BernieSanders2020. con/mainstream
Presidential candidate/Democrat frontrunner Senator Bernie Sanders is a bundle of contradictions.
Writer Kevin Williamson described Sanders as “the creepy Brooklyn [communist] who for some reason represents Vermont in the Senate, functionally as a member of the Democratic party, [a]…political organization to which he does not belong but whose presidential nomination he nonetheless is seeking a second time.”
Democrats are split on Sanders, but, unlike observers amused by Sanders’ anomalies, none of them think Bernie is either funny “peculiar” or funny “ha-ha.” Why not?
Because Sanders, an avowed socialist, speaks to – and for – significant numbers of fellow socialists in the party who don’t find him at all peculiar. “Moderate” Democrats who would more skillfully obscure their party’s harder left leanings find Sanders’ popularity among likely primary voters decidedly unfunny and fret that a socialist cannot attract enough worker and suburban swing votes in “Rust Belt,” “Blue Firewall” states that Hillary Clinton lost – Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and others – to defeat President Donald Trump.
Mr. Trump’s emergence from a crowd of 2016 GOP hopefuls to win nomination and the presidency showed that unexpected things can happen in a large primary field. Their contempt for President Trump, and optimism that lightning might strike twice, has enticed nearly two dozen mostly second/third-string Democrats into the 2020 race. In a field even larger than the 2016 Republicans’, the possibilities seem limitless, and success, to the hopefully ambitious, at least, imaginable.
Establishment Democrats should worry. 2016’s large Republican field permitted the Republican Party’s base – its genuine voice – to express its dissatisfaction with GOP insiders who ran losers in 2008 and 2012. A large Democratic primary field could similarly empower its voters, expose the party’s underlying socialist framework, and subject their eventual nominee to an electoral shellacking.
The Democrat field overall is lackluster. For months, Democrats have been held hostage by three outspoken, publicity-hungry, openly-socialist freshman House members – and the party’s presidential aspirants are already showing symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome. Most have been reduced to defending Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s radical Green New Deal and excusing Ilhan Omar’s and Rashida Tlaib’s overt anti-Semitism.
Robert Francis O’Rourke is an arm-waving, cliché-spouting arrested-adolescent; Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren comes across as a scold, a knuckle-rapping spinster schoolmarm; Pete Buttigieg is the openly gay mayor of a small blue city in a red state (Indiana) he cannot carry; New Jersey Senator Cory Booker is a compulsive talker, usually about…not much; California Senator Kamala Harris publicly advocates deal-killers like open borders, socialized medicine and tax increases – indeed, they all do; if nominated, old (nearly 78 by Election Day), touchy-feely former-VP Joe Biden has promised a younger, intersectional, liberal/socialist running mate; and the other dozen-plus are…who, again?
Clearly, elderly socialist Bernie Sanders is well inside the Democratic Party’s new mainstream. Accordingly, any nominee’s “Democrats are/I’m moderate” con will be a tough sell.
Granted, Sander’s heavy Brooklyn accent and his spittle-flecked, red-faced, grouchy-Muppet persona are entertaining, but American socialists remain too few to elect one president.
No Democrat pushing eighty is electable. None of them may be.
