In 2008, Sarah Silverman promoted “The Great Schlep,” a campaign to get young Jews to travel down to Florida and convince their grandparents to vote for Barack Obama. Four years later, she made a seriously indecent proposal to Zionist billionaire Sheldon Adelson in an attempt to pry away his $100 million donation to Mitt Romney’s Super PAC.
Now it’s 2016, and Silverman is all about the man who has a long-shot chance of becoming America’s first Jewish president: Sen. Bernie Sanders.
In a new YouTube video, Silverman insists that she is not trying to convince anyone to vote. “If you vote or not, that’s not my business, I’m not your mommy,” she said. “Though like your mommy, I have a completely full bush.”
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Instead, she directs her message at those who are already likely to vote in the presidential election. The New Hampshire native explains that as a feminist, she had always been a Hillary Clinton supporter—“Democratic woman president? Yes, please!”—but her neighboring senator from Vermont has helped change her mind.
Silverman says she always viewed Clinton’s decision to take donations from big-money interests as a “necessary evil” in the era of Citizens United. But now that Sanders has shown you can run a remarkably successful campaign on small donations alone, she has seen the light. “I’m not against Hillary,” she says, delivering a heavy sigh. “I’ve just met someone I have more in common with.”
She goes on to describe Sanders’s campaign as a “giant fuck you to the above-the-law billionaire class” and tries to remove the scare quotes from the label “socialist.”
“He’s a Democrat,” Silverman says. “He just believes that people who don’t have the same advantages as you and me should be given the same advantages as you and me.” Under a President Sanders, she assures people they can still become “rich assholes, it’s just that your fellow hard-working citizens don’t have to feed their children cat food in order for you to do it.”
As for the arguments that his plans are unrealistic, Silverman points to the fact of Sanders’s own fundraising strategy as proof that “what is right can also be possible.”
This month, Silverman made her case for Sanders on Real Time with Bill Maher, where she pushed back on the narrative that he is “unelectable.”
“I don’t know who’s perpetuating this unelectable thing,” she said. “He’s really popular with both sides, everyone likes him, and he’s not for sale, not playing the game and says what he means. He’s been on the right side of history at every turn—not along with history when it becomes popular, but before it’s popular.”
Despite huge wins in this past weekend’s caucuses in Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii, Sanders still trails Clinton by more than 250 pledged delegates and more than 400 superdelegates, making his path to the nomination nearly insurmountable. But in terms of general election electability, Silverman has a point.
Head-to-head with Donald Trump, Sanders leads polls by an average of 17.5 points. For Clinton, that margin drops to a far more dangerous-sounding 11.2.
