Posts tagged as “2020 Democratic Presidential Candidates”

Are the Democrats blowing it? Are they about to hand the election to the one man they despise above all else, Donald J. Trump? That’s the fear of David Frum, who makes precisely that case in a brilliant and insightful essay in The Atlantic.

Frum, of course, is the intellectual leader of the Never Trump movement and someone who’s moved left politically in the past 15 years, ever since warning of the “axis of evil” as a speechwriter for George W. Bush in 2003. Still, he is a keen observer of the political scene and someone well worth listening to.

Frum focuses his firepower on Bernie Sanders, who continues to surge in the polls. Bernie, Frum argues, can’t win. His positions on matters of economic and foreign policy are too extreme and too easily caricatured and attacked to prevail against Trump.

Plus: he has real trouble appealing to suburban women and African Americans, “the two groups whose greater or lesser enthusiasm will make the difference for a Trump challenger in November,” Frum argues.

Equally worrisome: Bernie has something of a glass jaw. He “is a fragile candidate… [who has never] had to face serious personal scrutiny.” He and his team

“are experts in Democratic Party factional infighting. Few have dealt with people who do not play by the rules of the mainstream Democratic Party. They have always been the rule breakers, the people who got inside the other team’s decision cycle.

“They have been the Minutemen fighting the Redcoats, picking off the other side’s regulars from behind trees and fences. Now they are about to experience what happens when a militia faces off on an open field against a ruthless modern army with cluster bombs and napalm. They will be shredded and torched.”

But if Bernie is the Democrats’ weakest candidate and a surefire loser in a general election matchup against Trump, the source of his political appeal is nonetheless instructive, says Frum, and something that Dems need to understand, internalize and embrace.

Simply put, Bernie is an old-fashioned socialist who focuses on bread-and-butter economic issues—jobs, healthcare, education, student debt relief, the social-safety net, et al. Other left-wing progressives running for president—Elizabeth Warren most notably—focus more on identity politics and on being “woke” or politically correct.

Frum is too polite to explicitly say it (especially in the pages of The Atlantic, which caters to woke, upscale progressives), but identity politics, left-wing cultural grievances, and PC purity tests are a real turnoff to most ordinary, working- and middle-class voters, black and white.

In fact, I believe that Trump’s 2016 win is far more attributable to the Democrats’ increasing embrace of cultural Marxism than it is to Trump’s embrace of economic populism.

Frum rightly fears that if the Dems continue to lean forward where they are weakest, on matters of culture and identity politics, they will lose in November to Trump. Thus he implores Democrats to lay off of their obsession with woke, identity politics, and, instead, to embrace Bernie’s more universal, broad-based, populist appeal.

It’s sound political advice, but will Democrats accept it?

Frum points to the fundamental divide within the Democratic Party: between the mostly white, affluent, upscale, college-educated progressives, for whom being woke is everything; and less affluent working- and middle-class blacks, who care more about the practical bread-and-butter issues that are at the heart of the Sanders’ campaign.

The white, affluent elite dominate the political dialogue and discussion and are the Dem’s donor class. However, the less affluent middle- and working class blacks are “in many ways the true base of the Democratic Party,” Frum says. They are the voters who will make all the difference in the South Carolina primary and, on Super Tuesday, in the South and industrial Midwest.

Ironically, Sanders has had real difficulty appealing to black voters; but Frum sees evidence that this is changing. “The latest CNN poll,” he notes, “showed Sanders erasing Biden’s lead among nonwhite voters—perhaps in spite of Sanders’s indifference to identity politics, or maybe, just maybe, because of that indifference” (though Frum acknowledges that this CNN poll may be an outlier).

If the polls are correct, then Biden is Frum’s only real hope for stopping Sanders and beating Trump. Biden has held up well, but he is still 77 years old and clearly not the man or candidate he was 10 or 20 years ago. He’s lost a step, and father time can be unkind.

Yet, as Frum observes, “the left-but-not-woke idea does have power—including with many members of racial minorities.” What we don’t yet know is whether that idea has enough power to overcome the Democratic Party’s woke brigades, or whether, instead, that idea will become their latest victim. All eyes are on Iowa, New Hampshire, and especially more racially and ethnically diverse South Carolina and Nevada. Stay tuned.

Feature photo credit: Associated Press via VOA News.

Bernie’s surge in Iowa and his steadfast core of support nationwide mask his extreme left-wing views. Most political reporting, after all, is focused on the competitive horserace and not on matters of substantive public policy. This has resulted in the norming or legitimization of Bernie’s far-left ideas, as voters are led to believe that the Vermont senator is just the latest in a long line of conventional Democratic presidential frontrunners.

Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Bernie, remember, is an avowed socialist fully committed to the redistribution of wealth, punishing and punitive rates of taxation, government control and coercion, public-sector monopolies, and American military withdrawal and retreat.

In short, Bernie is no JFK. He isn’t even Jimmy Carter or Barack Obama. How, then, did we arrive at this improbable and frightening moment where Bernie has become a bona fide presidential frontrunner who might well capture the Democratic presidential nomination and perhaps even the Presidency of the United States?

In an illuminating piece published today, National Review’s Jim Geraghty helps answer this question. Bernie, Geraghty points out, has led a charmed political life marked by incredible luck and a series of one unlikely success after another.

For example, Bernie first ran for office “in late 1971 because he volunteered and no one else did… He received one percent of the vote,” but gained valuable political experience. “In 1980, when he first ran for mayor of the town [of Burlington, Vermont, Bernie] won by 10 votes over a wildly overconfident five-term incumbent who ‘hardly bothered to campaign.’

“…In 1988,” Geraghty notes, Bernie “ran for Vermont’s open U.S. House seat and lost, in what could have been the end of his political career.” But alas, he ran again two years later in a six-way race.

The incumbent, Republican Peter Smith, had changed his mind on the so-called assault-weapons ban, infuriating gun owners and their political leaders. This led to an endorsement of the then-independent Sanders by . . . NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre. (“The gun vote brought us down,” Smith’s campaign manager later lamented.) Thus, with the help of the nation’s most powerful gun-rights group, Sanders was first elected to Congress. He’s been there ever since.

Yes, Bernie has been incredibly lucky. But as the old adage has it, you make your own luck. “Eighty percent of success is showing up,” explained Woody Allen.

Bernie has shown up, and he has competed politically, often when no one else would. Consequently, he is today knocking on the door to the Democratic presidential nomination, and he may well push the door open in Iowa Feb. 3. We’ll see.

The Trump Resemblance. In this way, Bernie bears a striking political resemblance to Donald Trump, another extraordinarily lucky politician who won (in 2016) largely just by showing up and competing politically. But like Trump, Bernie has his own peculiar ideas that run crosscurrent to the political mainstream.

We don’t hear much about these ideas because political reporting is what it is, and because of the cult of personality that surrounds “The Bern.” But make no mistake: Bernie’s radical positions are the essence of who and what he is politically. And precisely because his ideas are ideologically moored and grounded, they threaten to radically disrupt American life in ways Trump never dreamed of or even thought possible.

Trump’s peculiarities, after all, are his utter and complete self-absorption and narcissistic personality disorder. Bernie’s peculiarities, by contrast, have nothing to do with personality and everything to do with ideology, and, for that reason, are arguably far more dangerous. We will feel the burn, indeed.