Wooing Blacks, Sanders Reframes, But Doesn't Change Argument

The result is a political tightrope for a 74-year-old senator who has assembled a national following as a self-styled "democratic socialist" calling for a "political revolution" that wrests control of the U.S. government from "the billionaire class" comprising the nation's wealthiest individuals and corporations. On Friday, he took questions in front of a bipartisan group of black civic and business leaders gathered in South Carolina, where he's also airing a radio ad in which he bemoans "institutional racism," calls for ending racial profiling and mass incarceration and highlights his work in the civil rights movement as a college student. In Atlanta, he met privately with one of Martin Luther King Jr.'s children and paid his respects at the slain civil rights leader's crypt. In his standard campaign speech, Sanders blasts the status quo as particularly unfair to nonwhites and offers his policy ideas — raising the minimum wage, making public colleges tuition-free, decriminalizing marijuana, ending the for-profit prison industry — as the counter. Always a key Democratic constituency, black voters will be even more important in the 2016 nominating contests because the early primary calendar is dominated by Southern states, including South Carolina and Georgia, where blacks form the backbone of the Democratic electorate. [...] he sought to position himself as one of King's political heirs, not by casting himself as a civil rights leader but by reminding voters of King's wider legacy.

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