If The Best The Corrupted Democratic Establishment Can Do For 2020 Is Andrew Cuomo...

Bernie's out on the stump-- fighting against TrumpCare across Trump Country. He did rallies recently in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Tomorrow he's doing "Care Not Cuts" rallies in Kentucky and West Virginia. In announcing his 6pm event at the Northern Kentucky Convention Center in Covington, he pointed out that "McConnell’s legislation, which would throw 22 million Americans off of health insurance, would be a disaster for the country and an even worse disaster for the people of Kentucky. Under the Affordable Care Act, Kentucky has made significant progress in lowering the number of its uninsured people. Further, the expansion of Medicaid there has been of significant help in the fight against the opioid epidemic which has ravaged Kentucky."

By the way, Covington is the county seat of Kenton County, Kentucky's third most populous county. Trump won it decisively in November 59.7% to 33.7% but on primary day Kenton County was a different story. Ted Cruz won Kenton County with 2,475 votes to Trump's 1,997. And Hillary and Bernie each beat both of them. Bernie won 4,880 votes countywide-- more than Cruz and Trump combined.

And what about the site of tomorrow's second West Virginia rally in as many weeks-- Morgantown (the Morgantown Event Center at 12:30), the county seat of West Virginia's 3rd most populous county, Monongalia? In November, Trump beat Hillary 51.2% to 40.8%. But, again, the primary was a very different story. The Mon County voters wanted Bernie, not Hillary and not Trump. Primary day, 2016 in Monongalia:

• Bernie- 8,096
• Trump- 5,971
• Hillary- 4,963
• Kasich- 943
• Cruz- 851
• Rubio- 207

You-know-who woulda won.

Meanwhile... the latest crap-Democrat trial balloon is for Andrew Cuomo, one of the most corrupt politicians in America, who would be the GOP's dream-come-true opponent for Trump. If you were one of the people expecting Trump to be defeated in 2020 at least in part because of his own eye-popping corruption, write that off if Cuomo is the nominee. Progressive Democrats and the entire activist base of the Democratic Party absolutely detests Cuomo and his sleazy, money-grubbing, utterly inauthentic centrism. David Freelander termed Cuomo "a big-name politician who has long seemed an extremely unlikely national candidate-- until now, when suddenly he’s seeming like a very likely one." Democratic voters are going to cast primary ballots for this pile of crap instead of Bernie (or Elizabeth Warren)? I don't think so-- although Mark Penn and Andrew Stein might.

Freedlander is a good reporter, but, I'm sorry, this is just silly: "New Yorkers love to assume that their politicians are national figures by default, even as one by one they flame out on the big stage. For much of his career, Cuomo has looked like another in this long line: someone too nakedly ambitious, too pushy, with too messy of a personal life-- too, well, New Yorky-- to play much beyond Buffalo and the Battery. But suddenly it seems that Americans are willing to pull the lever for a muscular, messy, rough-edged leader shouting for the common man, and suddenly the governor of New York is starting to show up on a lot of people’s lists." No one likes Cuomo-- except...

“Look at his career, look at his work in New York,” said Jonathan Cowan, the president and founder of Third Way, a centrist think tank, and a former Cuomo advisor. “He is laying out a model for what it means to be a 21st-century Democrat. Our party is in a deep hole. You have to look around and say, ‘Who is succeeding? Who is doing it differently?’”

...Cuomo looks very much like someone doing the spadework to run for president. His speeches, like the one at the Hotel Trades Council headquarters, are increasingly laced with the kind of Big Themes that become the rhetorical cornerstones of presidential campaigns. He rails against Washington, contrasting the gridlock of Congress against his own relatively smooth management of the previously dysfunctional statehouse, the misplaced priorities of national Republicans against the steady progress he has made in Albany. Over the past several months, Cuomo has hired Chris Christie’s former chief of staff, a move widely seen as further burnishing his own bipartisan credentials; his aides have reached out to out-of-state donors about a possible fundraising swing later this year.

But if he runs, he’s got one big roadblock in his way first: The energy in the Democratic Party right now comes from a newly energized left. And the energized left, not to put too fine a point on it, hates Andrew Cuomo.

“The worst of the worst,” said Nomiki Konst, a Sanders delegate to the Democratic National Convention and frequent cable TV defender of the candidate who now serves on the Democratic National Committee’s Unity Commission. “Andrew Cuomo is somehow the only politician in America who still thinks neoliberalism and triangulation work, who opens up the Blue Dog playbook and says, ‘How can I use this to run for president?’”

