Which Democrat Is More Likely To Hold Trump Accountable-- And Who Will Let Bygones Be Bygones?

Preet Bharara, the former US Attorney for the Southern District of New York-- and if you're watching Billionaires you don't know how important that position is-- predicted in an interview with the Daily Beast that... well... um...

Scott Porch: Donald Trump was pretty clearly the unindicted co-conspirator in the guilty plea that sent Michael Cohen to prison. I won’t ask you what people in the know may have told you, but how likely likely is it that the Southern District or the State of New York will indict Trump after he leaves office?

Preet Bharara: I don’t know. My former office clearly endorses and believes the fact-- as Michael Cohen admitted in open court-- that he engaged in the conduct he pleaded guilty to at the direction of Individual 1. Individual 1 is the president. Depending on what the other circumstances are, I believe there’s a reasonable likelihood that they would follow through on that. There’s a difference, though, between accepting a guilty plea from Michael Cohen and going to trial on the strength of that same witness after he’s gone to prison for lying.

Porch: Do you expect that the Justice Department’s characterization of the Mueller Report won’t actually have much of an effect on how the various investigations of Donald Trump and the Trump campaign will proceed?

Bharara: It will be harder to shut down other investigations where the attorney general doesn’t have a tight leash on them. In the Southern District of New York, the Eastern District of Virginia, the D.C. District and other courts, I would expect things will unfold in the natural course.

The natural order? Not if Trump-- or Pence-- is president? How about Bernie? How about Biden? Have you thought much about the difference between the top two Democratic candidates? Bernie has always been a progressive. Biden has always been not a progressive. Biden made it clear from the very beginning of his career that he took extraordinary steps to make sure no one would think he was a progressive. But are their records predictive of how they would behave as president. Maybe yes, maybe no-- but it's all we have-- two guys who have been around a long time with long records. It shouldn't be that hard to figure out which one would hold Trump accountable and which one would let him skate "in the name of national unity" or some bullshit like that.

On Tuesday, The Baffler published an essay by Dave Denison about the candidate that time forgot-- a candidate lost to history and to himself: Twentieth-Century Man, who will call, with no fondness whatsoever, Status Quo Joe. "It would be hard," wrote Denison, "to find a more out-of-step-with-the-times candidate than Joe Biden. In a moment when two of the most important movements at the heart of the Democratic coalition-- the Black Lives Matter protests and the #MeToo upsurge-- suggest the need for someone with a strong record on racial justice and respect for women, up stands Joe Biden."

Here is Biden, who speaks of his formative days admiring the civil rights movement in the 1960s, but at a gut level spoke for the white ethnic urbanites who protested school busing and integration. Here is Biden, who wants credit for pushing the Violence Against Women Act in the 1990s, but at a gut level could not quite find a way to give Anita Hill the same respect and credence he gave Clarence Thomas in those atrocious 1991 hearings of the Senate Judiciary Committee that he chaired. Biden was so concerned at that time with appearing to be fair and even-handed to the Republicans that he allowed them to coordinate sustained attacks on Hill, which then allowed Thomas to belligerently shout his way onto a Supreme Court seat-- and, not incidentally, provide the model that was followed to the letter by Brett Kavanaugh and his railing Republicans more than twenty-five years later.

Biden now steps up to lead a party that needs the energies of activist women and that is always in danger of telling activist youth they have no real place in Democratic Party politics, unless they fall in line and follow instructions. And before he even got to his official launch, he had to answer uncomfortable questions about his habits of putting his hands on women and girls without any sense of propriety. Even in minor stylistic ways, Biden shows himself to be a relic. On the day he formally announced his candidacy, the opening lines of his announcement email were “America is an idea. Based on a founding principle that all men are created equal.” He doesn’t realize that eighteenth-century “all men” constructions sound especially jarring now to vast numbers of people under the age of, maybe, seventy?

What about the time last year when Joe was on his book tour and he got to talking at a Los Angeles Times–sponsored event about the political struggles of the 1960s? “And so, the younger generation now tells me how tough things are. Give me a break,” Biden said. “No, no, I have no empathy for it. Give me a break. Because here’s the deal, guys. We decided we were going to change the world. And we did.” He doesn’t realize how much anger there is among today’s “younger generation” toward Baby Boomers? He thinks sounding like a clueless old grampy with “no empathy” is the way to win the youth vote?

