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A mere 24 hours after Bernie Sanders called it quits on his second presidential run, the Vermont senatorsyouthful supporters had a message for Joe Biden: Dont let us down.

We need you to champion the bold ideas that have galvanized our generation and given us hope in the political process, said a letter from the #EarnOurVote initiative, a coalition of eight youth-focused groups, including the Sunrise Movement, March for Our Lives, and Justice Democrats. Their four-page memo outlined the commitments the former vice presidentwho failed to win muchsupport from voters under 45 during the primariesshould take up in the general election campaign to earn the support of our generation and unite the party.

One of their main requests: that Biden appoint ardent progressives to key executive branch positions. The groups want left-of-center lawmakers who endorsed Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren to co-chair Bidens transition team; they want liberal economists like Joseph Stiglitz to serve on Bidens National Economic Council; and they want a trusted progressive to run the Presidential Personnel Office with the aim of keeping a Biden administration free of corruption. They also wanted Biden to refrain from appointing any current or former Wall Street executives or corporate lobbyists, or people affiliated with the fossil fuel, health insurance, or private prison corporations, to your transition team, advisor roles of cabinet.

The document is the first high-profile manifestation of an organized effort among progressive activists, scholars, and lawmakers that quietly came together over the last few weeks as Bidennot Sanderssalted away the Democratic nomination for president. The distaste many on the left have for the former vice presidents candidacy stems from his ties to the banking industry and centrist economists, among other things. Now that Biden is moving ahead to the general election, progressives are determined to exert what power they have to shape his future appointments.

In 2008, liberals felt theyd been steamrolled by the Obama transition, which unfolded largely without their input. The team installed Clinton-era neoliberals such as Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers into high-level roles, in which capacity they were in turngiven the keys to the recovery from the Great Recession.

Eight years later, progressive groups had armed themselves for an ideological battle over the make-up of the would-be Clinton administration. The Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank, had built a bench of 150 candidates for critical economic policy jobs under Clinton. The Revolving Door Project, a progressive watchdog group that tracks corporate influence, dug into potential appointees it found undesirable based on their connections to business interests. Elizabeth Warren had brought Clinton her own list of potential appointees. Sanders, meanwhile, chose to spend the capital hed accumulated in his formidable primary fight on changes to DNC rules that he believed would level the playing field for party outsiders like himself.

Clinton, a policy wonk at heart, ultimately left little room for influence when it came to her potential appointees. But progressives were heartened by some of her choices, such as inequality expert Heather Boushey, the chief economist at the left-leaning Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Clinton had tapped her as the chief economist on her transition team and her likely pick to lead the White Houses National Economic Council.

At first blush, Bidens long political career and Obama ties might make him seem like a worst-case scenario for progressives who want to exert some influence. Hes spent nearly five decades at the highest levels of federal elected office, and his team had been intimately involved in the 2008 Obama transition that many on the left decried. But the former vice president ran a campaign that, for the most part, remained ideologically agnostic and scant on policy details. That, in combination with his White House experience, may actually set the table well for progressives hoping to exercise some control, says Chris Lu, who served as a deputy secretary of labor during the Obama administration and executive director of the ObamaBiden transition.

Bidens team knows its not just about the 100-day legislative strategythey know he needs a regulatory strategy around what Trump regs need to be turned around, and a budget, which is usually unveiled sometime in February, Lu explains. Thats to the benefit of the progressive community, because a lot of their ideas can be translated more readily by folks who understand the process.

There are also some signs that Biden wants to cooperate with the left. Last month, Biden adopted Elizabeth Warrens bankruptcy proposal, a plan that would reverse much of the 2005 bankruptcy bill he had championed as a US senator. As progressive youth groups released their list of demands last week, Biden announced that he supported dropping the Medicare qualifying age to 60 and canceling student debt for some low- and middle-income studentsmodest overtures to the progressive activists. And on Monday, Sanders and Biden announced that their trusted advisers would team up on six policy task forces focusing on topics such as the economy, climate change, and criminal justice, an effort the Biden campaign says will lay the groundwork for Bidens general election platform and presidential transition.

So far, the reception among liberal leaders and Sanders loyalists has been flat. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who had endorsed Sanders, told theNew York Times that Bidens concessions were almost insulting in their meagerness. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who co-chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told theTimes she needs to see real movement from the former veep.

