Bernie Sanders draws enthusiastic cheers in surprising Fox News town hall
Subtitle: The setup looked potentially hostile but became a free, hourlong commercial for the Sanders candidacy, broadcast to Fox viewers
Hilarious.
At every turn they clapped and cheered, enamored with the candidate’s prescriptions for universal healthcare, a humane attitude toward immigrants and the rejection of climate change denialism.
Bernie Sanders was the candidate, and the people clapping and cheering were audience members who turned out in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, for a televised town hall on Monday night sponsored by none other than Fox News.
. . . .
But if undercutting Sanders, an early frontrunner for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination and avowed democratic socialist, was the idea for Fox, somebody badly miscalculated.
The event at the SteelStacks auditorium in Bethlehem, with the extinct blast furnaces of Bethlehem Steel as a backdrop, drew a large crowd of Sanders supporters, who stood in line for hours to gain admission.
Onstage, the setup looked potentially hostile for Sanders, with Fox News hosts Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum asking the questions and trying to call the shots.
But Sanders, with the help of the sympathetic audience, flipped the script, turning whatever the Fox News executives might have intended to air into what at times seemed an hour long commercial for the Sanders candidacy, broadcast free to potentially millions of Fox viewers.
In perhaps the night’s biggest backfire, host Baier asked for “a show of hands of how many people get their insurance from work, private insurance, right now?”
Baier continued: “Now of those, how many are willing to transition to what the senator says, a government-run system?”
Nearly every hand went up, along with a hearty cheer.
And more.
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