Biden’s comment wasn’t directly about the student debt problem, but it was interpreted that way. And why not? His record on finance and debt matters is one of the worst parts of his long career in the Senate. He has been so consistently a shill for the financial industry that he has been blinded to one of the most dramatic and obvious structural changes in American life. Those students of the 1960s and 1970s he speaks about were the last generation to enjoy affordable college educations. The ones he has “no empathy” for lost something essential to middle-class stability. Saddled with debt and caught in the vise-grips of a predatory loan industry, college graduates spend years digging out-- in a way nobody Biden’s age ever had to do.

And of course all that is part of a wider problem that both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have been speaking about for decades—the way the financial industry is allowed to prey on people in dire straits. Biden joined with Republicans in the 1990s in efforts to toughen up the bankruptcy laws, based on the idea that too many middle-class people were irresponsibly running up credit-card debt and then declaring bankruptcy. Warren was then popping up as a Harvard Law professor who understood what the big banks were up to, and joined opponents who stymied Biden and the bank lobbyists for years.

In May of 2002, Warren wrote in a New York Times op-ed:

More than 90 percent of women who file for bankruptcy have been hit by some combination of unemployment, medical bills and divorce. Women are more likely than men to seek bankruptcy in the aftermath of a divorce or a medical problem, though both men and women cite job problems as the biggest difficulty.

It took until 2005, but Biden and the banks finally won and President George W. Bush signed their long-sought bill into law. As Theodoric Meyer wrote this spring in Politico explaining the Biden-Warren battle, the bill would likely have failed if Biden hadn’t led enough Democrats to the financial lobbyists’ side. Of course, the explanation was the usual one for Washington politics: the banking giant MBNA (absorbed in 2005 by Bank of America) was based in Biden’s home state of Delaware. And MBNA was the third-largest company in issuing credit cards, Meyer noted. Further:

Its executives and employees were some of Biden’s biggest campaign contributors, giving more than $200,000 over the course of his career, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. One of Biden’s sons, Hunter, worked at MBNA after graduating from law school and later consulted for the company after a stint in the Commerce Department. The Bidens’ ties to the company ran so deep that Obama campaign officials told the New York Times in 2008 that they were “one of the most sensitive issues they examined while vetting the senator for a spot on the ticket.” Biden was seen as so close to the company that he felt it necessary to tell the Washington Post at one point that he was “not the senator from MBNA.”

...[Biden is] trying to get you to know him the way his family and friends know him: as the guy who is warm and fair to everyone, including the nation’s top billionaires and the fellas down at the union hall. You are supposed to like him because he’s some salt-of-the-earth guy, though he’s been in the most privileged club in America since he was thirty years old. More so than ever, he seems to be a man out of context, looking backward, trying to catch up with the present, chasing only the future he imagined in 1964-- a man out of time.

Last week, the Harvard Political Review ran a different kind of look at Bernie than what you may be used to reading. But's it's valuable if you want to compare these two old white men. "As the baby boomer cohort continues to shrink" wrote Lexi Mealey, "millennials are beginning to rise into the political ranks, especially on the left. With the 2020 presidential election fast approaching, the Democratic Party has increasingly turned its attention to courting these young voters in its fight to take back the White House. Yet in order to capitalize on the increasing power of young voters, Democratic candidates will need to change their strategies. Distrustful of baby boomer representatives, as well as of the media and older voters, young Americans want a candidate who stands on principle, regardless of how it impacts his electability, and who can engage them through technology. In 2020, young Americans are looking for a candidate who is like them where it counts."

As parties become increasingly polarized, Democratic Party leadership seems focused on finding a candidate who can win. Moving into the 2020 primary season, the question on many left-leaning minds is not which candidate stands on the best policies but rather, who can beat Donald Trump.

Though this approach may seem like savvy strategy in the short term, candidates seeking to garner the youth vote may benefit more from following trends in youth political attitudes than trends in electability. A poll organized by the Harvard Public Opinion Project indicated that 82 percent of millennial respondents believe that it is more important for a candidate to share his political views than to be an electable politician. Across all demographics, youth support for candidates who share their political perspectives never falls below 75 percent of respondents. Regardless of political views or personal experiences, millennial voters care more about candidates who share their beliefs than those who they believe can win in a general election, favoring principle over political strategy.

