Every Potential Democratic Candidate Is Better Than Trump, Even Kirsten Gillibrand

Kirsten Gillibrand by Nancy Ohanian

Paul Waldman welcomed Kirsten Gillibrand to the fray by citing psychologist Barry Schwartz's 2004 book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, pointing out that "there's a point at which having more choices-- say for 75 different kinds of shampoo-- not only can become paralyzing, it makes us less happy with whatever option we eventually settle on." He's worried that the media, let alone the voters in Iowa, won't be able to distinguish one candidate from the other. They'll all be running on anti-Trump messaging, of course, but what about an ability "to sum up their candidacies in a few sentences, or even better." he insists, "a single idea." This is what Gillibrand told Colbert's audience Tuesday night, when she announced her candidacy:

I'm going to run for president of the United States because, as a young mom, I’m going to fight for other people’s kids as hard as I would fight for my own. Which is why I believe that health care should be a right and not a privilege,” she said. “It’s why I believe we should have better public schools for our kids because it shouldn’t matter what block you grow up on. And I believe that anybody who wants to work hard enough should be able to get whatever job training they need to earn their way into the middle class.

As he says, "This is a common Democratic message, that of the desire to create a society that ensures a baseline of care for everyone (health care, education) and provides shared opportunity so that the kinds of inequality we’re suffering from today can be reined back in. If you watched Julián Castro’s announcement speech you would have heard the same thing, as you will from lots of other candidates. Both Castro and Gillibrand frame that message in terms of their own identity-- Castro talked about his immigrant grandmother and activist mother to say that he wants to fulfill the promise they worked for, while Gillibrand says she’s doing this 'as a young mom.' Sherrod Brown frames what is essentially the same vision as 'the dignity of work' ... All of which is ... fine, if not exactly enough to get you out of your seat cheering. But it has been the Democratic message pretty much forever, from both more and less liberal candidates... the reason they sound alike is that they’re from the same party, so they tend to agree about what the big problems are and how we should go about fixing them."



In his New Republic essay yesterday, Who’s Afraid of Bernie Sanders? A Lot of Democrats, Apparently, Alex Shephard singles out one Democrat who stands out from opportunists and pulse-takers like Gillibrand and most of the others. "In the wake of Bernie Sanders’s loss to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary," began Shephard, "some people argued that, as Vanity Fair put it, he 'won in the end' because his race had 'a profound, and lasting, effect on his party.' This was not a fanciful idea. The Vermont senator’s 'revolution' had succeeded beyond progressives’ wildest expectations, pushing the party leftward on health care, climate change, economic redistribution, and foreign policy. Since Barack Obama’s ascendance, no other politician has had such a deep influence on the direction of the Democratic Party-- except perhaps the sitting president."

The only "profound, and lasting, effect" Gillibrand has had in her decade and a half in politics has been on Al Franken's career. She doesn't stand for anything at all, beyond her own careerism and opportunism. Shephard wrote that 2020 will see plenty of "other formidable challengers representing the left, like Elizabeth Warren, as well as a number of more establishment candidates, like Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand, who support policies Sanders popularized such as Medicare for All and a $15 national minimum wage."

But no one really knows what Gillibrand stands for, since she stands for nothing but herself, the Democratic Party's ultimate opportunist who changes her positions-- all of them-- the way a normal person changes their clothes. No progressive looking at her record would want to consider her for two seconds. She was the post child for the NRA when they suited her ambitions and the poster child for ugly, Trump-like and King-like xenophobia when that suited her ambitions. And, despite her insincere protestations, she has never ceased to be a complete Wall Street suck-up. There is no way to know where she would stand on anything if she ever-- God forbid-- got into the Oval Office. The only positive thing any progressive could ever say about her is that she's better than Trump-- which makes it so important that she loses the primary.

One of her former congressional colleagues declined to go on record but mentioned that "She’s an unusually well-disciplined liar. Fortunately for everyone, she hasn’t yet learned how to fake sincerity." The general public doesn't know much about her yet-- aside from her highly unpopular-- and successful-- ambush of her colleague, Al Franken. Journalists will never let go of that but will go much further into why she would be the worst candidate the Democrats could put up against Trump in 2020. Here's a little tweet thread from CNN's Dan Merica after her announcement: