Democrats

  Ralph Nader Radio Hour (7/20/19) “To go back to what they taught me in psychotherapy school, when confronted with a bully, kick him in the nuts. I really think this is what the Democrats need to be doing. They need to be going at Donald Trump with everything they have, and just calling him a racist is nowhere near enough. He’s also a criminal. He’s also a thief, and has been throughout his life. He’s a rapist. And that’s fairly well documented. These are words that really need to be attached to him, particularly if he’s going to do…

Running yet another corporate Democrat would play straight into the hands of the right. By Eric Blanc The Guardian (6/11/19) Many Americans agree on the urgent need to defeat Trump in 2020. But what kind of candidate can do it? Media pundits and Democratic Party insiders would have us believe that the path to the White House passes through the political center. While dismissing challenges from the party’s left wing, Democratic elites are also writing off large swathes of the country as irredeemable Republican bastions. Despite the ultimately disastrous results of this approach in 2016, Joe Biden’s currently high polling numbers imply that a number…

  By Tory Gavito & Sean Mcelwee GQ (5/30/19) At a critical juncture before the 2020 elections, the leadership of the Democratic Party is, perplexingly, abandoning key constituencies of its base, including young people, women, and people of color, as well as the policies that fire them up. In chasing a narrow swath of white swing voters, the leadership has ignored a broader coalition of voters who have delivered blue victories time and time again. Not only that—at times, it’s actively antagonizing them. Even though the multiracial coalition that re-elected Obama in 2012 and stayed home in 2016 was large enough…

Biden thinks he’s well positioned because after the shock of the Trump years, people want to go back to where we were. Wrong. By Hamilton Nolan The Guardian (4/30/19) You cannot understand politics in America until you understand that in the Democratic party, which ostensibly represents the left side of our nation’s political spectrum, there are a significant number of people who genuinely believe that Joe Biden is the best possible presidential nominee. Their belief is not cynical, or at least not wholly cynical. His constituency is real. It is not illuminating to think of them just as centrists, arguing for the…

Biden’s hardly the first politician to don rose-colored glasses when looking upon American history, but few Democrats wear them so regularly as he does today. By Josh Voorhess Portside (4/26/19) Joe Biden officially kicked off his long-expected 2020 campaign on Thursday with a video featuring footage from the 2017 white supremacist march and counterprotest in Charlottesville, Virginia. In his telling of the origin story of his latest White House bid, the moment President Donald Trump said that there were “some very fine people on both sides” of that clash was when Biden realized that “we are in the battle for the soul…

“Progressive challengers like Marie Newman will see more of this cronyism,” said Barrow, “but the progressive grassroots will have their backs.” By Eoin Higgins Common Dreams (4/26/19) The Democratic establishment is already taking steps to stop insurgent progressive challengers to the party’s incumbents. Marie Newman, who is challenging Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-Ill.) in the 2020 primary for the Illinois 3rd District, told Politico on Friday that a number of vendors have already dropped out of her campaign—the direct result of a rule put in place by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) banning consultants and other campaign mechanics from working with anyone running against…

Democratic centrists need to accept that the Donkey’s moving in a new direction now; fighting it by demonizing the left just makes the calamitous prospect of a second Trump term more likely. By Ed Kilgore Intelligencer (3/5/19) Democratic centrists — or you can call them New Democrats or moderates or “pragmatic progressives” or whatever label you choose — have had quite an impressive run in national politics. They have won seven consecutive Democratic presidential nominations (or perhaps eight, depending on how you classify Michael Dukakis), and then went on to win the popular vote in six of those general elections….

Obama and the centrist Democrats he backs are something like the old “Rockefeller Republicans” of the 70s and early 80s. They didn’t realize how out of step with the times they were until it was too late. By Bhaskar Sunkara The Guardian (4/8/19) Barack Obama is worried about the Democratic party. This weekend, he told a crowd at an Obama Foundation event in Berlin that the party is becoming a “circular firing squad” targeting those “straying from purity” on certain issues. Leading figures around the party have indeed moved to the left since he left office two years ago. Thanks in…

  By Max Greenwood The Hill (3/28/19) Health care was always likely to weigh heavily on the race for the White House. On Monday, the prominence of that issue became even more certain. The Trump administration’s decision this week to support the complete invalidation of the Affordable Care Act gave Democratic presidential hopefuls a new opening to pitch health care proposals of their own. And while a handful of candidates has backed the Medicare for All plan popularized by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), many have put their own spin on the proposal or outlined different approaches entirely. Here’s where the Democratic candidates…