"Bernie Sanders is
barnstorming across a deep South that is definitely enemy territory for
Northeastern liberals.
Before a Sunday rally in Kenner, Louisiana, a suburb about 12 miles outside of New Orleans, the candidate held a small house party at the home of Dr. Gilda Reed. Reed, a psychology professor who’d once run for Congress on a platform similar to Sanders’s, had been selected to host the
event that Wednesday, after offering her place
up to a Facebook friend who’d been tasked with finding a venue. “Who’s
as excited as I am that he’s coming?" Reed said in a status update.
"Private message me.”
The result was about 40 mostly middle-aged, mostly white Louisiana liberals—a mix of Reed’s Facebook friends and fellow members of the Jefferson parish Democratic Executive Committee—packed into the living and dining rooms of her shotgun-style one story house. In the center of the room, Sanders stood under a ceiling fan, listening as the crowd talked over each other. Having Sanders there was clearly cathartic for the liberal audience—but it underlined the challenges they face as Southerners, given Republican hegemony in the region.
The house party was the smallest of four events on the senator’s schedule in a two day swing through the state, which attracted Sanders’s usual sheaf of favorable media coverage. He made “a direct appeal to black voters” at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference gala in Baton Rouge on Saturday and “whipped up a thunderous crowd” of 4,500 in Kenner’s Pontchartrain Center (When I mentioned to Reed that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal only managed to draw 1,000 people to the same venue for his presidential announcement, she quipped “and he probably had to pay them to get them there.”). Bloomberg
Before a Sunday rally in Kenner, Louisiana, a suburb about 12 miles outside of New Orleans, the candidate held a small house party at the home of Dr. Gilda Reed. Reed, a psychology professor who’d once run for Congress on a platform similar to Sanders’s, had been selected to host the
The result was about 40 mostly middle-aged, mostly white Louisiana liberals—a mix of Reed’s Facebook friends and fellow members of the Jefferson parish Democratic Executive Committee—packed into the living and dining rooms of her shotgun-style one story house. In the center of the room, Sanders stood under a ceiling fan, listening as the crowd talked over each other. Having Sanders there was clearly cathartic for the liberal audience—but it underlined the challenges they face as Southerners, given Republican hegemony in the region.
The house party was the smallest of four events on the senator’s schedule in a two day swing through the state, which attracted Sanders’s usual sheaf of favorable media coverage. He made “a direct appeal to black voters” at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference gala in Baton Rouge on Saturday and “whipped up a thunderous crowd” of 4,500 in Kenner’s Pontchartrain Center (When I mentioned to Reed that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal only managed to draw 1,000 people to the same venue for his presidential announcement, she quipped “and he probably had to pay them to get them there.”). Bloomberg
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