rogers park bryan wrote:
Seems a lot of "Im a democrat, but the party is too far left" people popping up these days.
Yeah, as the party has moved far to the right economically. These people you speak of are dumb.
This is good:
https://newrepublic.com/article/145136/ ... atic-partyQuote:
Jim Kessler, vice president of the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way, opposes this approach—and the idea that Warren represents the new party mainstream. “She represents a wing of the party, and she represents it well,” he told me. The Democrat he thinks best represents the party consensus is the one who’s been preaching bipartisanship and moderation in recent weeks: former Vice President Joe Biden. But Kessler may end up in the minority. Walter told me “there is still a deep love and appreciation for Joe Biden, but his policies, especially if he runs basically where he’s been in the past and where he was with the Obama administration—I don’t know that it would be as popular as where Warren is coming from.”
That’s why her politics are intriguing to Democrats of many stripes. “The contest between Sanders and Clinton reflected progressive populism and liberal feminism,” Raskin said. “Elizabeth Warren is someone who merges them both. You could view her as the synthesis of the divides in the party we had in the 2016 election—a candidate who would leave nothing out and leave nobody behind.” Polling shows her agenda, which overlaps significantly with Sanders’s, isn’t just popular with Democrats. Most voters supported a $15-an-hour minimum wage, according to Pew survey last year. “Broad, bipartisan majorities support debt-free higher education,” a Demos poll found last October. The notion that the system is rigged in favor of big corporations certainly isn’t out of step with public opinion. Like all progressives, Warren has work to do selling single-payer healthcare, which doesn’t yet have clear majority support. But enthusiasm for Medicare for All is growing among Democrats in Washington and across the country.
Himes has reservations about Warren’s broader appeal. “How would Elizabeth Warren play in Ohio?” he mused on Tuesday. “It’s a huge question, and I’m not sure I have a preconceived notion. On the one hand, I think she has an authenticity and a clear passion that is going to be appealing to a lot of people. How she would manage gun issues that are pretty important in rural Wisconsin, other social and cultural issues, I think is an interesting question.” The question is whether Democrats should even be tailoring their message for places like rural Wisconsin, versus trying to energize a diverse swath of voters across the country. Raskin is fond of saying he has no ambition to be in the political center; he aims to occupy the moral center, and bring the politics to him. That’s a safer stance for a liberal congressman than a presidential candidate, and centrists rightly observe that public opinion hasn’t caught up to a whole host of progressive priorities. But as Kuttner said, mainstreaming “pocketbook populism” is Warren’s great gift, and it’s notable that even moderates like Himes—an ally of Wall Street and leader of an overtly moderate congressional caucus—won’t count her out. “If she can make the leap to being a candidate that played in the rural midwest,” he told me, “it could be really interesting to watch.”
I think Warren would play just fine in Ohio, actually. She'd do well in a lot of places where Mother failed. But yeah, it's hard to argue that she's a perfect compromise between the liberal feminists who think women in power magically make everything okay and the real progressives who care about ideas and policies.
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Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
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