Sanders adviser criticizes Obama economic record

A top Bernie Sanders adviser is hitting President Obama for not living up to his campaign promises on the economy in a new column featured on the White House contender’s campaign website.  

Larry Cohen, the former Communications Workers of America president, lauds the Vermont senator’s Wednesday speech on Wall Street reform and questions Obama’s follow-through on economic issues despite his campaign rhetoric. 

{mosads}“Are establishment Democrats so enamored with free markets and so addicted to the political contributions from financial high rollers that the party establishment has rushed to embrace Clinton with no real demands for change?” he writes.

“As we learned eight years ago, the words uttered during a primary campaign bear little resemblance to Presidential policies.”

He goes on to pan Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton’s policies as “more of the same, lacking a real challenge to financialization and its demands for finance capital to trump citizen rights on issues ranging from global trade to regulation.” 

Symone Sanders, the spokeswoman for the Independent senator’s presidential campaign, told The Hill that while she hasn’t asked Sanders specifically whether he agrees with Cohen’s assertion, the campaign website’s blog is a space to share the views of supporters and the opinion reflected is solely that of Cohen’s.

“Sen. Sanders can’t possibly agree with every single thing every one of his surrogates say and I don’t think his surrogates agree with every single thing he says,” she said. 

“But the beautify of the political revolution is that we can come together on common ground.”

The language is some of the most vocal criticism of the Obama campaign from a Sanders ally. The candidate himself has lauded Obama, but has broken from him on issues like trade and the economy. 

“Bernie Sanders has been a strong supporter of the president, but his implicit and sometimes explicit critique of the president is a problem as he courts the president’s supporters,” former Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer told Bloomberg in November. 

Sanders told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes during an interview in October that Obama and Vice President Biden have done a “damn good job,” but agreed when Hayes asked if there needs to be a “course correction.”