BERNIE SANDERS DRAWS DIVERSE CROWD OF 13,000 SUPPORTERS IN SAN DIEGO

By Miriam Raftery

Photos by Miriam Raftery and Ron Logan

East County leaders met with Sanders, share their impressions

To read highlights of Sanders’ speech, click here. Check back for full audio to be posted soon.

Updated March 24 with comments from Rev. Shane Harris, who met with Senator Sanders

March 23, 2016 (San Diego) – “I wanted to be here to be a part of history,” said Esmeralda Abarco (photo, left), a youthful voter who was first in line to see Vermont Senator and Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders at the San Diego Convention Center last night.  She drove down from Los Angeles, arriving at 5 a.m.  to hear Sanders because “Bernie is our only hope. He is for the people.”

Alex Vega, an African-American voter from La Mesa (photo, above right), is supporting Sanders because “he supports politics and things that I believed in even before I knew Bernie, policies that align with what’s best for the black community.  I think he’s the best candidate ever.”

Sanders spoke on  populist themes including the need to end the wealth gap in America, provide a single-payer Medicare for all healthcare system or all Americans, raise the minimum wage and social security, rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, take action on climate change and provide free college education.  He denounced the Brussels bombing and pledged, “We will crush and destroy ISIS” through a coalition led by Muslim nations, “without getting our brave men and women into a perpetual war.” In addition he took aim at voter suppression tactics.

He also spoke to minorities, pledging to fix a “broken” criminal justice system that disproportionately targets African-Americans give Native Americans the “respect they deserve,” and provide comprehensive immigration reform with a path to citizenship and “unite, not divide.”

Sanders met personally with a group of local Latino and African-American leaders from the National Action Network team led by Rev. Shane Harris before his speech, (photo, right) including Estela de los Rios, a national, international and East County Latina leader.

Rev. Harris told ECM that he had been working on setting up a meeting with Sanders, major civil rights organizations and religious leaders previously but a scheduling change prevented that meeting from occurring.  So when the Sanders campaign announced this week’s visit to San Diego, Rev. Harris said, “He wanted to make sure that this time he had a one-on-one with me.” 

Rev. Harris, whose organization was started by the Rev. Al Sharpton, says local leaders met with Sanders for about 10 minutes.  He said he urged the Senator to speak on issues including education equality and affirmative action, support for raising the minimum wage, fair housing issues and national criminal justice reforms including independent oversight of police use of force-issues that local activists have been working on.

On raising the minimum wage, Rev. Harris noted, “I challenged him when he got up there to push that really heavy, and he did.” Sanders, in his speech, talked extensively about people struggling on low wages and called for raising the national minimum wage to $15 an hour.  On fair housing, Rev. Harris said,  “he told me he believes that every city should enhance their code compliance department, which is definitely what we’ve been working on here.”

Rev. Harris (photo, left, in private meeting with Senator Sanders and his wife, Jane) also brought up the need for national criminal justice reforms, citing local activists’ call for the city of San Diego to have an independent citizens review board of policee use of force incidents, as the County already has for its Sheriff department. “I asked him `How do you feel about a board that reviews police practices of SDPD getting paid by the city?' He agreed, you should not have a review board that is not independent from what they are reviewing; that’s best police practices.”

Senator Sanders also wanted to speak with Rev. Harris about voter engagement, Harris told ECM. “He said `voter engagement is not about me, it’s about young people being engaged and going to the polls and voting.’”  Rev. Harris added that he will be deciding which candidate to endorse after also meeting with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the next couple of weeks.

De los Rios gave her impressions of the meeting. “I was very honored to meet Bernie,” she said. “I kissed him and hugged him and he smiled. He looked exhausted but said ‘Okay thank you,.now I have to go out there--everyone has been waiting for me.’ He was very concerned to tend to the crowd. I felt so elated and encouraged for the future of my daughters, my grandkids and our nation.”

After his speech, she told ECM, “I was very inspired. I really liked the fact that he has been the voice for representing everyone because in his speech he even mentioned Native Americans, he mentioned immigrants, a very diverse group and I thought that was beautiful.”

The signs carried by Sanders’ enthusiastic supporters spoke to the diversity of the audience he is attracting:  “Veterans for Sanders”,  “Unidos con Bernie,” “Babies for Bernie” and and “Bernie is a mensch” (a Yiddish term meaning a person of integrity and honor.)  The audience members were young and old, black, white, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Asian and Native American.

Some local officials were also present, including Lemon Grove Councilwoman Racquel Vasquez (photo, left, with Estela de los Rios) and San Diego mayoral candidate Lori Saldana.

Ben Kalasho, president of the Chaldean-American Chamber of Commerce, was also in attendance. "It was encouraging to witness first hand the diversified enormous crowd engaged in the voting process," he said, adding that regardless of which candidate you support, "attending a political rally of this magnitude definitely matures one's worldliness political understanding. I plan on attending other rallies, Republican or Democrat. I am enthralled by it all, and I don't feel that I've learned enough about a single issue or candidate to write any of it off. I welcome the process and enjoy listening to the passion which the candidates extrude, whether I agree with it or not...and that's beautiful."

Michael Ceraso, director of Sanders’ California campaign, said the campaign is mobilizing efforts to “get every single vote” possible throughout California.  “I wouldn’t come out here if I didn’t think Bernie would win in California,” he added.  “We’re putting together a grassroots campaign that Bernie’s supporters can be proud of.”

Cereso, who is from Northridge, California, said he has known Sanders a long time, working on his team in New Hampshire and elsewhere.  First and foremost, he believes the most important reason why Sanders should be the next president is “his character.”

Mark Vosko, a journalist from South America with Todo A Pulmon was among the press corps covering the rally.  He told ECM that people in South America are “watching the American election with horror” due to fear of Donald Trump and his harsh attitude toward Latino immigrants. He added that Trump’s reckless remarks on foreign policy are causing concerns around the world.  “My mother will be 93 years old. She is so upset she can barely sleep. She told me ‘If Trump wins,  I’m leaving Israel.’”

Vosko concludes, “The only person who talks from his heart is Bernie Sanders.”