Thousands turn out for Bernie Sanders rally at Bartle Hall

Bernie Sanders knows the deal in these parts, how vulnerable Kansans feel the burn of Gov. Sam Brownback’s policies.

“I know in Kansas you’ve got a governor who likes to beat up on the poor,” Sanders said Wednesday at a campaign rally at Bartle Hall in Kansas City, Missouri. “…It’s such an easy topic to beat up on the poor.”

He’s not wrong on either count. In Kansas, administrative policies and legislation pushed by Brownback have made life a struggle for the disabled, the jobless and others who needs a little help to get by.

And it is easy to beat up on the poor more generally. Other candidates vying for the White House have cast the impoverished as sponges on the government. The needy aren’t the only ones getting the harsh treatment: the disabled, Mexicans, Muslims and others.

Sanders spent an hour in a packed Bartle Hall room directing his ire at targets that mainstream politicians are reluctant to take on: Wall Street executives, Beltway cronies, police officers who shoot people needlessly, major corporations who leverage their influence to get taxpayer subsidies.

A Sanders speech sounds stern, like an aged hippy who has turned into an Ivy League professor, lecturing half-asleep students who don’t grasp the topic.

But Sanders’ crowd Wednesday got the point; a predominantly younger audience reacted to Sanders’ talking points with raucous applause.

Sanders, while sounding like a grump with his thick Brooklyn accent and repetitive intonation that overemphasizes every syllable, comes off better than Donald Trump’s casual xenophobia slapped with a thin veneer of sarcasm or Ted Cruz’s bogus preacher act.

That may be why Sanders, whose campaign maintains gets average contributions of $27 dollars, seems to have a connection with young voters who are inheriting the lousy policy decisions of generations ahead of them.

That would be a theme of his stump speech: how to make life better for the working class, the young student pondering whether it’s worth the deep debt associated with attending college, the wage gap between men and women, immigrants who want a path to citizenship and an end to America’s obsession with over-incarceration.

Sanders is speaking to an audience that a Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal op-ed called “The Young And Economically Clueless.” The piece contends that Sanders supporters are voting against their self interest.

Who is currently happy with how they pay for healthcare, with deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums changing (read: increasing) every year and the uncertainty of what you will pay for anything beyond a routine visit?

How is it against one’s self interest to be concerned about how debt is a necessary component of college enrollment, coupled with a lackluster job market for people coming out of higher education?

And whose interests are being served by having thousands serving time in prison for slinging an ounce of weed or two?

A Sanders campaign may not overtake the well-greased Hillary Clinton campaign, but his presence in Kansas City and the receptiveness of his audience to his message leaves little doubt that there are at least seeds of a political revolution, as Sanders campaign likes to put it.

“None of these ideas are radical,” Sanders says. “They’re uncomfortable to billionaires who want it all.”

Shortly thereafter, Sanders wrapped up his remarks and left the stage to the strains of David Bowie’s “Starman.”

[Note: We changed the headline to better reflect the attendance at the event. But we are avoiding specific numbers because of the imprecise science of crowd counting.]