Jerry Kremer

Bernie Sanders is ‘The Music Man’ come to life

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America is a great country. It gives us so many freedoms that other countries don’t enjoy. Just think about it. Unlike places like Russia and China, we have freedom of the press. We can travel with no limitations, and don’t have to worry about a midnight knock on the door.

But the greatest of all freedoms is our right to vote, which not enough people take advantage of. On April 19, New York state voters will have a chance to cast ballots for the Democratic and Republican candidates for president, and if you don’t vote, it’s your loss.

Whether it’s a surprise or not to any of my friends or readers, I’ve decided, without hesitation, that I’ll be voting for Hillary Clinton. For the purpose of this column, I’ll ignore the contest between Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz. If either of them manages to capture the Republican nomination, he’ll go down to an overwhelming defeat in November.

I confess that I, like others in politics, admire the explosion of support for Sen. Bernie Sanders, especially among young voters. If I were a college student, anxious about my job possibilities and fearful of the world around me, I would probably “feel the Bern.” After all, how can you not like a candidate who’s in favor of free public college tuition and health insurance for all? How can you not love a candidate who says he’s going to smash the big banks and insurance companies into little pieces and be the leader of a “revolution”?

Every time I hear Bernie’s standard speech about that revolution, I think of Professor Harold Hill in “The Music Man.” Hill arrives in a sleepy town and persuades the locals that they need a band, and that if they give him their hard-earned money, he’ll put the band together. After making promise after promise, to the cheers of young and old, Hill gets the money, and but for a quirk of fate almost succeeds in leaving town and cheating everyone.

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