Lu has been in touch with a number of the progressive groups seeking advice on how to have a say in Bidens appointees. Hes encouraged them to think about positions that touch a lot of decisions, such as those in the Office of Management and Budget and the National Economic Council. He also says they should consider whom they might want named to lower-level positions beyond the Cabinet. Everyone sort of thinks about the Cabinetand the Cabinet is important, Lu says, but who runs NOAA, for instance, can send an important signal about climate change priorities, and if you want something done on workers rights, you need someone at OSHA who gets it.

Other important players are reprising some aspect of their 2016 roles. The Roosevelt Instituteto which a pair of former Warren policy aides, Julie Margetta Morgan and Bharat Ramamurti, recently decampedhas been reaching out to experts, sources familiar with their work tell Mother Jones, but the think tank isnt currently performing the same bench-building effort it undertook in 2016. We believe its important to have progressive, reform-minded personnel that are ready and able to use the full power of the government to make a difference in peoples everyday lives, said spokesperson Ariela Weinberger when asked about the early outreach.

The Revolving Door, led by Jeff Hauser, is working with allied groups to identify people theyd prefer that Biden not appoint to his administration. Among those on Revolving Doors no-fly list: Larry Fink, chair and CEO of the financial services behemoth BlackRock, who Biden donors floated as a Treasury pick at a recent fundraiser; Erskine Bowles, a former Bill Clinton chief of staff whoco-chaired an Obama administration task force that called for cuts in benefits for the elderly, veterans, and government workers; and Jeffrey Zients, Obamas final director of the National Economic Council who now serves as president of the Cranemere Group, a London-based private equity firm. Hes a bundler for the Biden campaign and, during his White House tenure, Zients had been a proponent of austerity. I fear he might be this generations Robert Rubin, Hauser says,referring to the finance-friendly Clinton administration Treasury secretary.

One remaining question is what role Elizabeth Warrens will play. The Massachusetts senator has remained front and center in the debate over the nations response to the coronavirus pandemic, releasing plans to safeguard the economy and protect voting rights. She endorsed Biden on Tuesday, but has yet to announce any formal collaborations with the former vice president.*

But theres reason to believe she may reprise her 2016 efforts. Dont forget that Warrens entrance into national politics came by way of her feud with Biden over bankruptcy legislation in the aughts. She was a Harvard bankruptcy professor, then, and Biden was a senator whom she accused of performing energetic work on behalf of the credit card companies. In those days she saw him as a man from whom working families needed to be protected. Now hes the standard-bearer of the party that wants to speak for them.

*This story has been updated to reflect Elizabeth Warrens endorsement of Joe Biden.

See the original post here:
Joe Biden Is the Democratic Nominee. Progressives Are Worried About His Cabinet. - Mother Jones

Cohen said he views Warren as the strongest unity candidate and moderate Sen. Amy Klobuchar as the most divisive choice for Bidens running mate. And Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, has also been singing Warrens praises in talks with the Biden campaign.

She would be a wonderful choice, Nelson said. Were watching her leadership play out in real time during this coronavirus crisis and she would unite the party.

Warren's advocates argue that she would bring a number of strengths to the ticket, including a strong record on many progressive issues and a robust small-dollar fundraising operation.

A recent POLITICO/Morning Consult poll showed Warren with the highest net favorability ratings of the potential VP candidates listed. And her experience in the Senate and in launching a consumer advocacy agency could play well with Democrats who said in the survey that they value experience for Bidens vice presidential pick more than race, age, or ideology.

Despite the scar tissue from the primary, some Sanders campaign officials said Warren is the most viable progressive in contention for Bidens vice presidential selection.

I think one of the things we should do as a progressive movement is, given that he cant pick Bernie he said hes going to pick a woman we should push for the most progressive woman, Khanna said. And in my view, thats Elizabeth Warren.

Yet other Sanders allies and aides are outright dismissive of any effort to make Warren the consensus pick of the left. Sanders campaign leadership believes that her assertion that Sanders privately told her a woman couldnt win, which he denied, hurt him among female voters and amounted to a personal betrayal. Sanders was also deeply disappointed that she didnt endorse him after she dropped out of the primary, and it even made him question her progressivism, a person close to their talks previously told POLITICO.

