The 2016 campaign is under way –
Hillary Clinton: "I'm running for president"
– and it's pretty clear who's leading in internet sharing.
So how do you become the president of the internet?
Well, you say what you think, and you give no f***s about the consequences.
George Stephanopoulous:"I can hear the Republican attack ad right now – 'he wants America
to look more Scandanavia.'"
Sanders: "And what's wrong with that?
In those countries, health care is a right of all people, in those countries college
education, graduate school is free.
Retirement benefits, childcare are stronger than in the United States of America."
Bernie Sanders is running as a democrat, but he's really like a Scandanavian social democrat.
Not a USSR socialist.
But he's a guy who believes that free markets should be really sharply curtailed by expensive
public services.
Even if it means very high tax rates.
There's not that many politicians who stand up for this so frankly.
Or who don't really care about raising money from rich people.
Sanders: "This great nation and its government belong to all of the people, and not to a
handful of billionaires."
And the public really does agree with a lot of his positions.
People are with him on labor law reform.
They're with him on raising the minimum wage.
They agree with him that the rich pay too little in federal taxes.
And Sanders is the guy who launched a one-man filibuster to try to stop the Bush tax cuts.
Sanders: "...giving tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires who don't need it."
There's even a new poll indicating that over 50% of likely voters might agree with Sanders
about the merits of a completely government run health care system.
Still, Sanders isn't quite poised to capture the White House.
So even if relatively few Americans agree with all of Sanders' views, they agree strongly
enough to like it all on Facebook, to upvote it all on reddit.
Six months ago, if Bernie Sanders had started talking about free college tuition, nobody
would have covered it.
But because people saw how much enthusiasm there was about some of his earlier statements,
lots of people, Vox.com and every website I know, wrote about it.
The American party system is unusual around the world.
We have just two parties representing over 300 million people.
Canada has about a tenth that population, but there are five parties in its parliament.
Israel's tiny but they have 10 parties in their legislature.
Sanders: "People are frustrated and angry about a two party system which is dominated
by big money, and which does not pay attention to the needs of working people, or elderly
people, or poor people."
This is how Bernie Sanders is winning the internet.
He's not speaking in the bland, lowest common denominator model of most presidential candidates.
He's like a third party candidate, who just happens to be running inside the Democratic
party.
Which is literally what he's doing.