was a Democrat and independent before running for president on the GOP ticket as an America First populist, which prompted opposition to his candidacy from many establishment Republicans and Never Trump conservatives.

There may be some cognitive dissonance in Sanders’ remarks about voters supporting Democratic ideas but voting Republican. Watch the interview embedded below, however, and draw your own conclusions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJUN4TORNFU

In January Sanders suggested that the Democratic Party, given its primarily bicoastal power base, stopped listening to its traditional middle/working class constituency, including rural voters, in favor of selling out to big-monied interests, and that led to its defeat at the hands of Donald Trump. Parenthetically, some critics in the U.K. have leveled similar criticism about the politics of the London-centric Labor Party and its opposition to Brexit, among other things.

Later that month, Sanders praised Trump for taking on and defeating both the Republican and Democratic establishment as well as the mainstream media establishment on his way to the White House.

“That is an extraordinary accomplishment. And it talks about perseverance; it talks about very strong political instincts. It talks about a way to connect with people. So, I give, you know, Donald Trump his due. And I think any fair-minded person has got to,” he said at a nationally televised town hall at George Washington University broadcast by CNN.

A foe of income inequality and the one-percent elite, Bernie Sanders, 75, has been a member of Congress since 1991 (and a U.S. senator since 2007) and voted for most of the Obama agenda over the previous eight years. Prior to his election to the U.S. House, Bernie Sanders served eight years as the mayor of Burlington, Vermont.

Author Ed Klein, who claims that Hillary Clinton will seek a rematch with Trump in 2020, has also said that he doubts Bernie Sanders wants to run again for president.

Bernie Sanders will be pushing age 80 by the next presidential election, and is more interested in pushing the Democratic Party into a more progressive direction as his true-believing forces try to take state-by-state control of the Democrat organizational apparatus, according to Klein.

[Featured Image by Carolyn Kaster/AP Images]