Veteran actor Dick Van Dyke introduced Bernie Sanders at a campaign rally in Santa Barbara on Saturday, where he urged older voters to cast their ballots for the insurgent Democrat presidential candidate and called him “the sanest man in America.”
During brief introductory remarks at Santa Barbara City college, the 90-year-old star of the Dick Van Dyke Show said he had a “really important” message for older voters.
“Mostly I want to be here to talk to my generation,” Van Dyke said, according to the Hill. “I have a really important message for them. I was born in the Coolidge administration. Can you believe that? So I’ve seen a lot of politics. I was five years old when the stock market crashed; I lost everything.”
“What I want to say to my contemporaries is, as Bernie says, in the 50s and 60s, real democracy was really working from the bottom up, like it’s supposed to. There were no economic crashes during those decades because regulations were in place,” he added. “We need the person who can break the stranglehold that corporate America has on this country right now.”
The actor introduced Sanders by describing him as “the sanest man in America,” according to the Washington Post.
Van Dyke was in his element as he danced a jig while he waited for Sanders to take the stage. A fan-shot video (above) captured the actor in apparently good spirits.
Van Dyke is just the latest celebrity to sing Sanders’s praises ahead of California’s crucial June 7 primary. Actor Justin Long also appeared at Saturday’s Santa Barbara rally, while actresses Rosario Dawson and Shailene Woodley were in the middle of a get-out-the-vote trip across the state in a borrowed RV.
Sanders has largely caught up to Democrat frontrunner Hillary Clinton in California, pulling within just two points in the latest PPIC poll released last week.
Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum
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