SHUT THE DOOR, THEY'RE COMING THROUGH THE WINDOW

Remember when the execrable Mitch McConnell censured Elizabeth Warren when she read a letter from Coretta Scott King on the floor of the Senate opposing Jeff Sessions’ nomination for Attorney General?  When she refused to shut up, McConnell uttered the famous line, “Nevertheless, she persisted.” That was in February, 2017. 

Guess what?  She’s still persisting.  And now she’s making Bernie Sanders nervous. 

Joe Biden makes a natural foil for Bernie, just as Hillary Clinton did in 2016.  Sanders knows how to run against a conventional 20th century Democrat.  That doesn’t mean he’d win.  My guess is that, in a two-person race between Sanders and Biden, the result would be pretty similar to the Sanders-Clinton race four years ago – Bernie would put up a respectable fight, but he’d ultimately lose.

But he’s not in a two-person race, and while Team Sanders was focused on taking Joe Biden down a peg, Elizabeth Warren kept persisting.  She’s moved into third place in the polls, and she’s gaining on Bernie. 

Bernie’s problem is that he wants the Democratic nomination, but he doesn’t want it badly enough to actually be a Democrat.  Instead, his strategy is to run against the Democratic establishment, and attack the “corporate wing of the Democratic Party.”  Recent polls suggest that while his true believers appreciate this approach, it doesn’t seem to be winning him support from actual Democrats.  I’m no political consultant, but since he’ll need Democratic votes to win Democratic primaries, it strikes me that Bernie’s strategy puts him at a competitive disadvantage.   

Bernie recently argued that the reason Elizabeth Warren was gaining on him is because people want to vote for a woman.  That may be true, but it doesn’t account for the fact that it’s Warren who’s moving up in the polls, not Tulsi Gabbard or Amy Klobuchar.  In MoveOn’s most recent poll of its membership, Elizabeth Warren ranked first, with 37.8%.  Bernie was in second place, with 16.5%, trending in the wrong direction. 

Maybe it’s just as simple as this.  When given a choice between a progressive independent and a progressive Democrat, progressive Democrats are likely to prefer the progressive Democrat.

Meanwhile, Mr. Mainstream, Joe Biden (14.9% in the MoveOn poll, good enough for third place) keeps insisting that things were better in the good old days, when you could have civil conversations with unreconstructed racists.  At first, I thought Biden’s talk about reaching out to Republicans was just campaign boilerplate, the kind of thing you say to impress Beltway pundits.  It’s worrisome that Biden has doubled down on his “let’s don’t be beastly to the racists” theme.  It’s not impossible that a nation worn down by four years of Trump fatigue would embrace Mainstream Joe, but it’s hard to see how a someone like that could govern effectively. 

Biden’s a well-meaning guy who won’t do anything crazy.  He’ll do his best to undo the damage that Trump has done, as Jimmy Carter tried to do in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal.  But I fear that some of the roadblocks President Carter faced would likely surface for President Biden.  Carter was hamstrung by members of his own party, many of whom had presidential aspirations themselves.  Biden (like Bernie) would be the oldest person ever to be elected president – 79 when he took the oath of office in 2021, and 84 when re-election comes around in 2024.  If Good Old Joe is elected in 2020, many of his ostensible allies in Congress will start their campaigns for the 2024 nomination immediately, and they may decide that being seen as a Biden disciple isn’t a winning strategy.  And that’s to say nothing of Mitch McConnell and a united Republican opposition that desperately wants the new Democratic president to fail.

Speaking of the Republican Party, Cornell history professor Lawrence Glickman points to a 1956 newspaper article (link below) which describes an attempt by prominent southern politicians of the day to create a new political organization.  They called it the Federation for Constitutional Government, and its goal was to resist social welfare programs and racial integration.  They calculated that racism would win votes in the South, and that opposing government support for health, education, and welfare would appeal to voters in the North and West. 

They weren’t exactly wrong, were they?  They – including Joe Biden’s future Senate civility-buddies Herman Talmadge, James Eastland, and Strom Thurmond – basically wrote the blueprint for the modern Republican Party, sixty years before the rise of Donald Trump. 

All that civil discourse they had back then didn’t keep Dixiecrat senators from opposing civil rights legislation to the bitter end.  Will civil discourse turn Mitch McConnell into a good faith compromiser?  I say no.  Not with President Biden, and certainly not with President Sanders.  Were Bernie to win the presidency, the most likely scenario I can imagine would be a funhouse mirror version of the Trump administration, in which President Sanders tries to use executive powers to implement policy, and is challenged in court every time by his opponents.  But since Sanders is well to the left of most congressional Democrats, some of the challenges are likely to be bipartisan.

The Overton Window is a harsh mistress.  In the summer of 2015, Bernie felt like a breath of fresh air, and I supported his candidacy.  Bernie pushed the Democratic Party to the left, and good for him.  But in 2019, the Overton Window belongs to newcomers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Pramila Jayapal, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus.  Bernie Sanders is no longer the only progressive game in town.  Many of his policy positions are now solidly in the Democratic mainstream, or moving rapidly in that direction. 

I wish Bernie could accept that as validation of his life’s work, and try to sustain that work by throwing his support to someone like Elizabeth Warren, or any actual Democrat with policy preferences compatible with his.  But, as John McCain famously said, once you decide you want to be president, the only cure for that ambition is embalming fluid.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.  I will vote for either Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden if one of them is the Democratic nominee in 2020.  Either would be vastly preferable to a second Trump term.  But there are better candidates in the race.

https://www.newspapers.com/clip/33166656/corvallis_gazettetimes/