"Youre not going to see a lot of groups who endorsed Bernie pushing for [Warren] given how things ended, said one leader of a group that backed Sanders. The person privately believes Warren would probably be the person who would win over the most progressives but said the organization would likely stay mum given the raw feelings.

A former aide to Sanders' 2020 campaign added, Elizabeth Warren has a progressive voting record and progressive ideas and has been a progressive leader. But if the goal is to bring disaffected Democrats into the fold, I think the primary and how that played out complicates her ability to do that.

Many former Warren aides scoff at the finger-pointing and say Sanders campaign has itself to blame for his defeat.

Others Sanders supporters recommended people other than Warren to be Bidens running mate.

Rep. Marc Pocan (D-Wis.), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and a top Sanders endorser, talked up his home state senator Tammy Baldwin. At the same time, he disagreed with the notion that Sanders and Warren arent on good terms and said their teams have worked together with the CPC on battling the coronavirus.

I dont know if we have a particular VP candidate, he said of progressives generally. Personally, Im a huge fan of Tammy Baldwins. Wisconsins a must-win state. Shes a progressive. She won the state by 11 points.

Melissa Byrne, the former grassroots director for Sanders in California and New York, suggested Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) on Twitter Tuesday, and Sanders policy adviser Terrel Champion cheered her on.

Other progressives are advocating for the vice presidential pick to be a woman of color. Groups including Indivisible, She the People, and Latino Victory Project signed a letter in March calling for just that.

Jennifer Epps-Addison, the co-executive director of Center for Popular Democracy, which endorsed Sanders, seconded that call. "We think the VP pick must be a woman of color, she told POLITICO, adding that Stacey Abrams is qualified beyond measure.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on Wednesday also signaled she wants a progressive woman of color on the ticket in interviews with POLITICO and ABCs The View. Asked which woman she wanted to see on the ticket, Ocasio-Cortez said to have our first female vice president and to have that be a woman of color is a significant milestone.

But she then subtly acknowledged the lack of a consensus choice: In terms of who that is, you know, its really hard to kind of, um, to point some out because there are leaders out there, but, you know, I dont think we have a shortage of them. Thats for sure.

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Progressive movement wary of Warren for VP - POLITICO

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Editor:

With democracy on Novembers ballot, progressives must act to ensure that we preserve the system of government envisioned by the Founding Fathers.

We have already won the war of ideas. Especially with the onslaught of COVID-19, Americans increasingly favor universal health coverage. A majority of all Americans believe that climate change should be a top priority for the president and Congress.

Our only chance to meaningfully address the many critical issues facing our country public and personal health, the environment, resuscitation of our economy, wealth inequality, student debt, immigration, mass incarceration, public education and more is through our vote in the November election.

Another Supreme Court justice in the mold of the two most recent appointees would be fatal to our civil liberties and civil rights.

The self-anointed pro-life conservatives have been exposed as not even remotely valuing life. They have allowed COVID-19 to become a catastrophe and caused countless unnecessary deaths by first denying the pandemic and then delaying and bumbling its response.

They told us the elderly should become human sacrifices on the altar of the stock market so business as usual can quickly resume. They suggested we pack the churches on Easter despite a life-threatening contagion ravaging our country.

ADVERTISEMENTSkip

................................................................

They withheld life-saving equipment and supplies to punish blue states or had governors who failed to show sufficient appreciation. What could be less life affirming?

Our votes will write the next chapter of American history. Lets write a chapter that cherishes our democracy and works to make it better.

Sincerely,

William C. Bumgarner

Bernalillo

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Letter to the Editor: Progressives must vote well in Nov. - Albuquerque Journal

Bernie Sanders campaigns in Ann Arbor, Mich., March 8, 2020. (Lucas Jackson/Reuters)The Populists Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left Are Rising, by Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti (Strong Arm Press, 244 pp., $19.99)

Timing is everything for election-cycle treatises, which tend to have a shorter shelf life than do other political books. Praise a candidates legacy too late or envisage a political partys emerging strength too early and you submit your thesis to the unpredictability of the voters. Such is the case with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjetis manifesto, The Populists Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left Are Rising, which was released in February. The nascent revolution at its heart the supposed leftright populist realignment that animates the duos project risks being crushed in the crib.

