Sanders: Clinton’s Money ‘Hustle’

You wouldn’t think CNBC is the place to deliver a message about the coming socialist political revolution, but Sen. Bernie Sanders cares little about your conventional wisdom.

Mr. Sanders, the Vermont independent who launched his presidential campaign last month with a press conference outside the Capitol, is drumming up excitement for a campaign kick-off rally Tuesday afternoon in Burlington, his hometown. In so doing, he told CNBC that its financial industry viewers ought to watch their pocketbooks when he’s president.

“You know what? Sorry, you’re all going to have to pay your fair share of taxes,” Mr. Sanders told CNBC’s John Harwood. “If my memory is correct, when radical socialist Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, the highest marginal tax rate was something like 90 percent.”

Mr. Sanders and front-runner Hillary Clinton will be joined in the 2016 Democratic primary field this weekend by former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who is set to announce his intentions Saturday in Baltimore. But Mr. Sanders is already moving to corner the market on liberal attacks on Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. Sanders used the CNBC interview to launch unvarnished attacks on the Clinton family wealth from which other Democrats have so far steered clear. Making $25 million a year – as the Clintons did from paid speeches, according to disclosure reports released earlier this month – insulates them from problems faced by the sort of regular Americans Mrs. Clinton’s campaign says it is focused on, Mr. Sanders said.

“When you hustle money like that, you don’t sit in restaurants like this [a bistro near the Capitol],” he said. “You sit in restaurants where you’re spending—I don’t know what they spend—hundreds of dollars for dinner and so forth. That’s the world that you’re accustomed to, and that’s the world view that you adopt. You’re not worrying about a kid three blocks away from here whose mom can’t afford to feed him. So yes, I think that can isolate you—that type of wealth has the potential to isolate you from the reality of the world.”

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