Is Jesus a Bernie Sanders fan? Could be, if you believe Howard Dean. On today's Morning Joe, Dean claimed that "if you look at the red-letter version of the Bible, Jesus was probably to the left of the Democratic party."
Dean's declaration came in the context of a discussion of yesterday's forum on poverty in which President Obama and AEI President Arthur Brooks participated. Question: is Dean confusing the establishment of faceless government bureaucracies that can entrap people in dependency with the kind of personal caring for the downtrodden that Christ commanded?
Note: Joe Scarborough quoted Arthur Brooks, the sole conservative on the poverty panel, as saying "the reason I became a free market conservative was because what I cared about the most was the poor. And I believe this was the best way to alleviate suffering."
JOE SCARBOROUGH: You see what the President said, you see what Arthur Brooks said, what other people said. Then suddenly E.J. Dionne goes, wait a second, maybe both sides really can work together.
HOWARD DEAN: They can. Let me share some incredibly interesting polling data we got ten years ago when I was running the DNC. I was wondering why evangelicals didn't vote for Democrats because if you look at the red-letter version of the Bible, Jesus was probably to the left of the Democratic party. So we did polling. And here's what we found. This is ten years ago. Evangelicals over 55 it was all about abortion and gay marriage. Evangelicals under 35 in this country, the number one issue was poverty, the number two issue was climate change.
NICOLLE WALLACE: And they support marriage equality under 30.
DEAN: We didn't poll for that.
WALLACE: It's changed. It has changed.
