Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), the former DNC official who resigned her post to back Bernie Sanders, taped an emotional ad for the presidential hopeful in which she talked about her military service.
The ad, titled “The Cost of War,” features Gabbard surfing the waves in her home state of Hawaii and recounting her 12-month stint in Iraq. She calls Sanders the best choice for commander in chief.
{mosads}“Bernie Sanders voted against the Iraq War. He understands the cost of war and that cost is continued when our vets come home,” says the Democratic representative. “Bernie Sanders will defend our country and take the trillions of dollars that are spent on these interventionist regime changes and unnecessary wars and invest it here at home.”
Gabbard is one of the first female combat vets to serve in Congress, returning from a deployment in Iraq in 2006 and volunteering for another deployment in the Middle East in 2009.
“I could not in good conscious stay back here in beautiful Hawaii and watch my brothers and sisters in uniform go off into combat,” an emotional Gabbard says. “These people are friends who we never forget and who we strive to honor every day that we are blessed to live and breathe.”
“The American people are not looking to settle for inches, they’re looking for real change,” she continues. “What I saw in Bernie was a heart of aloha.”
Gabbard stepped down from her role as vice chairwoman for the Democratic National Committee in February to publicly back Sanders. She has slammed his opponent Hillary Clinton for her policies while in secretary of State under President Obama.
“In both Clinton’s record and her campaign rhetoric, she has made it clear … that she favors a continuation of the counter-productive and horribly expensive foreign policy of intervention and regime-change,” she said in an op-ed for Time magazine Tuesday.