Are Americans Ready For A Transformative Presidency?

The woman in the video is Disney heiress, Abigail Disney, a member of Patriotic Millionaires, which released the video yesterday to advocate for the inclusion of an ultra-millionaires tax in the New York state budget (which is going to be wrapped up in 2 weeks... and the villains here are Governor Cuomo and Senate Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, of course + The Long Island 6: Todd Kaminsky, Monica Martinez, Kevin Thomas, James Gaughran, John Brooks and Anna Kaplan). The tax only affects individuals with annual income over $5 million. It's meant to help bail out cash-strapped public schools that are facing further budget cuts, and the long-neglected subway system which just continues to decline.

I'm glad New York is trying to solve these problems on a local level. As for addressing these kinds of problems across the country-- on the national level-- obviously nothing's going to happen while Trump and McConnell have a choke-hold on the political system. But a transformative presidency would. Not a Status Quo Joe bullshit presidency or that of any other pick-me, pick-me candidate with nothing to offer the American people-- but a really transformative presidency, the likes of which we haven't seen since FDR passed away. I guess I gave it away, right? Bernie.

You've probably noticed that many of his once-shocking policy ideas have lately moved from the fringe to the mainstream of the Democratic Party-- from Medicare-For-All and the Green New Deal to putting working families interests before Wall Street's interests. Most of the potential nominees-- despite their own histories and records-- are now trying to offer some version of Bernie's populist economic message.

Faiz Shakir, Bernie campaign manager, reminds the media that all Trump offered to woo working class voters was a ripped-off, hollow version of what Bernie has been advocating for decades-- almost making himself sound like what Shakir calls a "faux-Bernie Sanders."

Yesterday the AP reported that the case for Bernie being able to beat Trump is now front-and-center in discussions of the Democratic nomination.

“The polls have been pretty consistent that Democratic primary voters are very focused on which candidate has the best chance to beat Trump, so I expect all the candidates to argue why they are uniquely positioned to win,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama.

“Bernie Sanders has a strong case that his economic message works in the states that delivered Trump the presidency in 2016, but his challenge is going to be articulating how he can defend himself against attacks that he is a socialist,” Pfeiffer said.

Karine Jean-Pierre, a Democratic strategist and senior adviser at MoveOn, argued against the notion that a more centrist candidate is inherently more electable. “Often you’ll hear arguments from centrist, or more corporate-aligned, Democrats that a candidate needs to run as a centrist to win-- but those comments say more about the commenters’ interests and ideology. They don’t actually tell you much useful about political outcomes,” she said.

“This year’s primary is obviously a different dynamic than 2016, when there were only two Democrats, and much of that debate centered on electability-- and then the candidate presumed by the Democratic establishment to be most ‘electable’ lost,” Jean-Pierre said.

So far, Sanders has been focused on Democrats’ shared goal of defeating Trump, whom he’s called the most dangerous president in American history. But he’s also placed himself as a standard-bearer in today’s political environment.

“In 2016, this is where the political revolution took off,” Sanders said during a recent trip to New Hampshire, a state that he won by 22 percentage points. He said that he began the race far behind Clinton, campaigning on ideas “considered by establishment politicians and mainstream media to be ‘radical’ and ‘extreme.’”

Sanders says that now his ideas are supported by a majority of Americans, particularly Democrats and independents, as well as his rivals in the race.