I think that Sanders could be much more palatable if he cut the
revolutionary talk and returned to "new deal" politics. I don't know if I
could have been comfortable as a Republican 40 years ago as I was not a
supporter of Nixon or Ford. I felt that the Republican Party was out of
touch as I recall and I felt that government should be providing services
and actual jobs which they did back in the sixties and seventies. Some of my
first job experience came from government funded jobs through the old CETA
program. I also did not support the Republican attitudes toward criminal
justice issues at that point. but at any rate in some ways I am feeling that
there are things in the Democratic Party especially in California today that
I am having trouble swallowing.
Chuck
-----Original Message-----
From: Miriam Vieni
Sent: Thursday, March 31, 2016 7:21 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Could President Sanders defeat a Republican
congress
Chuck,
But the Democratic Party has changed radically in the past 30 years. Given
your political orientation, I wonder if you would have supported FDR and his
New Deal because actually, that is what Ssanders is talking about, old
fashioned FDR New deal politics. He's using the word, "revolution", to
indicate that in order to get the party and the country back on track, very
large numbers of people must be involved. The current Democratic Party is
very much like the Republican Party used to be. Perhaps back 30 or 40 years
ago, you would have been comfortable in the Republican Party.
Miriam
________________________________
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Charles Krugman
(Redacted sender "ckrugman" for DMARC)
Sent: Thursday, March 31, 2016 7:44 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Could President Sanders defeat a Republican
congress
this article does a better job than I could of putting my thoughts in to
perspective as to why I haven't jumped on the Sanders bandwagon and why I'm
having trouble buying in to his campaign. To start I must that I am a proud
liberal Democrat (note the differentiation from progressive). My goal is not
a political revolution but is to elect Democrats and further the Democratic
Party locally and nationally by making sure that Republicans are voted out
of office. While the Obama Administration could have done some things better
I am not ashamed of its performance. I have said in earlier posts that I
believe the problem has been the Tea Party in Congress and in state and
local government. I believe that at the time the banks and auto industry
needed to be bailed out to protect America as a whole and the economy. Yes
the bail out might not have gone far enough for the average consumer but the
consequences of not having it might have been much worse. I want a candidate
to show partisanship which is why I supported O'Malley until he dropped out
of the race. Perhaps I'm promoting the status quo but I just can't get
excited about the issues that the Sanders campaign presents and the
solutions that it offers.
Chuck
From: Frank Ventura <mailto:frank.ventura@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, March 26, 2016 1:12 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Could President Sanders defeat a Republican
congress
From:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/01/25/could-president-sanders-defea
t-republican-congress/SflnJZh7gwLqHtNEaNOF0N/story.html
Could President Sanders defeat a Republican Congress? - The Boston Globe
Page 2 of 6
Cohen writes:
Surely, because he serves in the Senate, Sanders knows that a public option
in Obamacare didn't fail because Obama didn't advocate for it; it failed
because Democrats in Congress refused to go along with it.
Bernie Sanders listened to a question at a town hall apoearance in Iowa
Falls, Iowa, on Monday.
Mark Kauzlarich/REUTERS
Bernie Sanders listened to a question at a town hall apoearance in Iowa
Falls, Iowa, on Monday.
By Michael A. Cohen January 26, 2016
Bernie Sanders on the campaign trail is quite good. His rap on income
inequality and the distorting effects of big money in American politics is
persuasive and effective. But as I listened to him speak in Nashua last
week, I couldn't help notice there was something missing from his stump
speech: Republicans.
It's a bit of an odd omission, seeing as Sanders is running for the
Democratic nomination for president. But it also speaks to one of the
fundamental problems with Sanders' campaign and his theory of political
change.
Now to be sure, it's not as if Sanders fails to criticize Republicans (he
does); it's that his focus lies elsewhere.
He says, "What we've got to do is create a political revolution which
revitalizes American democracy; which brings millions of young people and
working people into the political process." In a recent speech on Wall
Street, he listed the iniquities of the One Percent, but never mentioned the
GOP.
This language is at pace with a campaign message that views money, not
Republicans, as the true impediment to transformative political change. But
just a cursory review of the past seven years of American politics suggests
that Sanders is wrong.
