Kshama Sawant, the only Socialist on the Seattle City Council, who hosted Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in Seattle some months ago, traveled to New York to stump for him April 9.
Sawant, a member of the Alternative Socialist Party, identifies with Sanders who describes himself as an avowed Democratic Socialist with the watchword “political revolution” as his main campaign slogan.
In a “Clinton v Sanders” New York proxy debate between supporters of Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Sanders, held at the Judson Memorial, a radical church on Washington Square in the Big Apple, opponents lined up in a vehement debate about their respective candidates’ positions, Slate.com reported. The panelists included among others, Sarah Leonard, senior editor at the Nation magazine, Jonathan Tasini, an activist, organizer and author of a book on Sanders, Sawant, Brian Lehrer, moderator and radio host, C. Virginia Fields, former Manhattan borough president and current president of the National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS, a Clinton supporter, and Michelle Goldberg, Slate commentator.
If Sawant’s support worked any magic for Sanders in Washington state, there’s no surety it will in New York State. But the Seattle politician has a loud presence within the socialist fold in the nation. This March 25, Sawant introduced Sanders at a mass rally in Safeco Field where 30,000 people came to hear the Democratic Socialist candidate from Vermont the day before Washington state voted in the Democratic presidential caucuses to give Sanders a whopping 72.7 percent over Clinton’s 27.1 percent, according to the official state elections website.
Writing in the Huffington Post on March 2, under the headline, “Bernie vs Hillary, What’s a Feminist to do?” Sawant argued fervently for Sanders. She sees women’s rights clashing with ‘corporate interests’ time and again, she said, even on issues such as $15 minimum wage where women council members voted for ‘sub-minimum’ wages most affecting women. “Do these women not consider themselves feminists? I think they do, though I won’t speak for them.”
She accused Clinton’s campaign of portraying her ascendance to the presidency as a logical next step toward greater gender equality. “Yet, instead of the expected coronation, Hillary Clinton has had a real fight on her hands from the self-proclaimed socialist from Vermont, and that turn of events has perhaps been most clearly reflected in young women’s enthusiastic support for Sanders.” And why?
“Why are establishment feminist icons on the defensive with young women?” Sawant posited, from Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schulz, the Democratic National Committee chair to Gloria Steinem, and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.”At the heart of the matter is the deep divide between the substance of women’s rights and the identity question of gender in this race,” Sawant maintains. “And the sticky problem facing Clinton defenders is the undeniable fact that Sanders’ platform and record are far more pro-woman.” She goes on to cite his “unwavering” commitment to reproductive rights, $15 minimum wage, and other issues. On the other hand, she like many on Sander’s side proclaim, “Hillary’s own political history reveals the hollowness of her expressed oneness with ordinary women.” She says Hillary Clinton championed then President Bill Clinton’s “gutting” of welfare funding in the 1990s, leading to a “deadly spiral of intergenerational poverty,” and also accuses her of obfuscating the stand that abortion ought to be “safe, legal and rare.”
“If the question is one of policy and not of identity, can there be any doubt that Bernie Sanders is the real feminist in this race?” Sawant proclaims, declaring that “Feminism, solidarity and socialism are interconnected and inseparable.”
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