They started letting people into the big Sheraton Dallas Hotel ballroom at 11:30 a.m. yesterday, 90 minutes before Bernie Sanders, the independent Vermont senator and Democratic presidential candidate, was scheduled to show up for a campaign rally. Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” blared from the sound system as they poured in: a young white guy wearing an Obama t-shirt, a 50ish Hispanic woman in a pink cowboy hat, older Anglo men with long gray ponytails, a middle-aged black woman in a business suit. Among the early-arriving crowd near the makeshift stage was Denton-born Roy Holcomb, a 57-year-old real estate investor who’d come with his daughter Jessie Pike and her husband, David Pike, both 26-year-old Lewisville schoolteachers.
“I’ve been reading Bernie pretty hard for five years,” Holcomb said. “What got me stirred up was Citizens United. Money has just taken over, and he’s the only one calling out the banks, the Koch brothers, the corporations. The corporations do one thing: make money and eat everything in their wake. I’m the cowboy, and the Indians—the Republicans—are all around me, everywhere. My wife is a nut Fox News-hound, and I started watching Fox and thought, ‘This is propaganda.’ ” Holcomb, who said Sanders’ chief rival Hillary Clinton is “bought and paid for by the corporations—just like Jeb Bush,” added with a laugh that he had to talk his daughter and her husband into accompanying him today. Said David, choosing his words carefully: “We’re still trying to figure it out.”
All around them, the ballroom was filling up. Organizers said that 8,500 had RSVP’d online and that more than 7,000 were likely to turn out. So two big-screen TVs had been set up outside the main room in the nearby lobby for the “overflow” crowd, or those who came late. As 1 p.m. approached the music kept blaring—”Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” by the Temptations, the Byrds’ “Turn, Turn, Turn,” “Baby Love” by the Supremes. People waved big homemade signs—”Time for Wall Street to Feel the Bern,” “Texans for Bernie”—and then, finally, the woman in the pink cowboy hat started clapping and others picked it up and a loud chant swept the room: “We want Bernie! We want Bernie! We want Bernie!” The roar grew even louder when Joe Montemayor, lead organizer for the Texas State Employees Union, strode to the podium. The union official calmed the crowd and made a pleasantly brief introduction. When he hailed Sanders as “the next president of the United States,” the room exploded again.
At that the candidate emerged from behind a curtain and took the stage—a smallish, bespectacled, white-haired man of 73, dressed in a dark suit and a blue open-collared shirt. For the next hour Sanders, who has described himself as a Democratic socialist, would tick off a litany of problems plaguing the country—and his solutions—in a straight-ahead, no-frills style. He was in Texas, Sanders began, because “I do know that this state is controlled by Republicans, and I’m here to change that!” Democrats need to have a 50-state strategy, he said, before launching into the crux of his insurgent campaign—one that has caught unexpected fire, leaving him closer in polls to Clinton than many had expected: “Enough is enough,” he thundered. “This great country belongs to all the people, not just a handful of billionaires! … This campaign is sending a loud and clear message to the billionaires: you can’t have it all!” Then he added this warning for the wealthiest: “Your greed has got to end! Your greed is destroying America, and we are going to end your greed!”
The crowd clapped and stomped and shouted its approval, buoying Sanders along as he continued his populist pitch (is this what Huey Long sounded like, one wondered? Eugene Debs?). He said middle class jobs and wages have been disappearing and declining at unprecedented rates, that youth unemployment is “tragically high” for all races, but especially for African-Americans. He called for doubling the minimum wage to $15, for wage parity for women, for mandatory paid family leave, for mandatory paid vacations. He said a $1 trillion federal program to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure would create up to 13 million good jobs. He advocated bringing back Glass-Steagall banking regulations and breaking up the mega-banks: “If they’re too big to fail, they’re too big to exist!” He ripped the Koch brothers for buying elections, said the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision must be overturned, and argued that every public college and university in America should be tuition-free. Before closing with a ringing call for nothing less than a “political revolution,” the candidate set his sights on Republicans who deny the climate is changing: “I urge them to stop worrying about their campaign donors like the Koch brothers and Exxon Mobil, and start worrying about their constituents!”
Finishing to still more raucous applause and cheers, Sanders worked his way around the front of the room for awhile, smiling and shaking hands. Next he popped up on a little stage outside in the overflow room, and thanked everyone there for coming. Then he was whisked by his handlers out of the hotel, intent on making a second Texas rally—that one in Houston—last evening. So, were the Pikes, who had come to the Sheraton at the urging of Roy Holcomb, persuaded now to cast their votes for Sanders? “I agree with everything he said,” David shouted over the music and the roar of the still-excited crowd. Debbie was even more succinct: “Go Bernie!”
