David Brooks sneers at Bernie Sanders: "He doesn't get the working class"

Other people Sanders doesn't get, according to Brooks: suburbanites, Latinos, African-Americans

Published July 13, 2015 3:25PM (EDT)

  (C-Span)
(C-Span)

David Brooks took his lazy thinking from the New York Times op-ed page to his sweet Friday night gig on the PBS "NewsHour," where he dismissed Bernie Sanders and the progressive movement.

According to Brooks, Sanders doesn't get the working class, suburban voters, African-Americans or Latinos. He is, he suggests, a poster child for college-town liberalism.

Here are his comments:

Well, it is and always has been a university crowd left in this country, a progressive element at our many fine universities. And he's playing to that element.

But that element is not big. It's not even big within the Democratic Party. He doesn't get the working class. He doesn't get the suburban voter. He doesn't, by and large, get African-American and Latino voters. So there is a huge ceiling on what he can do.

And for Hillary Clinton to be fearing him strikes me as wrongheaded. She's still the overwhelming favorite, no matter how big of crowds he can get in university towns. Second, she has to be aware that she lives in a country where people are quite suspicious of government, more suspicious of government than they are business.

And, in my view, on substantive grounds aside, just political grounds, if she goes over and seems like a very conventional big government liberal, it is going to be much easier for any Republican to run against her, because this is not a country that is sanguine about government power.

Watch the entire clip below. The Sanders discussion comes near the nine-minute mark. It's worth it for the condescending lilt in his voice as he says "many fine universities."


By Salon Staff

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