Progressives (Liberals)

Youre spouting nonsemse as usual. Rabif opinion masquerading as fact.

Progressives are weary, however, that Bloomberg continues to ride outside the debate spotlight without having his professional and political career examined by other candidates on a national stage.

As Politico now reports, liberals in the Democratic Party are begging the DNC to alter debate rules and allow Bloomberg to have a podium where, they believe, he can be torn down under the microscope:

Progressive allies of Elizabeth Warren have approached the Democratic National Committee to lobby for an unusual cause: including billionaire Mike Bloomberg in upcoming presidential primary debates.

The move, described to POLITICO by a co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, reflects the desire of liberal activists to pin down the former New York mayor, who has avoided verbal combat with his opponents by waging a self-funded campaign that plays by its own rules. But the entreaty also speaks to progressives’ growing unease with Bloomberg’s relative success: After spending hundreds of millions of dollars, he has vaulted into double digits in national polls and amassed a giant staff of A-level operatives.

His rise is now stirring growing anxieties among some of his biggest detractors, who maintain that his white knight pledges should not insulate him from critiques and what they consider a standard vetting process.

“He has a long history of big-money self-promotion, but he wants to play senior statesmen and try to get people to believe he’s just taking one for the team,” said Zephyr Teachout, a law professor who has run for statewide office in New York and is aligned with Bernie Sanders.

“But he’s spending hundreds of millions because he wants the most powerful job in the world, and he needs the full treatment,” she added, pointing to his positions on foreign policy and Social Security and his long mayoral record.

...I don't agree with how he got there.

Although I’m a pessimist by nature, deep down I think I always believed that the Republic would survive Donald Trump.

The majority of Americans have never accepted him, and his ascendancy fueled a nationwide civic awakening, starting with the Women’s March and proceeding through airport protests, health care town halls and finally the midterms. It’s been devastating to see how quickly so many American institutions have been corrupted — the Department of Justice turned into an engine of Trump’s paranoid vendettas, the State Department purged of nonpartisan professionals, evidence of Trump’s Ukraine extortion scheme buried by his Senate lackeys. It’s outrageous that the country’s being forced to endure four full years of lawless kakistocracy, but surely, I thought, the majority would put an end to it in the next election.

But now that election is approaching, and the debacle of the Iowa caucuses only highlights how the Democratic Party is threatening to fracture. In its aftermath, we’re left with a national race led by two very old and extraordinarily risky general election candidates whose weaknesses were underscored by Iowa’s results, muddled as they were.

Bernie Sanders’s supporters have argued that he can expand the electorate to make up for the suburban moderates he’s likely to lose, moderates who were, incidentally, responsible for many of the gains Democrats made in 2018. But while Sanders claimed a popular vote victory in Iowa, there was no surge in voter turnout since the last election, and an NBC News entrance poll showed that the number of first-time caucusers actually went down.

Sanders still has the advantage of energy and ardor; young people are overwhelmingly on his side, and his campaign will be carried along by the same sort of ebullient cultural ferment as Barack Obama’s. (When the pop megastar Ariana Grande met Sanders in November, she wrote on Twitter, “I will never smile this hard again.”) I try to talk myself into believing that his passionate base, combined with a polarized electorate, will be enough. Still, with the survival of American democracy at stake, it seems like a wild gamble for Democrats to turn the fight against Trump into a referendum on Democratic socialism at a time when Americans’ personal economic satisfaction is at a record high.

Here’s the place for disclosure: My husband is consulting for Elizabeth Warren, the candidate I believe in more than any other. But I recognize that Warren has electability challenges of her own, and the truth is I’d be fine with any nominee who could generate enthusiasm without scaring suburbanites, if I could only see who that was.

I’m not the only one feeling panicked. The recent rush of mayoral endorsements for Michael Bloomberg is partly just a function of the money he’s poured into cities through his philanthropic work, but it also indicates a worrying lack of confidence in the existing field.

And, Netanyahu’s ire is a badge of honor. He’s a craven genocidist. Bernie’s in the right side I’d the Zionist/Palestinian issue.

CODE RED
How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country
By E. J. Dionne Jr.

E. J. Dionne Jr. has spent a career searching for common ground among opposing groups, in the hope that it can become the foundation of a politics of consensus. In books like “Why Americans Hate Politics” (1991) and “Our Divided Political Heart” (2012), he tried to chart a course between left and right, suggesting that if we peer across the political divide with clearer eyes and more open minds, we can begin to build a postpolarization politics.

As part of this endeavor, he has often chided the right for its mounting extremism, but he never wrote it off. Which is why Dionne’s latest book should send our alarm bells shrieking. Though written in the same patient, even soothing, voice as his earlier works, the narrowed scope of “Code Red: How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country” shows how much his view of politics has changed. The right barely factors into this new bridge-building project. Conservatives are, for all intents and purposes, a lost cause.

This means “Code Red” is not yet another call for bipartisanship (thank goodness). Nor is it a plea for centrism, which in an earlier era had been a defining feature of Dionne’s work. Here he has abandoned the idea of a center poised between left and right. “The political center cannot be defined as a halfway point between Democrats and a Republican Party that has veered far to the right,” Dionne writes. Instead it is something to be negotiated within the Democratic Party.

As a result, Dionne pleads with moderates and progressives to see one another as allies who have far more in common than they might think. And while his past calls for political unity seem to have failed, there’s reason to hope this one might succeed. The rise of Donald Trump and the radicalization of the right have been unifying forces for moderates and progressives. While the two factions disagree sharply on proposals like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, they share a distress and disgust with the Trump presidency and the growing right-wing extremism that preceded it...

Trump Hails Acquittal and Lashes Out at His ‘Evil’ and ‘Corrupt’ Opponents
As President Trump renewed his attacks on Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democrats, his press secretary threatened payback against them.

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And, Netanyahu's ire is a badge of honor. He's a craven genocidist. Bernie's in the right side I'd the Zionist/Palestinian issue.

Yup.

If Sanders was to gain the nomination then win the general while Dems take House and Senate, that could provide an opportunity for a reconfiguration of Israeli politics. This is a very optimistic scenario but interesting to consider.

This is a very optimistic scenario but interesting to consider.

Some of them are not Zionist, but a lot of them are and we can't afford to alienate that whole base of support.