Ball, a former MSNBC host, and Enjeti, a former Daily Caller correspondent, have attracted praise from a heterodox crowd that ranges from Glenn Greenwald to Steve Bannon. The two are cohosts of Rising, a fire-breathing display of populist punditry, from both the left (Ball) and the right (Enjeti), that is produced by The Hill and streams daily on YouTube. While the show borrows the aesthetic of the mainstream media, it is self-consciously iconoclastic. In an era of insurgent politics and rampant skepticism of media, its the BernieTrump show that owns the elites. Despite starting less than a year ago, Risings audience has ballooned to 400,000 subscribers on YouTube, with over 3.4 million hours watched in the last month enough fans to allow The Populists Guide to debut on Amazons best-seller list.

The book is composed largely of the pairs on-air monologues, offering the screen-averse reader a sample of Risings greatest hits with some original commentary mixed in. The authors goal is to challenge conventional wisdom and shift both parties to work in the interest of the working class instead of their current financial masters. But ultimately this ambition undoes their analysis as the 2020 race proves, their vision clouds their judgment.

The progressive Ball and the conservative Enjeti differ in their beliefs and their preferred policies, but they are united by an economic framework and by a conviction that America is beset by working-class anxiety. As they put it, they share a central diagnosis of the rot in this country, of how we got to this place, and a deep skepticism of power. Exhortations against the establishment are a staple: Speak up. Make people uncomfortable. Dont let the experts convince you that better isnt possible. As good populists do, Ball and Enjeti focus on exposing problems. In the books first three sections titled Core Rot, Media, and Identity they go after neoliberalism, media bias, and identity politics.

While Ball shares with other Democrats a visceral dislike of President Trump, she trains her fire on members of her own partys establishment. Just imagine if a fraction of the time devoted to Russiagate and Ukrainegate had instead been spent on increasing Social Security, or a $15 minimum wage, or Medicare-for-All, she writes in a chapter criticizing the failed impeachment. She also hammers the pundit world of her past life, documenting how the mainstream media bared their ideological and biased preferences in coverage of the 2020 field. An entire chapter is dedicated to her former employer MSNBC, which for various reasons she says is no friend of the left.

Enjeti offers criticisms of the Right, echoing the 2016 Trump campaigns rejection of the Republican Partys past affinity for liberal immigration and free trade. Republicans should become more comfortable with using the power of the government to help direct market forces toward the goal of conserving our American way of life, American workers, and American families, he writes.

At the core of The Populists Guide to 2020 are critiques of most of the Democratic field. High on the naughty list are the failed centrists. Ball dismisses Pete Buttigieg as the Boomer candidate for the college-educated MSNBC watching type. And Enjeti blasts Kamala Harris: Her entire political ethos was founded on being a woman of color who touted neoliberal economics. Fundamentally for their case, the authors then deliver a broadside against Joe Biden, in behalf of Bernie Sanders.

Ball and Enjeti declare Biden to be a representative of the centrist establishment, a figure upholding a bipartisan commitment to wars, soft corruption, and steady grinding of the working class in the name of efficiency. Enjeti rips Bidens neoliberal record in an essay on the former vice presidents legacy in the Obama administration, pointing to his promotion of the North American Free Trade Agreement and his weak record on China as the proof in the pudding. Ball calls the former vice president inarticulate and unimpressive and blames him for creating the very rot which led to Trump in the United States and other right-wing populist movements around the world.

Throughout the book, Ball makes the case for Sanders not only as her preferred candidate but as the candidate best positioned for electoral success: Bernie is the representative of a left-wing class-based movement that could answer Trumps right-wing populism with something new, a Democratic Party that actually delivers for the entire multi-racial working class. This characterization is jarring when set against the Vermont progressives collapse, for the second straight Democratic primary, against an allegedly weak, establishment front-runner. Before he dropped out of the race, Sanderss support among black voters was down significantly, and he had hemorrhaged votes from non-college whites, suggesting his working-class base had shrunk since 2016. And his hoped-for record youth turnout didnt materialize. The failures raise serious questions about the prospects for progressive populism, among them: What animates the Left? A revolution of class consciousness, or a collection of socially liberal cultural crusades?

As Samuel Huntington famously wrote, the great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. For all the books warnings about the dangers of identity politics, perhaps the most telling passage of The Populists Guide to 2020 is Enjetis damning description of the dynamic that will bring about the eventual downfall of the American Left: No matter how much you want to tout progressive economics, the intersectionally woke members of your coalition will always impose their PC litmus tests upon you, he warns the economically minded members of the Left. They will not allow a single concession . . . to the cultural right and will demand representation in any future administration they are likely to hold.

