OKLAHOMA CITY – Spending over $400,000 on television advertising here in Oklahoma, the campaign for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is setting its sights on a potential win in this state on March 1st – Super Tuesday, hoping to upset Hillary Clinton’s momentum after her win in Nevada caucuses last weekend.

At the BernieSanders.com site, the “A Future to Believe In” rally will bring Sanders to Tulsa today to the Cox Business Center for a free event where Sanders will “discuss a wide range of issues important to Oklahomans, including making college affordable, getting big money out of politics, and combating climate change.”

A pushcard for Sanders appearing in Oklahoma City mailboxes this week, from OK for Bernie and Bernie 2016, encourages voters to vote in the Democratic primary on March 1st and that independents are now allowed to vote in the Democratic primary as well. After talking with many libertarians and conservatives, it seems as though Sanders' straight-talk on attacking corruption in government and the private sector is resonating strongly. This explains the rise of the "outsider" phenomenon taking Sanders and Donald Trump to great political heights this election cycle.

The pushcard reads: “Bernie Sanders will be a president for all of us, not just the billionaires.”

It notes that he will:

Fix a Rigged Economy Reform Our Corrupted Democracy Give the Middle Class a Fair Shot

The flipside of the pushcard notes that while most people “got crushed during the financial crisis,” the “1 percent are now richer than ever.”

Covering the Sanders campaign in Iowa in advance of the Iowa caucuses earlier this month, Red Dirt Report noted that the Scandinavian-styled Democratic socialism touted by Sanders is very American, as noted by longtime Iowa politico and precinct captain James James spoeaking to RDR reporter Tim Farley during our time in Des Moines at a Sanders rally.

“He’s a Kennedy Democrat and he’s the last hope we have to get our country back,” James said. “He’s not a radical individual. He’s what the Democrats were when I was in high school back in the ‘60s.”

James bristled at the notion that Sanders’ critics are using the term “Democratic socialist” as something that’s bad or evil.

“Roosevelt was a Democratic socialist and Kennedy was a Democratic socialist and needless to say they did something right,” he said. “Democratic socialism has worked since World War II.”

Strong language. And yet four and eight years ago you would not have heard that sort of language spoken about as openly. It shows just how far to the right the United States has gone in 50 years time.

A little over two years ago, Red Dirt Report featured an article title “America’s social-democratic future to become a reality, argues professor.” The article highlighted an article in Foreign Affairs magazine titled “America’s Social Democratic Future” by University of Arizona Prof. Lane Kenworthy. We later reviewed Kenworthy’s book, Social Democratic America, here.

As Kenworthy wrote in Foreign Affairs at the time: “Thanks to a combination of popular demand, technocratic supply, and gradually increasing national wealth, social democracy is the future of the United States,” Kenworthy writes.

The “powerful forces” (i.e. Wall Street, Big Corporations, the Koch Brothers, ALEC, "the banks made of marble" and more) in America, Kenworthy argues, “are fighting a losing battle and can only slow down and distort the final outcome rather than stop it.”

Kenworthy concludes his article by noting that we are better off as a country than we were a century ago, but that there is still work to be done.

Once we reach a social-democratic future,” he wrote, “the country will be better for it.”