Erin Burnett Presses Sanders Aide on Campaign’s ‘Establishment’ Bashing: Are ‘African-Americans in the South’ Part of the Establishment?

CNN’s Erin Burnett pushed back on the Sanders campaign’s narrative of running against the Democratic “establishment,” pressing one of its senior advisers to explain the massive turnout of African-Americans who voted against his candidate on Super Tuesday.

Speaking with David Sirota on her Wednesday evening show, the CNN host asked the Bernie Sanders spokesperson his reaction to the successive endorsements from moderate rivals Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, and Mike Bloomberg around the former vice president’s candidacy.

“It shows that the establishment is coalescing around Joe Biden,” Sirota said. “And let’s be clear, it’s not just those candidates. You’ve seen stories today about Wall Street donors starting to open their checkbooks for Joe Biden, that big money is flowing to Joe Biden. And that’s on top of the fact that he’s being bankrolled by a Super PAC. So, it makes the choice very, very clear. On one side you have Bernie Sanders, a grassroots-funded candidate who is running a grassroots campaign, a multiracial working class campaign. And on the other side you have Joe Biden who has told his big donors that, quote, nothing will fundamentally change if he’s elected. Joe Biden picking up big support from places like Wall Street and from the establishment in Washington. That makes the choice very, very clear.”

“On that point of establishment, you’ve mentioned it twice in this answer and Senator Sanders said it today. His words were the establishment is working frantically to try to defeat us,” she noted. She then played a clip of Biden surrogate, Congressman Cedric Richmond, who alluded to Biden’s Super Tuesday victories based on massive turnout and support from African-American voters. “What do you say to that? Joe Biden did overwhelmingly strongly with that particular group. Do you consider African-Americans in The South part of the establishment?”

“Well, let’s be clear, Bernie Sanders did very well among younger African-American voters,” Sirota pointed out. “And secondly, when we talk about the establishment, what we’re talking ability are the billionaires who are bankrolling Joe Biden’s campaign.”

“What about the people voting for Joe Biden?” Burnett said, cutting in. “Billionaires is only going to be what, 60 votes in the country?”

“Well, but billionaires fund campaigns. Billionaires fund lots and lots of ads,” Sirota replied. “You’ve got corporations, lobbyists, and big donors funding super PACs. So, what we’re talking about when we talk about the establishment, we’re talking about the people who are financing the campaigns, allowing them to put on huge amounts of ads, allowing them to, frankly, to distort Bernie Sanders’ record. So, that’s what we’re talking about.”

“So, are you saying that people are falling prey to that, that they’re not able to figure out the truth, that they’re falling prey to these ads?” Burnett asked. “They’re not voting the way they would really vote? What are you trying to say about the actual voters themselves who voted for Biden?”

Biden convincingly won 10 of 14 states on Super Tuesday, taking a double-digit lead over Sanders in Democratic delegates and earning nearly one million more cumulative votes.

“What I’m saying is money has power in elections,” Sirota said. “When you have super PACS funds and bankrolling Joe Biden, when you have a health care Super PAC, a health care industry Super PAC that’s trying to distort Bernie Sanders’ position for instance on Medicare for All, as we saw in South Carolina hundreds of thousands of dollars of ads by the health insurance ads and drug companies fear mongering about what Medicare for All really is, that has an impact on the discourse and debate in elections, which can have an impact on the outcome of elections.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.