Biden And Bloomberg Are Too Old To Be President-- Bernie Isn't And Here's Why

Let me talk about something difficult for most people, though not for me. Next month I turn 71. My old friend Martha was just in town and she's either my age or a year younger. She's a research scientist at Columbia and recently retired. In college she was the only person I knew who was politically to the left of me. When she asked me who I was voting for next year, I said Bernie of course. She voted for him last time too but said she's not so sure this time. "Too old." We argued but she said she feels her brain slowing down lately and asked me if I do too. I do. A little. Trump will be 73 in June. His brain has come to... a grinding halt. He's an unhealthy fat man who doesn't exercise either his mind or his body. Joe Biden just turned 76. He seems out of it an awful lot; he isn't Trump but his brain is failing. Mike Bloomberg turns 77 in a few weeks. He seems sharp ands clear. He was born the same year as Bernie, who also seems sharp and clear. I spoke with him a few weeks ago when I was in Burlington. I could have been speaking to someone 20 years younger. He sure seems a lot healthier than Trump or Biden.

But age means something else to me than all of that. It has to do with ideas. When you hear conservative jackasses scolding younger Congress members like AOC, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and telling them to grow up or stop acting like children, they can probably throw Bernie in there too. What conservatives can't grapple with are the ideas these people are putting forward. On Tuesday, Mike Bloomberg said the push to legalize recreational marijuana "is perhaps the stupidest thing anybody has ever done." Now that's old! Really, really, disqualifyingly old. And ignorant. "Last year, in 2017, 72,000 Americans OD’d [overdosed] on drugs. In 2018, more people than that are OD-ing on drugs, have OD’d on drugs, and today, incidentally, we are trying to legalize another addictive narcotic, which is perhaps the stupidest thing anybody has ever done." His idea on pot is from the 1950s.

Biden has similarly old fogey perspectives on the world. He doesn't understand Medicare-For-All and he doesn't understand the Green New Deal. It would be a complete waste of time to nominate the Warren G. Harding of the Democratic Party to follow Trump. Trump is ignorant and venal but his instincts are much "hipper" than two squares like Bloomberg and Biden. Bernie on the other hand... he may not skateboard or do Ramones covers, but his ideas are way hipper-- and more fearless-- then Beto's. I hope you read Jason Zengerle's fantastic GQ report about a road trip with Bernie, The Unfinished Business of Bernie Sanders. The link gives you the whole piece. Here are some excerpts:

Sanders has become an entirely different person. In the nearly four years since he announced his first presidential campaign, he has done more to remake the modern Democratic Party in his image than any politician since Bill Clinton-- and that includes Barack Obama, who not only spent eight years in the White House but also was a Democrat. (As his friends and foes often emphasize, the socialist Sanders does not serve in the Senate as a Democrat but rather as an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.) Medicare for All, a $15-an-hour minimum wage, free college-- the issues that he championed during the 2016 Democratic primary and that Hillary Clinton dismissed as naive and unrealistic-- are now mainstream Democratic Party positions. “We are where we are,” says Shakir, who’s now the ACLU’s national political director, “because Bernie forced the party to rethink everything.”

Having toiled his entire political career as a gadfly, Sanders is now a prophet. “The ideas we brought forth in 2016, which were considered, not only by the Democratic establishment but by the editorial writers, to be extreme and fringe and out of step with where the American people are,” Sanders told me, “are now what is in, by and large, the Democratic national platform and are being adopted by candidates across the country.” What’s more, the Democratic Party’s future-- as reflected by the remarkable rise of the 29-year-old New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-- has clearly tilted to the left. This development has been as satisfying for Sanders as it was unexpected. “We have had more success in ideologically changing the party than I would have dreamed possible,” he said. “The world has changed.”

In Kenosha, Sanders was appearing at a union hall to stump for Randy Bryce. A mustachioed ironworker and labor activist who went by the nickname “Iron Stache,” Bryce was running for Paul Ryan’s old congressional seat. He’d supported Sanders in the 2016 presidential race, speaking at Wisconsin rallies, and Sanders had been an early backer of Bryce’s congressional bid. When Bryce traveled to Washington to seek Sanders’s advice about his campaign, Sanders had warned him that things could get nasty: “Randy, you run and you threaten these people, they’re going to throw millions of dollars against you in ugly, personal, destructive type ads.” It was another instance of Sanders’s prophetic tendencies. A GOP super PAC supporting Bryce’s Republican opponent, a former Ryan aide named Bryan Steil, had indeed spent millions attacking Bryce over arrests for drunk driving and marijuana possession, as well as labeling him a “deadbeat” for delinquent child-support payments to his ex-wife. By the time Sanders arrived in Kenosha, two weeks before Election Day, Iron Stache was a dead man walking-- badly trailing in the polls and relying on his ex-wife to defend his honor. “D.C. politicians are putting our family’s personal business all over the news and television, right where our son can see it,” she’d said in a statement.

