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Working Families Party Endorses Bernie Sanders For President
By
Emma Whitford
Published Dec 9, 2015
Modified Dec 9, 2015
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By
Emma Whitford
Published Dec 9, 2015
Modified Dec 9, 2015
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The progressive Working Families Party has officially endorsed Vermont Senator and Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders for President.
"We want to live in a nation that allows all people to live a decent life, no matter what is in their parents' bank account or who is in their family tree," WFP National Director Dan Cantor said in a statement. "That's why we're standing with Bernie Sanders to build the political revolution and make our nation into one where every family can thrive."
Working Families has chapters in 10 states. The Times Union reports that the party's New York chapter based its endorsement on an online poll that turned back 87.4% in favor of Sanders.
But the endorsement was not entirely uncomplicated—as the NY Times points out, Mayor de Blasio, a Hillary supporter, is a "close associate" of the party.
One high-up union director, Mike McGuire of the Mason Tenders District Council, told the paper that WFP officials “rigged the system to make sure it went for Bernie," and WFP co-founder Bertha Lewis said, “I thought the most revolutionary act that we could possibly do was to finally put a woman in the White House.”
“Bernie has devoted his career to helping working families and is gratified by the support of the Working Families Party,” Sanders’s campaign manager, Jeff Weaver said in a statement. “Together they will work to take on the billionaire class and change the rigged economy that is being held up by a corrupt political system.”
The "Bern" has undeniably been felt in Brooklyn—“He’s the only candidate that when he opens his mouth to say something, my first thought isn’t immediately bullshit," Mannequin Pussy’s Marisa Dabice recently told us—and Bernie campaigners are never far from a Fight For $15 rally. But, as of November, the presidential hope-against-hopeful had only been endorsed by two labor unions—National Nurses United and the US Postal Workers Union. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, has racked up endorsements from unions representing more than half of the country's 14.6 million unionized workers.
As our own Native New Yorker columnist recently put it, "He will never, ever win." Why not?
Not because America is not prepared to elect a socialist, or because Hillary has raised three times more money, or is crushing him in the polls by 25 or 30 points, or that she has cajoled or blackmailed almost all of the institutional Democratic support, including, as of today, our own Sandinista mayor. Certainly not because Hillary will arrange to have murdered any person or group of people that stand in her way on this, her final chance to win the presidency.
No, it's because Americans find New Yorkers, particularly New Yorkers with big honking Flatbush accents, annoying in the extreme.
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bernie sanders
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Emma Whitford
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