Bernie Sanders appeals to white Progressives. That much is obvious.<\/p>\n
But not all Progressives are lining up behind him. Notably, those fighting for racial justice under the #BlackLivesMatter banner<\/a> have targeted him and he finds himself far behind Clinton and even trailing yet-to-be-running Biden in South Carolina, where\u00a055 percent of the voters are black.<\/p>\n In a recent column in the New York Times, Charles M. Blow explores Sanders\u2019 lack of appeal with black voters<\/a>. There he writes that \u201cAn August\u00a0Gallup Poll<\/a>\u00a0found that Hillary Clinton\u2019s favorability among African-Americans was 80 percent, while Sanders\u2019s was 23 percent.\u201d And even more disturbing, \u00a0\u201cTwo-thirds of blacks were unfamiliar with Sanders.\u201d<\/p>\n Disturbing as that might be, it\u2019s both understandable and correctable.<\/p>\n As I drove two\u00a0weeks ago from my home in Helena, MT to Missoula where I teach, I listened to an NPR story about the potential candidacy of \u00a0Joe Biden<\/a>.<\/strong> There, Rachel Martin and Mara Liasson discuss the \u201cantiestablishment fever that\u2019s been sweeping the Democratic Party base\u201d while failing to mention the person at the vanguard of that fever.\u00a0Liasson even, quite gallingly, says of a potential Biden candidacy that,\u00a0\u201cThere are many Democrats who think it would be good for Hillary Clinton because she\u2019d have a serious opponent, and it would help her become a better candidate.\u201d<\/p>\n Really, no serious opponent<\/em>? But my jaw didn\u2019t really drop until I heard her next line: \u201cRight now, she\u2019s basically running against herself and her problems.\u201d<\/p>\n If NPR, a\u00a0supposed bastion of left-leaning thought, can have a nearly 5-minute discussion of the Democratic presidential race without so much as mentioning Sanders, we have a problem.<\/p>\n While NPR here simply ignored Sanders, other media stories have\u00a0merely noted his name\u00a0or ridiculed him as an impossible outsider, a\u00a0socialist<\/em>, and as appealing only to his own existing fan-base (which is, if we can judge by crowds at his speeches, rather huge).<\/p>\n In order to counter this apparent laziness by the media, Sanders is going to need to go directly to the people he wants to reach and prove to them that he understands their problems and can help as President. I watched his talk this week at Liberty University as an outstanding example of his failure\u00a0to do just that.<\/strong> From the outset he is perfectly honest about who he is and where he likely differs from the students of Liberty U, but he moves on too quickly to what he believes to be\u00a0a powerful common interest: the injustice of the extraordinary inequality in our country. I have no doubt that Christian conservatives dislike extreme inequality, but in general they just don\u2019t think it\u2019s the government\u2019s responsibility to remedy that, and nothing in Sanders\u2019s speech is likely to convince them otherwise.<\/p>\n Writers at Religion Dispatches posted two responses to the speech.<\/strong> In one, Sarah Posner lauds Sanders<\/a> for breaking out of the Democratic \u201cfaith outreach\u201d mold. Her analysis is spot on and it shows his ability \u2013 or at least willingness to try \u2013 to find common ground with people who might be tempted to ignore or oppose him. \u00a0Daniel Schultz gives Sanders a B- (or Solid C, according to the URL) for religious outreach<\/a>, wishing that Sanders had done more digging through scripture in making his case for economic equality.<\/p>\n I agree. Bernie made connections with the students, but only ever so briefly, and only to then move on to his central message of\u00a0economic\u00a0inequality. His fans there, and perhaps some of the Liberty U students, cheered loudly at times, but he probably didn\u2019t connect with anyone that didn\u2019t already generally agree with his progressive politics.<\/p>\n