Standing on stage in the union-hall ballroom, with Bryce sitting on a stool just to his right, Sanders did his best to help in what already appeared to be a lost cause. “They do ugly ads because they have nothing positive to say,” he told the crowd of several hundred people that had gathered, sounding as frustrated about Bryce’s travails as he does about income inequality.

...Before the 2016 campaign, he’d tried to persuade Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator and his closest friend in the Senate, to run against Clinton. It was only after Warren told him no that Sanders decided to enter the race himself. “He said, ‘Okay, I have to do it, because someone has to represent this viewpoint,’ ” a Democratic strategist with ties to Sanders told me.

But in 2020, not only is Warren running; so, most likely, are a host of other Democrats—Ohio senator Sherrod Brown, Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, Oregon senator Jeff Merkley, to name a few—who are so similar to Sanders in their worldviews that they’ve been dubbed “Bernie 2.0’s.” There are some Sanders supporters who believe that the best decision he could make for 2020 would be not to run himself but to anoint a successor-- a woman, a person of color, someone who isn’t in their late 70s-- and then turn over to that candidate the keys to his movement. Will Bunch, the Philadelphia Daily News columnist and an ardent booster of Sanders in 2016, recently urged Sanders to sit it out in 2020, arguing that there is “a sense that white dudes from the baby-boomer-and-older-generation have been running things for far too long, and that America needs some new blood.” Indeed, while Sanders emerged from his defeat in 2016 with newfound prominence and power, a loss in 2020 would almost certainly serve to diminish him-- and perhaps his legacy.

...In a Democratic Party that is increasingly deriving its energy-- not to mention its votes-- from minorities and women, Sanders remains a critic of identity politics and a firm believer that issues of race, while important, are not as salient and determinative as those of class. “There are people who are very big into diversity but whose views end up being not particularly sympathetic to working people, whether they’re white or black or Latino,” he said. “My main belief is that we need to bring together a coalition of people-- of black and white and Latino and Asian-American and Native-American-- around a progressive agenda which is prepared to take on an extraordinarily powerful ruling class in this country. That is my view. Many of my opponents do not hold that view, and they think that all that we need is people who are candidates who are black or white, who are black or Latino or woman or gay, regardless of what they stand for, that the end result is diversity.” He hastened to add that “diversity is enormously important,” but there was a bigger goal: “to change society and create an economy and a government that work for all people.”

His balancing act wasn’t just rhetorical. I noticed that one wall of his conference room was decorated with black-and-white photos of bucolic Vermont scenes—barns, mountains, snow-covered roads. On the wall facing it hung three humongous oil paintings of black women.

When Sanders does talk about what he wants right now, he says his 2020 decision will ultimately come down to one basic question: Is he the candidate with the best chance of ending Donald Trump’s presidency? “He really does want to beat Trump in a deeply personal way,” Weaver says. “It’s distressing for him to see democracy going in this Trumpian direction.”

Sanders and his advisers believe he’s uniquely suited to the task of defeating Trump. Part of the reason is Sanders’s appeal to white working-class and rural voters-- those same voters Sanders refused to denounce as racist for being uncomfortable about voting for a black candidate in the 2018 midterms. Those who would staff a 2020 Sanders campaign talk not only of taking back Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin-- the three states that put Trump over the top in 2016-- but of putting Iowa and possibly other Plains states in play. One Sanders adviser even told me that he thought Sanders would compete in West Virginia-- a state Trump won by 42 points in 2016. “The untold story of 2016 was Bernie’s strength with rural voters,” Weaver says.



But it’s more than just the electoral map. Sanders has some of the same political skills as Trump. It’s a depressing reality that Trump, for all of his flaws, is a savant when it comes to messaging; he has a gift for boiling down complex issues into simple, visceral, often unrealistic policy proposals—such as building a wall to combat illegal immigration. It’s why some Trump supporters say that you need to “take him seriously, not literally.” Democrats, by contrast, are quite good at developing realistic policy proposals that nonetheless, in part because of their complexity, fail to excite the public. Sanders is a rare exception.

Last fall, for instance, he introduced the Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act (Stop BEZOS), a bill that would force large companies like Amazon to pay additional taxes to fund certain government services used by their low-wage workers. Stop BEZOS was laughably bad public policy and completely unworkable due to the way benefits eligibility works, which many liberal policy wonks pointed out. But Stop BEZOS did deliver a strong message: Giant companies like Amazon should pay their employees a living wage. And, sure enough, a few weeks after Sanders introduced Stop BEZOS, Jeff Bezos announced that Amazon would raise the company’s minimum wage in the U.S. to $15. “[Sanders] is a very American kind of populist,” Vox’s Matthew Yglesias wrote at the time, “whose specific policy proposals are best understood as props in a larger moralistic narrative rather than well-designed cures for specific ills.” Or, as Sanders told me when I asked him about Stop BEZOS and his general approach to public policy, “What I have always believed, and Trump believes it, too, as a matter of fact, is that the way you bring about change is you garner grassroots support, and then that support filters on up.”

