This past April, just days before the critical New York primary, the Bernie Sanders campaign released a
new ad it hoped would help overcome its rival’s home-state advantage and take the Vermont senator over the top:
Wall Street banks shower Washington politicians with campaign contributions and speaking fees [an unseen narrator declares]. While Washington politicians are paid over $200,000 an hour for speeches, they oppose raising the living wage to $15 an hour. Two hundred thousand dollars an hour for them, but not even 15 bucks an hour for all Americans. Enough is enough.
The pointedly unsubtle attack hit upon the central theme of the Sanders campaign, and its critique of frontrunner (and eventual nominee) Hillary Clinton. Making note of Clinton’s lucrative speaking fees from Wall Street banks it also employed coded class rhetoric to charge her — and by extension the entire Washington political establishment — of enjoying an incestuous, transactional relationship with powerful private interests at the expense of average Americans.
This was the essence of the populist, social-democratic message upon which Sanders founded his presidential campaign.
The “rigged economy” of which he spoke was not only one in which corporate greed conspired to create a deeply unequal and unfair society, but also one underpinned by a symbiotic, mutually enriching relationship between plutocrats and politicians in both major parties.
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