April 21--REPORTING FROM SCRANTON, Pa. -- A different Bernie Sanders -- or at least a different Bernie Sanders message -- showed up in Scranton, Pa., on Thursday as he resumed campaigning after his New York primary loss.
In an hourlong speech, there was no mention of Hillary Clinton's top-dollar speeches to Wall Street, no demands that she release transcripts of them, no mockery about how, to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, those speeches must be Shakespearean in quality.
There was no mention of the $15 million her super PACs have raised from Wall Street employees, or the $25 million her supporters raised from special interests, gibes that have been common in his speeches in recent weeks.
The Vermont senator who showed up in Scranton went 26 minutes into his speech before even alluding to Clinton.
Over the last half of his speech, he noted several areas in which he and Clinton disagree -- over the minimum wage, trade agreements, fracking and lifting the income cap to better fund Social Security. But his comparisons were of the just-the-facts variety.
"I opposed all these trade agreements. Secretary Clinton supported most of them; that is a big difference," he said in what served as Thursday's template.
He did hold a grudge of sorts against New York, complaining about the fact that only Democrats were allowed to vote in New York's Democratic primary. He said that rule disenfranchised independent voters.
"We just had a Democratic primary in New York state," he said, prompting boos from the crowd. "Well, I share those sentiments, but here's the point: I don't mind losing, but 3 million people who registered as independents did not have the right to participate. That really is not democracy."
Still, throughout the event, Sanders appeared to be minding suggestions from some of his supporters and others that the Democratic candidates tone down a nomination fight that has grown more contentious in the past few months.
Clinton had done much the same earlier. On Wednesday, in her first campaign appearance in Pennsylvania after the New York results, she made only a slight mention of Sanders, on the subject of gun control measures she has supported and he had opposed.
Whether what seemed to be something of a truce will hold is anyone's guess. Republican candidate Donald Trump took the high road Tuesday night, calling Texas Sen. Ted Cruz by his honorific, but by Wednesday morning, he was back to castigating him as "Lyin' Ted."
But Trump and Cruz are in a ferocious battle that likely will not end until the July national convention in Cleveland. There are better odds that Clinton will clinch the Democratic nomination by the end of the primary season, which is what has led to calls for a calmer contest lest Democrats be handing Republicans their general election talking points. (Sanders' team believes it still has a path to the nomination but acknowledges it's more than likely to require superdelegates now supporting Clinton to flip to Sanders.)
Before thousands of enthusiastic supporters in Scranton, Sanders made his regular appeals for expanded prekindergarten and child care programs, a single-payer healthcare system, free tuition for state colleges and universities, sterner climate change measures and an end to the ability of wealthy Americans to finance campaigns. In lieu of criticizing Clinton's judgment and mocking her political alliances, Sanders set out as culprits the "establishment" and Congress.
"The greed, recklessness and illegal behavior of Wall Street drove this country into the worst economic downturn in the modern history of this country, since the 1930s," he said. "What did Congress do? They bailed them out. I didn't vote for that, but that's what Congress did."
He made a pitch for his proposal to tax Wall Street speculation and use the money to finance his free tuition plan.
"This is not an idea the establishment feels all that comfortable with," he said. "They might like the idea of bailing out Wall Street -- that's OK. But bailing out the middle class and helping their families, that is a terribly radical idea. I don't think so!"
Sanders did offer generic slights at politicians who raise money from the wealthy -- as most politicians do -- but did not attach those complaints explicitly to Clinton, as he has in the past.
"The reason this campaign has been doing so well is we are listening to the people of this country, not just wealthy campaign contributors," he said. "A lot of what American politics is about today is candidates running around, sitting in mansions of billionaires, listening to the terrifying problems the millionaires have."
He laid out what could have been read as a call for a political movement that would last beyond his candidacy, however it ends.
"What our job is as a people is to tell the establishment, the big money interests, wealthy campaign contributors, the Congress, is that the status quo is not working for Americans and we demand change," he said. And he added a line that he has tossed off about Clinton, though not by name this time: "We demand real change, not tinkering around the edges change."
cathleen.decker@latimes.com
Follow me on Twitter: @cathleendecker. For more on politics, go to latimes.com/decker.
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