Sanders Wins Indiana - and the Political Debate

Bernie Sanders Wins Indiana – and the Political Debate

https://ourfuture.org/20160504/207226 

Robert Borosage

 

Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Campaign for America's Future

Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist insurgent, won Indiana convincingly Tuesday night – 52.5 percent to 47.5 percent – over Hillary Clinton, the establishment moderate. This is a remarkable victory, a statement of the extent and scope of the Sanders surge.
Indiana is a Wonder bread state – Midwestern, centrist, largely white, religious. It gave us the blond and bland Evan Bayh, the former New Democrat governor and senator who thought Barack Obama was too liberal. Its current senators – Democrat Joe Donnelly and Republican Dan Coats – are centrists. Sanders has been already been counted out in the mainstream media. But young voters, liberals flooded into the polling booths and swept Sanders to victory. Picking up a net of five delegates, Sanders may not be winning his struggle against the delegate math, as the mainstream media keeps reminding us, but he is winning the political debate.
Sanders’ victory was completely overshadowed by Trump’s romp on the Republican side, which led Ted Cruz to “suspend” his campaign at the end of a sonorous, cliché-ridden, insufferably pompous concession speech. In both parties, insurgents took Indiana, and the party establishments lost. Suddenly the presumptive nominee of his party, Trump couldn’t rise to the occasion, but managed to say nice things about Cruz and his family while vowing to “go after Hillary.”

When Young People Don't Vote

by Duane Campbell

When young people don’t vote. The “Policy Experts”  Just Don’t Get It

I watched the Public Policy Institute  Sacramento Forum on the California Voter Turnout on January 23.  A series of speakers presented technical issues on why many Californians don’t vote- but they missed the big picture.

It is good that they studied the small issues, such as on-line voter registration.  However, as is clear, minority young people are not registering and voting at representative numbers.

The problem is that these young people have just completed 12 years of education in California schools where the curriculum and textbooks  tell that they don’t exist. The situation in California is as bad or worse than in Arizona and Texas. 

Latino and Asian American students have been absent from the curriculum since 1986. When the 48.72 % of students who are Latino , and the 11.5 % who are Asian do not see themselves as part of the community, as a part of  history,  for many their sense of self is marginalized.   Marginalization negatively impacts their connections with school, their success in school, and their commitment to  democratic institutions  such as voting and to a democratic society.

History classes  and textbooks  should help young people acquire and learn to use the skills, knowledge, and attitudes that will prepare them to be  find a good job and to be a competent and responsible  citizens, but they don’t.  

See here. https://sites.google.com/site/chicanodigital/home/why-california-students-do-not-know-chicano-history