Vermont senator Bernie Sanders was the first presidential candidate this election year to visit central Pennsylvania.  He appeared in State College at Rec Hall on the Penn State campus on Tuesday, April 19.  I was lucky enough to attend the rally as part of an educational experience with my friend Rachel Jones.

Although neither of us completely support his views on certain topics, I believe that Sanders has good intentions and he has a very good track record in the Senate on many issues. He is also a very likable and trustworthy guy. I realized this after going to the rally, but we cannot always vote on likability. The American voters have to vote on common sense, the facts, and what will be best for America.

As we waited for Sanders to appear, I eavesdropped on several nearby conversations.  It was funny to hear some Sanders supporters say that they would rather vote for the controversial Donald Trump than the experienced, but equally as controversial, Hillary Clinton.

The rally began with Bernie Sanders walking out to the chants of the thousands of college students there to see him. He started the rally by highlighting the fact that his campaign was solely funded by the people without the help of Super PACs or big cooperate donors. He also spoke of how Hillary Clinton currently receives $200,000 per speech while he doesn’t get paid for his speeches.

The first issue Sanders brought up was voter’s rights. He began with the fact that there were three million people who could not vote in the New York primary because they were registered as independents. Although this has been the rule for a while now he brought up a good point. Why don’t we allow independents to vote in the primaries? We could very easily allow them to choose a candidate from either party and vote.

The biggest issue that Sanders brought up numerous times throughout the rally was the Wall Street bailout. If you are not familiar with the issue, the Wall Street bailout happened back in 2008 when the United States was going into a recession and the Senate proposed a bill to bail out the big banks and crooked wall street corporations. Despite the Senate being full of free market Republicans and anti­-corporate Democrats, the scare tactics fed to them worked and they ended up passing the bill. It was signed into law on October 3, 2008 by president George W. Bush.

Sanders, like myself, was against the 700 billion dollar bailout of the Wall Street corporations that was a burden on millions of Americans who lost their homes and jobs and for those who didn’t
lose their homes were forced to pay high taxes to help reduce the money spent for the bailout.

Despite focusing a lot of his plans around creating a higher tax speculation on Wall Street to redistribute the wealth to the lower 99%, Sanders forgot to mention that with his new tax plan would have a family of four making $80,000 a year, spend an average of $27,700 a year. It doesn’t take a scientist to realize that this is a huge increase over the current $17,000 being paid. However, one of the biggest reasons his tax plan is not working in favor of his campaign is because he says he wants to help rebuild the lower and middle class.  But if you look at it, you will realize that taxes will increase on everyone, not just the top 1%. Leaving out these details are crucial, but the college students we were surrounded by didn’t seem to care as long as they received “free” education and a $15 dollar minimum wage.

Free education has been another one of the Vermont senator’s biggest topics and yet it’s also a controversial one. With young college students welcoming the idea, older Democrats view this as a train wreck waiting to happen. With estimates of his free education plan costing 68 billion dollars, there’s a reason why these older voters are turning towards Clinton.

Sanders, who has been failing to attract a large amount of diverse votes including women, made it a point to speak about women’s’ rights, but left out the heavily discussed issue of abortion rights. He instead focused on the unfair earnings of women. Sanders talked heavily about the fact that women tend to earn only 78 cents to a dollar as compared to a male colleague. While speaking out on the issue he had arguably his best line of the night, “Women don’t want 79 cents, they want the whole damn dollar!” Getting cheers from everyone in the audience, Sanders quieted down the applause and moved on to the issue of marijuana.

My favorite moment of the night was when Sanders got to the discussion of marijuana and it was definitely the most cheered about topic of the night. He spoke about the drug companies ripping off Americans and he pledged his support for the legalization of marijuana. Sanders also took this opportunity to address the problem with racial profiling and the fact that you are more likely to be searched for illegal drug possession if you are an African American. He built on the racial profiling and marijuana issue by also speaking about prisons and how cops need to be “demilitarized,” and that cops’ first response should not be with guns.

The cheers erupted for Bernie every time he finished speaking about an issue, and as Sanders came to the end of his rally, he closed with telling encouraging everyone to go against the status quo and envision a new America.

On my way out of Rec Hall I realized that Bernie Sanders, as well as Donald Trump, are tapping into the anger of the voters, but mostly with his hatred of Wall Street, big banks, and the corruption in politics.

Although Bernie Sanders may not be my first choice, despite his costly ideas and wanting more government in people’s lives, he is taking a step in the right direction.