Fidel Castro, whom the Republicans could make Bernie Sanders’ running mate
By all reasonable measurements, Bernie Sanders‘ promised “political revolution” has not happened. Probably the two best such measurements — Democratic primary voter turnout, and Sanders’ share of the black and Latino primary vote — vividly demonstrate this. Instead, however, another type of revolution was associated with Bernie Sanders this week: Fidel Castro‘s revolution in Cuba.
On Wednesday, at the Univision Democratic presidential debate aired by CNN, Univision moderator Marina Elena Salinas played a video (now on YouTube) from 1985 showing Sanders praising Fidel Castro’s takeover and rule of Cuba.
For some Democratic voters and others, the Sanders Castro tape, and similar elements of his socialist background, raised fears of what the Republicans would do to Sanders in a general election, if Sanders were the nominee. As Jordan Brown, a veteran of John Kerry‘s 2004 presidential campaign, wrote in a Huffington Post piece earlier this month:
I believe that, if Bernie were the nominee, he would face a horror show that would make “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” look like a matinée. I worked for John Kerry in 2004. He was a Vietnam war hero, a distinguished Senator, a great mind on foreign policy, who was running against a president who had limped into office in one of the most controversial elections in our history, and was presiding over a deeply unpopular war that most of the public believed by then to be baseless. And Kerry was sunk by a few tens of millions of dollars of fictional ads. At first, the campaign didn’t even respond because the ads were so insane, so beyond the norms. The Koch brothers have said they would spend $900 million to win this election. They wouldn’t need $100 million of it to do the same type of smear campaign to Bernie.