Sanders knows that, should he run in 2020, his battle would be with forces even larger than Trump. “How much would the pharmaceutical industry spend not to have Bernie in the White House?” asks one Sanders adviser. “Is there a number big enough to articulate?” And were Sanders to win? “If you thought President Obama faced insane opposition from Senate and House Republicans, you ain’t seen nothing yet,” one former Sanders staffer says. “He’d be trying to dismantle the economic system that benefits the D.C. elite on both sides of the aisle.”

Yet, in order for Sanders to go after the D.C. elite, he’ll have to go through Trump. And while those encouraging him to run believe he’s the Democratic candidate best suited to that task, even Sanders sometimes wonders just how he’d do that.

At the end of a long day last October stumping for midterm candidates in Arizona, Sanders sat in a small meeting room at Arizona State University-- where he’d soon address a thousand people at a rally in the student union-- and let out a loud sigh when I asked him if he felt Democrats still didn’t quite know how to handle a politician like Trump. “Yes,” he said, and then paused for several seconds. “Look, Trump in a very bad way has redefined the nature of American politics. Every politician in the world stretches his or her point, you know, that’s nothing new. But now that we have a president who is a pathological liar, who can say anything he wants, who does say anything he wants, regardless of whether or not it has any bearing on the truth, that’s something new. All right, how do you deal with that? How do you deal with that? How do you deal with a president who is a racist, who is a sexist, who is a xenophobe, who is a homophobe, and who is a religious bigot?”

Sanders had begun his day in Nogales, along the Mexican border, where he’d met in a budget motel conference room with about a dozen or so immigration and environmental activists. Trump, and cable news, were talking nonstop about “the caravan”-- the group of migrants slowly making their way across Central America toward the Mexico-U.S. border-- and Sanders wanted these people’s advice about how to respond. One of the activists suggested that Democrats ask Trump what he’s done to help the Central American countries improve the conditions of their citizens so that people don’t feel compelled to leave.

“You’re talking rationally,” Sanders said. “But I want you to put yourself in Trump’s head and what he cares about, and his job is to simply win votes and pit one group of people against the other. You already gave me a rational answer. All right? But I need a political answer.” A local lawyer suggested talking about “the rule of law” and how Trump was waiving numerous environmental laws to crack down on immigration at the border. Sanders nodded and pointed to another activist, who proposed a “welcoming action” at the border where people showed up with food and clothing for immigrants. Then another activist argued that “we have to be not afraid to be rational” and said Democrats should point out just how few immigrants were coming across the southern border.

Sanders wasn’t satisfied. “I’m not sure that I’m getting through to you,” he barked. “This is all politics! It’s like me telling you there’s a guy with a machine gun out there, and if you don’t do this he’s going to bust in here and shoot you all up! It’s not true. All right? But I can create that fantasy. I can tell you that there’s somebody coming down with a machine gun, right? I can get you really scared! And you’re going to come to me: 'How do we protect ourselves?' That’s what it’s about! Right-wing extremism and demagoguery is not based on rationality. It is based on fear." Sanders told the group that their-- and his-- challenge was to “be really smart and figure out how we fight that demagoguery effectively.”

Ten hours later in Tempe, I asked Sanders if he had any answers. “I think what Trump has gotten away with is saying the economy is booming,” Sanders said. “What we have got to talk about is the economic pain that still exists in America. The second thing I think we have to do is to make it clear that when he ran for office, he lied directly to the people. He said he was going to provide health care for everybody. He said he was not going to cut Social Security. He said he was going to take on the pharmaceutical industry. Absolute lies, not just generalizations, these are lies in the campaign he told people who voted for him. I think we have to expose that as well.”

I asked Sanders if that wasn’t just more rationality. How would any of that counter the visceral nerve Trump touched in some voters when he talked about the caravan?

“Well, I mean, it’s difficult if you are not a pathological liar,” Sanders said. “It is difficult if you will not say anything at any time, just to get a vote. So what your real question is: How could one do politics that are honest, that are respectful, and beat somebody who is an authoritarian demagogue, who is a pathological liar, who will say anything at any time? That’s your question.”

Yes, that was my question, I said.

Sanders paused and suddenly, for the first time on the campaign swing, he seemed tired. “The answer is, it is hard,” he said. “And we better damn well find the answers to that pretty soon.”

People always ask me if he's made up his mind and if he's decided to run or not. That thermometer above wouldn't be there if I wasn't absolutely certain that he is. Just one great president in our lifetimes... is that too much to hope for? Just one. We can do it. Tim Russo: "The 2020 Democratic Primary is beginning to resemble the dynamics of the 2016 Republican Primary in which Donald Trump cruised to the GOP nomination over 17 establishment dopes Trump easily crushed. Similarly, by the time of Ohio’s March 2020 primary, Bernie Sanders will either be wrapping up the Democratic Party nomination in a walk, or facing a final showdown with whoever of the two dozen Democratic Party tools of capital survives a Hunger Games auctioning of themselves off in order to end up in a distant second place."