Bernie Sanders on Late Show With Stephen Colbert

Sanders on Late Night

Bernie Sanders was on the Late Show With Stephen Colbert on Friday. Colbert did a great job of introducing the interview earlier in the show, which is well worth watching if you only watched the actual interview. He joked about Sanders’ surprising success in the nomination battle, declaring this the most shocking upset of Hillary Clinton since the last time it happened to her. A couple of other jokes in this segment:

Bernie Sanders popularity is surprising because he’s a self-described socialist, who would also be our oldest president ever. The man is 74-years-old. That’s five years older than Donald Trump and 50 years older than anyone Trump would marry.

Sanders had 27,500 in the sport arena in Los Angeles In August, 11,000 in Phoenix, 28,000 in Portland on a Sunday. A guy in his 70s filling stadiums? Who does he think he is, a Rolling Stone?

And the actual interview:

Bernie Sanders explained his meteoric rise in the Democratic race:

“I knew we had a message that would resonate with the American people. This is the wealthiest country in the history of the world, yet almost all of the income and wealth is going to the top one percent, and people do not feel good about that,” Sanders said of his rise. “At a time where we’re seeing more millionaires and billionaires, we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any other major country on Earth. We are the only major wealthy country that doesn’t guarantee health care to all people, family and medical leave, paid sick time, paid vacation time, and people are asking, ‘Why?'”

Colbert asked Sanders about being a self-proclaimed socialist and a liberal, asking him why he didn’t accept these terms as the insults they were meant to be. Sanders explained his views, and also explained why he would make a strong candidate in the general election:

“If you look at the polls at me running against the Republicans, despite the fact that 20, 30, 40 percent of the people don’t know who I am or what I am fighting for, we do almost as well and in some cases better than Hillary Clinton does today, and that will only get better in the future,” Mr. Sanders said.

He added that “Republicans win when voter turnout is low” and that, through the crowds and excitement he sees his campaign building, he has the ability to not just take back the White House but recapture the Senate as well.

Sanders was especially critical of Donald Trump’s xenophobia and racism:

I think that what Trump is doing is appealing to the baser instincts among us: xenophobia and, frankly, racism. [He’s] describing an entire group of people (in this case Mexicans) as rapists or as criminals… That’s the same old thing that’s gone on in this country for a very long time. You target some group of people, and you go after them. You take people’s anger, and you turn it against them—you win votes on it. I think that is disgraceful and not something we should be doing in 2015.

What I am talking about is a vision that goes beyond telling us we have to hate a group of people. What I am talking about is saying that, in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, there are extraordinary things that we can do when people come together—black and white and gay and straight—and demand the government start working for all of us—not just a few.

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