Bernie Sanders bounces as health scare fades
By Gregory Krieg, Annie Grayer and Ryan Nobles, CNN, November 14, 2019
Des Moines, Iowa (CNN)Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez capped her debut on the Iowa hustings in support of Bernie Sanders last week with a blunt call to action.
"This is not about something that we allow to happen to us. We don't let this race happen to us," she said at a rally for the Vermont senator in Council Bluffs. "We don't watch the presidential race. This is not a movie, this a movement."
And yet, there has been a certain cinematic quality to the last six weeks of Sanders' second Democratic presidential campaign. Nearly sidelined, or worse, by a heart attack in Las Vegas on the first night of October, Sanders has charted a remarkable revival. It's been powered by a run of invigorating endorsements, new poll results that showed him gaining steam in New Hampshire and Iowa, and the sense -- fueled in part by the massive crowds that welcomed him during recent rallies in New York and Minnesota -- that his "political revolution" was, after a trying summer, back on the march.
There are also, as Sanders joked following his Saturday climate summit in Des Moines, the stents to thank.
"I've got three arteries that are working right now -- that's pretty good," he deadpanned, while practicing mid-range jumpers on a basketball court at Drake University. "Better than one blocked artery, so I'm feeling really good."
His supporters and staff are saying much of the same. The backing of Ocasio-Cortez, along with fellow "squad" members Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, news of which broke before and during the most recent debate last month in Ohio, bolstered an argument that Sanders has been making for months -- that his campaign is steadily attracting a racially diverse, young and working class coalition ready to make an unapologetic case for his democratic socialist vision.
Democratic voters, too, have made it clear that Sanders remains front of mind as the primary season approaches.
About two weeks after the debate, a CNN poll of Democrats in New Hampshire showed Sanders with a narrow lead over the emerging top tier of candidates, with 21% to Sen. Elizabeth Warren's 18%. Former Vice President Joe Biden came in at 15%, and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, placed fourth with 10%. No one else touched double digits. Recent surveys of Democrats in Iowa show the same group jockeying, mostly within the margin of statistical error, for the top position.
A durable candidate
For an elected leader famously disinclined to discuss his own inner life, and whose campaign slogan -- "Not me, us" -- is both a comment on his view of politics and a criticism of how its practice is covered by the press, Sanders wry assessment of his arterial functions felt like a revolution in its own right. "Bernie's back," as his campaign puts it, but the person at the center of it all seems just a little bit different. As if he's been freed, finally, to return the embrace of an increasingly influential leftist movement -- the largest the country has seen in nearly a century -- that has vaulted him to within a relative whisper of the White House.
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