Putting policy before electability will only become more imperative for political candidates as millennials move towards becoming the largest voting block in the country. This is especially true for Democrats, who tend to receive the majority of millennial support. In the 2016 presidential election, 55 percent of millennials voted for Clinton, while only 37 percent voted for Trump. Even for Republicans, though, youth represent an increasingly important electoral demographic. While millennials had the lowest voter turnout rate in 2016, this trend is set to change, with 63 percent of millennial respondents in the HPOP poll indicating that they will definitely vote in the 2020 election. Already, millennial voting power has been increasing in every election since the peak of baby boomer voting power in 2004.

To communicate their policy positions to millennial voters, candidates should stay away from mainstream media outlets. HPOP data shows that only 14 percent of young people trust the media to do the right thing, though Democrats are twice as likely to trust the media when compared to Republicans at 23 percent to 10 percent. Even appealing to the most established news networks may not be an effective way of reaching young voters, as Business Insider reports that only 17 percent of all people who watch television news are millennials.

This does not mean that all media outreach is lost on millennials. Young voters are still consuming political news through a different digital medium. Business Insider reported that 23 percent of millennials get their news primarily from social media and 43.4 percent get their news from smartphones. Such trends indicate that a 2020 hopeful should focus on social media strategy, rather than mainstream media rollouts. An engaging website, a great podcast, and a strong Instagram presence will do more to garner the support of young voters than a televised town hall.

Frequent and direct social media engagement with young voters will also help candidates seeking the millennial vote to create a sense of trust. Yet building this trust is not an easy task. HPOP polling indicates that only 18 percent of young people feel that baby boomer voters care about them and only 16 percent feel that baby boomer elected officials care about them. It therefore seems unlikely that gaining endorsements from senior party members or former politicians will have the same effect on young voters today as it has in past elections.

Given that many of the prominent Democratic presidential candidates for 2020 are baby boomer elected officials, these hopefuls should focus on direct engagement and forward-looking policy solutions to bridge a generational lack of trust. Young voters want political officials who care about them and their interests moving forward. The burden is on each candidate to prove him or herself up to this task.

Despite millennials’ large distrust of baby boomers, Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) garnered the most support from millennials of all 2020 presidential candidates in the HPOP poll, with 31 percent of respondents selecting him as their favorite candidate from the 2020 Democratic field.

So, why Bernie? Polling results indicate that Sanders’s name recognition as a former presidential hopeful and established public trust may be helping him overcome the massive age gap between himself and young voters. Yet these factors alone cannot explain the outpouring of support for Sanders. Former Vice President Joe Biden has just as much, if not more, name recognition as Sanders, and is popular for his work with Barack Obama, who left office with a favorability rating of 73 percent among millennials. Nonetheless, Biden trails Sanders by 11 percent among millennial voters.

What sets Sanders apart from Biden and other Democratic hopefuls in part is his ability to communicate his forward-thinking policy solutions to young Democratic voters directly through social media. Sanders boasts 9.2 million followers on his personal Twitter account. Even Biden pales in comparison, with just 3.4 million followers. Sanders’s Twitter is focused on his policies. Rather than constantly tweeting about recent campaign appearances, Sanders is tweeting endearing videos of youth activism, support for national unity against the “billionaire class,” and an introduction to his new podcast. On most days, Sanders tweets upwards of 10 times, demonstrating a desire to listen to and engage with young supporters.

It is clear that Sanders is overcoming the age gap with millennial voters by making concerted efforts at relatability. He speaks the language of tech-savvy millennials and understands the kind of policy-driven content they want to see. Most importantly, Sanders is overcoming distrust in baby boomers by setting himself apart from the rest of his cohort. Sanders openly speaks out against baby boomer-era projects, such as nuclear proliferation and foreign wars. He expresses genuine care for the future, even if it is a future that he will not likely experience himself, prioritizing policies like affordable housing, education, support for unions, and infrastructure development.

Democratic candidates who aim to capture the youth vote should focus on similar future-first policies to set themselves apart from their predecessors, who are largely distrusted by young voters. Millennials are seeking candidates who will be their political advocates and allies, holding strong to their political convictions rather than pandering to seem more electable. For Democratic candidates to win the youth vote in 2020 and beyond, it is clear that hopefuls should be like Bernie: relatable, communicative, and invested in the future.