“Don’t underestimate me,” warns Bernie Sanders who will, as the AP reports:
… jumpstart his campaign on Tuesday with a kickoff event – complete with free Ben & Jerry’s ice cream – in Burlington, the place where he won his first election by beating a longtime incumbent Democrat by 10 votes to become mayor.
For Sanders, raising the money for a legitimate campaign presents both a challenge and an opportunity. He has, so far:
… raised more than $4 million since announcing in late April that he would seek the party’s nomination. He suggested in the interview that raising $50 million for the primaries was a possibility.
But he will be running against a candidate who proposes to raise $2.5 billion.
Sanders, however, may be able to make this vast disparity into an advantage of sorts. It could work if, as one suspects, there is a growing unhappiness over the coziness of the political class with the sources of big money.
“I’m not going to have a super PAC in this campaign,” Sanders said. “I don’t go to fundraisers where millionaires sit around the room and say here’s a million, here’s $5 million for your super PAC. That’s not my life. That’s not my world. And I think the American people are saying that is not what our politics should be about.” He said the money he’s raised so far has come from more than 100,000 individual donors, giving an average of $42 each.
Forty-two bucks … about the cost, one suspects, of a single shrimp served on a little paper-thin cracker at one of those political money raising soirees.
More on Sanders here.