Sanderss political demise illuminates this conflict. While Ball tries to paint the movement of the Vermont independent as a genuine revolution, distilling a fusion of democratic socialism and intersectionality into slogans fit for TV, Sanderss failures illustrate the error of touting the consistency of his vision and message in the war to end all class wars. In reality, the campaigns 2020 pitch to young voters amounted to adopting some new woke and hip markers. He went from being a hardliner on illegal immigration in 2015 a working-class position Trump espoused to great effect to calling the presidents position dehumanizing. He touted endorsements this election cycle from uber-wealthy models and pop stars while railing against wealth inequality. His rock-concert-like rallies gave off more of a college-kid-who-read-Marx-once vibe than one of New Dealera organizing. And as he spoke of waging a peoples revolution against the status quo, Sanders personally apologized to Biden after a surrogate wrote an op-ed about Bidens corruption problem. For all his posturing, Sanders has been more of a hippie godfather than a protagonist in the great progressive struggle.

His fall demonstrates how the institutional strength of the Democratic Party, built on Bill Clintons and Barack Obamas mainstream popularity, has been able to mollify the angry winds of progressive populism with incremental cultural shifts of the Overton window. As Matt Stoller recently quipped, the progressive movement is basically just an aesthetic critique.

While The Populists Guide to 2020 offers a populist paradigm for the future of American politics potentially moldable in a post-coronavirus world its fatal conceit is the assumption that both Left and Right must answer the putative rise in working-class political energy. A different sort of shift seems more likely. Michael Lind argued in an April 2016 New York Times op-ed that in one form or another, Trumpism and Clintonism will define conservatism and progressivism in America. As Republicans continue to align with working-class voters by moving somewhat to the left on middle-class entitlements and somewhat to the right on immigration and trade, Lind predicted that Democrats would react to balance the bipartisan system by moving toward finance-friendly economics with social and racial liberalism to represent more upper-class constituents. Indeed, on his podcast for the Hudson Institute, The Realignment, Enjeti offers a frequently perceptive exploration of these issues.

If the Tea Partys 2010 surge of populist anger within the GOP was a portent of Trumps shock victory in 2016, the resurgence of moderate Democrats and the partys blue suburban wave in the 2018 midterms may herald an upscale future for the party that once dominated union halls. Ball and Enjeti envision working-class populism as a panacea for Americas political deadlock, but the realignment may already be underway on terms Ball would find unfavorable. The Democratic Partys swift rejection of Bernie Sanders suggests committed populists may have a future on only one side of the aisle.

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'The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left Are Rising' Book Review - National Review

The Democratic presidential primary is over. Joe Biden is the presumptive nominee heading into the election. And this week, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren endorsed their former competitor.

On the left, the question is: What went wrong? How did Sanders lose to Biden? Why didnt Warren catch fire? But too few of these postmortems have had sufficient data to build out their theories. And too many of them explain away strategic and tactical failures as media or establishment conspiracies.

Sean McElwee has a different perspective. McElwee is the co-founder and executive director of Data for Progress, an organization that utilizes cutting-edge polling and data-analysis techniques to support progressive causes. His aim is to fashion an agenda that is both progressive and popular. But he also sits atop mountains of data that let him test hypotheses with a lot more rigor than most armchair pundits.

As a result, McElwee has a fascinating, heterodox view of the 2020 primary, the Sanders and Warren campaigns, and what it will take for progressives to build power. We discuss the critical mistakes both major progressive candidates made, which progressive ideas are most popular with the American people, how the lefts theory of class politics interferes with its most obvious path to electoral victory, why maximalist policy agendas fail even when they look like theyre succeeding, what good (and bad) Overton Window politics look like, how progressives can shape Bidens presidency, and much, much more.

You can listen to our full conversation by subscribing to The Ezra Klein Show, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

As a teaser to our discussion, here are some of McElwees findings:

Theres a lot more where that came from. You can listen to our full conversation by subscribing to The Ezra Klein Show, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Read more from the original source:
Why Bernie Sanders lost the presidential nomination and how progressives can still win - Vox.com