The Moderates Uniting Behind Biden Is Good News ... for Bernie

By Erin Gloria Ryan, The Daily Beast

03 March 20

Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar are falling into the trap. By racing to endorse the uninspiring Joe Biden they will fire up progressives to back Bernie.

n Monday, Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg, two former future presidents who do not like each other, joined forces to campaign for Joe Biden, a man that neither of them seemed to feel that strongly about until about 12 hours ago. For funsies, Beto O’Rourke joined in. This move represents a consolidation of the most ardently comme ci comme ça forces in the Democratic party, a fiercely lukewarm coalition of support for the one candidate who the establishment agrees might be able to beat Bernie Sanders. By the end of all this, they hope, America will unite to declare Joe Biden “okay, I guess.” 

It was about a week ago that Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Biden shared a different stage, a debate stage where they spent fifty-seven hours shouting over, around, and about each other. This is one of many reasons this new affinity for Biden seems weird. On one hand, rivals becoming teammates is part of the political process. But on the other, the 2020 iteration of the rival-to-ally process of moderates dropping out and rushing to prop up Joe Biden’s staggering campaign is particularly uninspiring. 

This all feels so counterproductive. Amy Klobuchar radiates dislike at Pete Buttigieg in much the same way that my cat radiates dislike for my partner’s dog who won’t leave her alone. Carrying Joe Biden over the finish line has driven Klobuchar to Mayor Pete, and so it must, in her view, be pretty urgent. And Beto’s decision to jump in indicates that even skateboarding progressive-adjacents who sometimes drop tape of the f-bomb can get down with Biden. Is this going to discourage Bernie’s base of support? Absolutely not. Establishment apoplexy is to populists what spinach is to Popeye. Whipping America’s gooey ideological center into a froth is part of progressive candidates’ appeal. It’s why Chris Matthews’ (happy retirement, by the way) barking at Elizabeth Warren went viral among her supporters and why supercuts of party-line Democrat pundits on cable news wringing their hands about a possible Bernie nomination are gleefully shared among his supporters. The harder Joe Scarborough tsks, the better. 

The line from the Klobuchars-Buttigieg-style fall-in-line moderates is that a progressive nominee would inspire other people to either vote for Trump or stay home. First of all: who? Show me these actual people and establish to me that there are more of them than are former nonvoters turned out by their excitement about Bernie Sanders. Secondly, Amy, Pete, Beto, and lightly Republican Stephanie from sales who watches too much CNN and thinks she’s a pundit don’t know how other people are going to act on the other side of countless unknowable variables between here and Election Day any more than anybody else does. They assume that moderate fearmongering will convince Democratic voters to run away from scare-words they think Americans shouldn’t want (socialism) rather than toward policies that polling suggests Americans actually do want (socialized medicine, affordable education, a well-marbled billionaire in every pot). They must think that at the end of all this, Joe Biden will be president and we can pretend the entire Trump era never happened. 

Going back to how it was is not how progress works. It’s the opposite of progress. And nominating moderates out of fear is not how Democrats win. Klobuchar of all people should know this; one of her early mentors was the late Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone, a leading-edge progressive who introduced a single-payer healthcare bill into the Senate in 1993. Before it was cool! Part of me is convinced that if he hadn’t died in a plane crash in 2002, he’d be the president right now. 

Every election cycle, moderate Democrats and Republicans who call themselves “independent centrists”—because they don’t want to reckon with the fact that they vote like a racist—freak out over the unelectibility of progressive change. But when is the last time the consensus moderate candidate won a presidential election for Democrats? Obama campaigned on hope and coolness. Bill Clinton ran on change and horniness. The last Democratic president elected before that was Jimmy Carter, who ran on turning the thermostat down and wearing a nice sweater indoors. Hillary Clinton, winner of the popular vote, ultimately ran for president on a platform that contained many progressive tenets, including Lena Dunham. To rally behind a moderate is to do the opposite of the Dylan Thomas poem. Consider the electibility of rage, raging against the dying of the light, when you could instead go gently into that good night. 

As Amy and Pete shared a stage through dead-eyed D.C. smiles, as I read that Beto O’Rourke was joining them in spirit, I wondered what they were getting from all this. The idealist view is that they’re making a difficult decision in service of what they both personally believe is best for America. The cynical view is that they’ve had successful brand-building runs, and now it’s time to throw their support behind the guy who could one day appoint them to a cabinet post. The truth, in this case, at least, is probably somewhere in the middle.

Did Chris Matthews Reveal What the Democratic Establishment Really Fears?

By Jeff Cohen, Reader Supported News

03 March 20

ainstream news outlets keep pounding home the same message — that the “Democratic establishment” or “Democratic moderates” are worried sick that Bernie Sanders can’t beat Trump. They worry about a Trump landslide, and a “down-ballot disaster” in Congressional races.

Democratic insiders, we’re told, fear a re-run of 1972 — when progressive antiwar candidate George McGovern lost 49 of 50 states to Richard Nixon. Given our divided electoral map, with nearly 40 states safely blue or red, such a scenario in 2020 is thoroughly absurd.

