Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders called a recent article about his wealth derogatory for depicting him as “cheap” and obsessed with money.
“Call that what it is. It’s an anti-Semitic article,” Sanders told the Young Turks this week.
The article in question is a May 24 profile in Politico Magazine that chronicles how Sanders, a self-described socialist, used traditional market forces and the principles of capitalism to become a millionaire.
“Today, he might still be cheap, but he’s sure not poor,” the article reads. “In a strict, bottom-line sense, Sanders has become one of those rich people against whom he has so unrelentingly railed. The champion of the underclass and castigator of “the 1 percent” has found himself in the socioeconomic penthouse of his rhetorical boogeymen.”
Photos accompanying the piece depict Sanders, who is Jewish, standing in front of a tree with money growing from its branches as the Vermont senator juggles multiple houses in his arms.
Sanders said the article is a prime example of political media covering Beltway gossip rather than the issues that matter to everyday Americans.
“I think they live in a certain world. It is a world of inside-the-Beltway pundits,” he said. “It is a world that has not a clue about what working people and lower-income people are experiencing and, in fact, really don’t care about working people and lower income people.”
Sanders said during a town hall with Fox News earlier this year that he will not apologize for being “a very successful author.”
Sanders and democratic socialists like him frequently rail against “the top 1%” who control most of the money in America.
Sanders, who is polling second in the Democratic primary behind Joe Biden, has vowed to even the playing field for low-wage and middle-class Americans if he is elected president.
“It is a world which completely missed what Donald Trump’s campaign was about,” Sanders said of the Beltway. “And misses, in fact, what we are trying to do, and what we will do.”
