Boston Globe: In N.H., Bernie Sanders asserts he’s a credible candidate

Credit:  Alex Wong / Getty

By James Pindell, May 3, 2015, Boston Globe

NORTH CONWAY, N.H. — As he hit the campaign trail for the first time as a presidential candidate, Vermont US Senator Bernie Sanders traveled New Hampshire Saturday hoping to convince like-minded liberals that he won’t be just the protest candidate against former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton, but her credible alternative.

From a packed house party in Manchester to an outdoor labor union event with the White Mountains Presidential Range behind him, Sanders began a new stump speech with crib notes written on a folded sheet of yellow legal paper. It began with statistics on income equality and then went on through the progressive playbook on climate change, health care, college costs, and campaign finance reform.

At the end of his pitch to voters in the first-in-the-nation presidential primary state, he acknowledged he is an underdog, yet not a lost cause.

“This campaign we are going to wage in New Hampshire and all over the country is going to be a very different campaign,” Sanders said. “I know people say, ‘Oh Bernie this and Oh Bernie that, but he cannot win.’ Let me tell you: We can win.”

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