That didn’t stop now-ex-MSNBC host Chris Matthews — who abruptly resigned Monday after having had an on-air, Sanders-induced crack-up in recent weeks — from offering this prophecy in mid-February: “I was there in 1972 at the Democratic convention when the people on the left were dancing in glee…. And they went on to lose 49 states in their glee. So that could happen again. So clearly. That’s what I see. It could happen again.”

Let’s put aside that mad prediction. Or Matthews’ paranoid Cold War comment linking Sanders somehow to public executions in New York’s Central Park. Or his comparison of Sanders’ triumph in Nevada to the finality of the Nazi conquest of France. Or his sexism.

And let’s recognize that even a crazed TV character — like Network’s Howard Beale — is capable of blurting out an important truth once in a while. On the eve of the Nevada caucus, Matthews let the cat out of the bag about the true fears of many in the Democratic establishment:

“I’m wondering whether the Democratic moderates want Bernie Sanders to be President. Maybe that’s too exciting a question to raise — they don’t like Trump at all. Do they want Bernie Sanders to take over the Democratic Party in perpetuity? If he takes it over, he sets the direction of the future of the party. Maybe they’d rather wait four years and put in a Democrat that they like.”

Notice that the worry here is not that Sanders will lose, but that he will win. And proceed to transform the Democratic Party. And presumably the country.

Matthews was not expressing fear of 1972. It was more like fear of 1932. That’s when Franklin Roosevelt (a Sanders hero) triumphed and — propelled by labor and socialist movements — transformed society with a New Deal benefiting working people.

The corporate media’s “Bernie can’t win” drumbeat should arouse skepticism among news consumers. First, because political outcomes are difficult to predict — especially after an unstable reality-TV star and a young African American (middle name “Hussein”) won the White House. Second, because few have been more wrong for so long in their predictions than mainstream media pundits and their pals in the Democratic establishment.

In 2000, the cautious candidate of the Democratic establishment, Al Gore, was sure to win. He didn’t. In 2004, they told us the ever-vacillating John Kerry was the most electable. He lost. In 2016, media and party elites pushed hard for Hillary Clinton against the Sanders challenge, insisting she was the candidate who could beat Trump. She didn’t.

As a newspaper of the corporate Democratic establishment (and endorser of Gore, Kerry, and Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries), The New York Times has long repeated the “Bernie can’t win” mantra. So I give the Times credit for publishing an important opposing view last week in a guest column by analyst Steve Phillips of Democracy in Color: “Bernie Sanders Can Beat Trump. Here’s the Math.”

Phillips cites head-to-head polling that shows Sanders beating Trump nationally and “outperforming Mr. Trump in polls of the pivotal battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.” 

Phillips says the changing electorate (even from 2016 to 2020) and the particular way that Sanders won the popular vote in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada augur well for Sanders as the candidate who best matches up against Trump:

“In all three early states, he received twice as much support from voters under 30 than his closest competitor. In Nevada, he received about 70 percent of the vote in the most heavily Latino precincts…. This will be the most racially diverse electorate ever, with people of color making up fully one-third of all eligible voters. The share of eligible voters from Generation Z (18-23-year-olds) will be more than twice as large in 2020 as it was in 2016.”

More than other contenders, Sanders has shown he can inspire the two fastest-growing, anti-Trump sectors of the electorate — youths and Latinos. Writes Phillips: “In Michigan and Wisconsin, which were decided in 2016 by roughly 11,000 and 22,700 votes respectively, close to a million young people have since turned 18.” He notes that “160,000 Latinos have turned 18” in Arizona, a state Trump won by only 91,000 votes.

I co-produced a documentary in which we interviewed working-class whites in the Rust Belt of Ohio, longtime Democrats who’d voted for Obama, voted for Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary and then jumped to Trump (often out of anger over NAFTA). These are the so-called “Obama-Trump voters” — and no Democratic nominee is likely to win more of them back than Sanders.

The progressive senator is also “most likely to reclaim those Democratic voters who defected to the Green Party” — the “Obama-Stein voters.” As Phillips points out: “The increase in votes for Jill Stein from 2012 to 2016 was greater than Mr. Trump’s margin of victory in Michigan and Wisconsin.”

As the South Carolina primary showed, one crucial voting bloc that Sanders has so far had trouble inspiring is older African Americans — although he beat Biden among blacks under 30, according to an NBC News exit poll.

If mainstream media spent less time on horse-race analysis and dubious predictions, and more time accurately presenting the candidates’ records, perhaps almost every voter of every color would know that Sanders was a brave civil rights activist at the University of Chicago — a student leader in the then-renowned Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), who “sat-in” and was arrested protesting discrimination against African Americans.

The pictures of young Bernie in action are dramatic and important to see.

At least as important as seeing Trump swing a golf club — or watching the latest anti-Sanders smear from TV pundits carrying on the Chris Matthews tradition.

Jeff Cohen is cofounder of the activism group RootsAction.org and founder of the media watch group FAIR. 

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.