Bernie Sanders-Style Politics Are Defining 2020 Race, Unnerving Moderates
The sharp left turn in the Democratic Party and the rise of progressive presidential candidates are unnerving moderate Democrats who increasingly fear that the party could fritter away its chances of beating President Trump in 2020 by careening over a liberal cliff.
Two months into the presidential campaign, the leading Democratic contenders have largely broken with consensus-driven politics and embraced leftist ideas on health care, taxes, the environment and Middle East policy that would fundamentally alter the economy, elements of foreign policy and ultimately remake American life.
Led by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a democratic socialist who is the top candidate in the race at this early stage, many vocal leaders in the party are choosing to draw lessons from liberal victories in 2018 rather than the party’s breakthroughs in moderate suburban battlegrounds that delivered Democratic control of the House.
These progressive Democrats risk playing into Mr. Trump’s hands — he has repeatedly branded them “socialists” — yet they argue that their ambitious agenda can inspire a voter revolt in 2020 that elects a left-wing president.
Maybe. We’ll see. But, really, it isn’t a leftist agenda so much as a popular policy approach.
DMR (it’s J Ann Selzer):
Iowa Poll: Biden, Sanders top early look at possible Democratic hopefuls in 2020 caucuses
The results are part of a new Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom Iowa Poll, setting the stage for the contest that will sweep across Iowa in the next 14 months.
A massive field of Democratic candidates representing the full spectrum of political experience is beginning to take shape. Nearly half of poll respondents in the first-in-the-nation presidential caucus state — 49 percent — say the right person to defeat Trump should be a "seasoned political hand" rather than a "newcomer."
The poll of 455 likely Democratic caucus goers has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.6 percentage points. It was conducted Dec. 10 through 13.
Name recognition is a powerful thing. Still, there are nuggets to mine.
People want a new face! With experience!
Concord Monitor:
Sen. Bernie Sanders is headed to the Granite State on Sunday for his first visit as a declared candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
Conventional wisdom says the 77-year old Sanders – who will headline an event at the Grappone Conference Center in Concord at noon, followed by a gathering at the Colonial Theater in Keene – will face a much tougher time in the Granite State than in 2016. Last cycle, the onetime long shot candidate crushed Hillary Clinton in the first in the nation primary, launching him into a marathon battle that didn’t end until he endorsed Clinton at a July event in the Granite State.
But Sanders is on a roll as he returns to New Hampshire even though he is part of a much larger Democratic primary field – 14 at last count – including many candidates who are espousing the same progressive agenda that Sanders proposed in 2016.
“I would rather be Bernie Sanders than Elizabeth Warren right now. I would rather be Bernie Sanders than Joe Biden right now,” University of New Hampshire political science professor Dante Scala said.
Sanders topped a recent University of New Hampshire Survey Center poll of the 2020 Democratic contenders.
Masha Gessen/New Yorker:
Why Measles Is a Quintessential Political Issue of Our Time
Vaccination is a basic political issue, because it is the subject of community agreement. When a high-enough percentage of community members are immunized, a disease can be effectively vanquished. In epidemiological terms, this is known as “herd immunity,” which cannot be maintained below a certain threshold. When enough people reject the community agreement, they endanger the rest. Willfully unvaccinated adults and children can spread diseases to those who cannot be vaccinated or haven’t been vaccinated, such as infants and people with a compromised immune system; these vulnerable populations would probably be safe in conditions of herd immunity. Vaccination and the refusal to vaccinate are political acts: individual decisions that affect others and the very ability of people to inhabit common spaces.
Frank Bruni/NY Times:
The Real Horror of the Anti-Vaxxers
This isn’t just a public health crisis. It’s a public sanity one.
For example, anti-vaccine propaganda — some of which was spread by Russian trolls and bots as part of their sowing of discord before the 2016 election — can look as official and trustworthy as legitimate information. “And as websites get better and Twitter becomes something that people not only look at but rely on, it’s very difficult to get away from falsehoods and conspiracies,” Specter told me. “We’re living in a world where facts are just another element of your decision-making process.”
One of the best explanations of that came in a 2016 essay in The Times Magazine by Jonathan Mahler, who noted “a radical new relationship between citizen and truth.” He wrote that millions of people “are abandoning traditional sources of information, from the government to the institutional media, in favor of a D.I.Y. approach to fact-finding.”
They turn to the internet, which is both a hall of mirrors and an overstuffed bazaar. It lets them customize their input and thus tailor their reality, which is reinforced by the like-minded company they keep online. They become surer that climate change is a hoax, that the deep state plots against the bold warriors who threaten it, that a fake Melania Trump is sometimes used as a substitute for the actual one. And they open the floodgates to so much fiction that fact is swept away.
Where’s the vaccine against that?
Ken White (@popehat)/Washington Post:
6 Reasons Paul Manafort Got Off So Lightly
The criminal-justice system works at every stage and every level to give chances to people like Manafort.
Criticizing American criminal justice is fitting and proper. But there are two kinds of critiques—simplistic ones, which let the larger system off the hook, and complicated ones, which point out that many factors combined to get Manafort the dramatic break he enjoyed. Any criticism of Ellis as an individual is woefully inadequate. The American criminal-justice system works at every stage and every level to give chances to people like Manafort and deny them to poorer people.
First, there can’t be a sentence without an investigation. After 9/11, the United States Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney’s Offices that it controls shifted resources and focus from white-collar crime to drugs, guns, and immigration. In Los Angeles, the U.S. Attorney’s Office shuttered the Public Corruption and Government Fraud Section, where I served. Investigations of people like Manafort—people who have committed complex financial crimes—are time-consuming and resource-intensive. You can jail 20 drug traffickers for life with the resources it took to prosecute Manafort. America picks who goes to jail when it picks whom to investigate—which is one of the reasons so few people involved in the 2008 Wall Street debacle went to jail.