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Letter: Bernie Sanders would make best president
Op-Ed · September 18, 2014


Sen. Tom Harkin’s 37th and final steak fry is over and in paraphrase of it being time to fish in place of just endlessly cutting bait; it’s time to stop the grilling and to bite into some red meat.


Iowa Public Television’s series on the remarkable members of Roosevelt family, Teddy, Eleanor and FDR) well reflected back into times in which our nation most needed in the White House leaders of great vision, determination and compassion for common people — this as much as any time since that of Abe Lincoln and his leading the Union to keep from perishing from the Earth that form of governance that came of the founding people of the nation giving revolutionary action to the vision Thomas Jefferson expressed in the Declaration of Independence.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” ~ July 4, 1776, the nation’s birthday.

If we are to recapture what Lincoln succinctly defined and agonizingly defended as government of the people, by the people and for the people four-score and seven after its inception, we need to join with another visionary and insistent leader and prove ourselves to be another Greatest Generation. The only person on the horizon who to me appears to stand up and out for such a task is Independent Bernie Sanders, whose lonely words call for a fresh start of dramatic change in business as usual that has become all business as Tennessee Ernie Ford mournfully sang of it:

Some people say a man is made outta mud

A poor man’s made outta muscle and blood

Muscle and blood and skin and bones

A mind that’s a-weak and a back that’s strong



You load sixteen tons, what do you get

Another day older and deeper in debt

Saint Peter don’t you call me ‘cause I can’t go

I owe my soul to the company store.

And how about Hillary Clinton, I believe at best she would be a bit better than Bill Clinton and that is not good enough. In the good economic times in which Bill served the nation he did not join in leadership of we the people to do anything of lasting significance and his times at the helm of leadership have proven to be the calm before the more recent doldrums of further neglect from which either a tempest will erupt or our form of governance will die parched out as a desert island where:

Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, nor breath nor motion;

As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean.



Water, water, every where,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, every where,

Nor any drop to drink.

If our becalmed ship of state is to sail on into ever better waters for ourselves and our posterity, we will sign on with Bernie Sanders at the helm.

Sam Osborne, West Branch