...When he at last became the second Cuomo to serve as governor of New York, by the standards of the state, he was barely a Democrat. It was in the depths of the Tea Party’s counter-revolt against Obama’s presidency; the state’s economic outlook was disastrous and Cuomo positioned himself firmly as a man of the center. He capped property taxes and let a tax on millionaires expire. He gathered a bunch of friends in the real estate industry to run an outside spending campaign on behalf of his agenda, rallied for charter schools, slashed pensions and the state workforce. If Spitzer had come to Albany as a crusader, cleaning out the ethically compromised and ridding the state of the Republicans who could slow his agenda, Cuomo signaled from the start that he was willing to work with the powers that be, so long as their powers didn’t get in his way. In 2011, when a group of moderate Democrats announced they were leaving their party’s conference in the state Senate to form an alliance with the Republicans, Cuomo signaled his tacit approval, in part because it meant that his veto pen wasn’t the only thing keeping restive downstate liberals from having the run of the state. He undercut liberal stalwarts like Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, trying to incorporate parts of their offices’ responsibilities into his own, and leaking gossipy and embarrassing details about them to the press.

In the era of Occupy Wall Street, such machinations made Cuomo Democratic Public Enemy Number One. On MSNBC, Chris Hayes called Cuomo’s power play against a Democratic Senate, “a remarkable cynical display.” “Andrew Cuomo, Fake Democrat,” blared Salon. Over at Daily Kos, Markos Moulitsas delivered the death blow, comparing Cuomo to-- gasp!-- Joe Lieberman. In an era in which moderates were supposed to find no safe harbor save for a couple of hideouts in the Mountain West, Cuomo remained defiantly in the middle, practically delighting in how much he could troll his lefty detractors.

But in 2014, something changed: A little-known, poorly funded Constitutional law professor named Zephyr Teachout ran against Cuomo in the Democratic primary and captured a third of the vote, proof that not only was a restive progressivism already brewing in the pre-Trump, pre-Bernie era, but that the party’s liberals didn’t care much for their governor. Cuomo responded by swinging abruptly to the left.

With exactly zero authenticity. I sincerely doubt Cuomo's opportunism and posturing has convinced Freelander he's for real and, as he wrote, "progressives see a cynical exercise in box-checking... If Andrew Cuomo has a problem on his left flank, it isn’t just because he doesn’t always toe the party line; it is far more personal than that. To them, Cuomo is fundamentally dishonest, a political weathervane obsessed with his own ambition. To him, they are soft-headed naifs who don’t understand how politics works and don’t speak for the millions of workers and labor unionists who serve as the real base of the Democratic Party."

Liberals will never love him, or even learn to see him as one of them. But it’s clear that Andrew Cuomo can move an agenda forward. If he delivers on progressive priorities, can they learn to live with him? As friends and advisers of the governor’s see it, Cuomo enters the discussion of top-tier presidential contenders in a party that hasn’t just gotten used to symbolic victories; it has become comfortable with even symbolic losses. Consider climate change, or health care, or taxes, or for that matter, the way Democrats slunk back to their hideaways after winning the popular vote but losing thanks to an arcane scoring system from the 18th century.

Progressives comfort themselves with clichés now as vapid as they are well-worn-- putting points on the board, moving the needle, bending the arc-- and rest content that since they have facts and morality on their side, things are bound to go their way eventually.

Crack open Andrew Cuomo, and you won’t find Ted Kennedy. You probably won’t even find Mario Cuomo, someone who treated Albany like it was the Athenian agora. But you will find someone consumed with winning, who throttles anyone who looks like he or she might stand in the way of that winning. Is Andrew Cuomo really a warrior for social justice? Maybe, but probably not, but if you get a higher minimum wage and paid family leave and free college and gay marriage and gun control and a fracking ban and the first reversal of harsh Rockefeller-era drug laws in four decades, who cares?

Last word goes to Ben Mathis-Lilley at Slate: "[W]e can dismiss this concept without even addressing the already tiresome idea that what a Democratic voting base that has spent the past six months getting jazzed up about aggressive resistance and unapologetically liberal policies is actually fixin' to do in 2020 is nominate a moderate centrist triangulating triangulator who-- as Politico points out itself!-- lowered taxes on millionaires and has close ties to his state's most powerful corporate executives... Andrew Cuomo's approval rating in New York is 43 percent. It is not going to improve as he becomes increasingly associated in the public mind with subway mega-failures. In a Demcratic 2020 primary whose dynamics seem likely to resemble the 2016 Republican primary in many ways, he would combine the worst qualities of Jeb Bush (being an dynastic insider) with Chris Christie (being unpopular and famous for an act of brazen corruption, in his own state). If Hillary Clinton, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and Rahm Emanuel merged into a single person, would Politico declare that person a major contender for the 2020 nomination? (Yes, probably!)"