First and foremost, to say that nothing real will happen until we have a
political revolution is refuted by history. Since President Obama took
office, Congress passed a health care law that expanded access to 20 million
people, reformed the student loan program, made massive investments in clean
energy and infrastructure, and strengthened financial regulation. What
allowed this to happen wasn't a political revolution. It also wasn't even
the election of a Democratic president. The simple fact is that much of this
happened because Democrats, for a brief period, had a filibuster-proof
majority in the Senate and control of the House.
Democrats have enjoyed far less success now that Republicans control
Congress. GOP opposition on Capitol Hill is not simply a result of campaign
donations from Sheldon Adelson, the Koch brothers, and Wall Street - three
of Sanders' key bogeymen. It wasn't these folks that had the most to lose
from health care reform; and indeed many on Wall Street and in the business
community disagreed with Republican opposition to immigration and watched in
horror as Republicans in Congress played chicken with the debt limit. The
driver for these efforts is politics and the ideological preferences of
Republican politicians and voters.
But the second problem here is that Sanders, though running as a Democrat,
is diminishing, even disrespecting, the accomplishments of Democrats.
Implicit in Sanders' call for single-payer health care is that Obamacare is
simply inadequate to the challenge of ensuring greater access to care and
cutting costs. Implicit in Sanders' call for greater financial regulation is
that Dodd-Frank is inadequate reform. Implicit in Sanders' call for free
higher education is that Democratic efforts to improve the student loan
program and ensure free tuition for community college is that these measures
are insufficient.
Now of course Sanders would likely suggest that one needs a political
revolution to ensure the kind of changes that go beyond these half-measures.
But if one believes that, why is Sanders running for president?
Surely, because he serves in the Senate, Sanders knows that a public option
in Obamacare didn't fail because Obama didn't advocate for it; it failed
because Democrats in Congress refused to go along with it.
If it is Congress - particularly Republicans - that has blocked reform,
shouldn't Sanders' focus be on electing more liberal Democrats to Congress?
I asked his campaign how much time he's spent over the years helping
Democrats get elected to Congress. I didn't get a response. But it bears
noting that Sanders isn't even a Democrat, and from my admittedly crude
Google searches I couldn't find much evidence that he's actively campaigned
on behalf of Democratic House and Senate candidates.
That stands in contrast to his opponents, Martin O'Malley and Hillary
Clinton. O'Malley criticized Sanders during the last Democratic debate for
not campaigning on behalf of Democratic candidates in South Carolina. For
her part, Clinton campaigned in 20 states at the tail end of the 2014
midterm election. In fact, while Clinton helped to raise $18 million for
Democrats in 2015, Sanders didn't raise a dime for the DNC - and she's
identified helping down-ballot Democrats and rebuilding local Democratic
parties as top priorities.
As Sanders, who has been in Washington for decades surely must know,
Congress today is a dysfunctional mess, one in which Republicans block
pretty much every single reform effort proposed by Democrats. Why would
President Sanders be successful in overcoming Republican obstructionism? If
he believes the key to creating a political revolution would come through
overturning Citizen United or ending the influence of super PACS or moving
toward public funding of elections or ending redistricting, how exactly
would he accomplish that?
The point of course is that he wouldn't, not without a solid majority of
Democrats in Congress and even then much of his agenda would be open to
negotiation.
Now, in fairness, lots of presidential candidates talk about legislation on
the campaign trail that has no chance of becoming law. Clinton is just as
guilty of this, but she's not the one talking about a political revolution
or being indifferent about electing more Democrats to Congress.
If anything, political change in America rarely begins with the actions of
presidents - it usually ends with them, as political leaders, pushed by
activists and social movements, are often the last group to jump on a
political bandwagon. This has been true from enacting laws to protect
workers and the civil rights movement to more modern fights in support of
same-sex marriage.
Sanders' focus on the presidency as a spark for massive political change is
a particular affliction that affects the Democratic Party, where more
emphasis is placed on electing a president than on the hard work of electing
Democrats not just to Congress but at the state and local level, too.
In a sense, this is what is so troubling about what Sanders is doing. It's
not just that he is presenting his supporters with a simplistic
understanding of how political change happens, he is merely setting them up
for crushing disappointment. If, by some outside chance, Sanders became
president, his agenda would be dead on arrival. We'd see four more years of
gridlock and four more years of dysfunction. If Sanders really wanted to
push his agenda, he would have spent the last few years electing like-minded
Democrats to Congress. But I suppose that's less fun than running for
president.
Michael A. Cohen's column appears regularly in the Globe. Foll0w him on
Twitter @speechboy71.
