Most Of The Democratic Candidates For President Are Part Of The Problem, Not Part Of The Solution

It's worth watching this Bernie endorsement video by Illinois state Senator Robert Peters, the former political director of Reclaim Chicago and the young man who now represents the Chicago district Obama used to represent. Biden has big lists of worthless politicians who have been endorsing him, generally mean nd women whose endorsement would want to make people run in the opposite direction. Listen to Peters explain why he's backing Bernie.

Yesterday, the Washington Post published an interesting and unexpected bit of reporting by Tory Newmyer, Goldman Sachs seeks to rebrand as wealth takes center stage in the Democratic presidential race. Wall Street's most notorious banksters has been sponsoring presidential candidate forums in Iowa and New Hampshire. "Goldman executives," wrote Newmyer, "say their purpose is to elevate small-business concerns in the contest. Small businesses employ nearly half the private workforce, and Goldman argues they lack a voice in Washington and have received scant attention on the campaign trail-- a realization executives say they reached after shepherding more than 9,100 through the entrepreneurship program they launched nearly a decade ago. But the effort is also a subtle rebranding exercise by a firm at the center of a knockdown political fight between Wall Street and Main Street. For populists such as Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the banking giant remains a totem of runaway Wall Street greed that helped precipitate the 2008 financial crisis and continues to reap a windfall under the Trump administration. For Wall Street titans and the uber-rich, liberal Democratic candidates are villainizing their success and threatening it with their economic plans."

Proposals by Bernie and Elizabeth are frightening-- and inciting-- the banksters and other enemies of working families. Right-of-center Democrats like Bloomberg, Mayo Pete and Status Quo Joe are sticking up for them as best they can, but Democratic-- and independent-- voters keep telling pollsters they prefer policies that force the super-rich to pay their fair share of taxes. The woman most rumored to be a Biden running mate, Rhode Island neo-liberal governor, Gina Raimondo-- also the least popular governor in the country and widely considered a corrupt Wall Street shill worked with Goldman on launching the forums. A truly disgusting person, Raimondo is also trying to suck up to Bloomberg and said she thinks Goldman’s effort "comes from a genuine place."

Democratic voters may be a tougher sell. They believe Wall Street hurts the economy more than it helps it, by a margin of 46 percent to 41 percent, according to a January poll by the Pew Research Center. More than 8 in 10 Democrats think the political system mainly benefits those in power, a Washington Post-ABC News survey in April found. And there is widespread voter concern about the industry’s political influence, with 69 percent saying financial services interests wield too much power in Washington, according to a 2018 Kaiser Family Foundation poll.

...[T]he firm also uses the events as opportunities to strengthen its ties to the candidates, sending lobbyists from its Washington office to greet them. For the Harris event, it was Joyce Brayboy, who was chief of staff to former congressman Mel Watt (D-NC), who has spent over a decade pressing the firm’s interests on Capitol Hill. The participants in the forums are, predictably, the conservative candidates: StatusQuoJoe, Michael Bennet, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O'Rourke, and Mayo Pete, all of whom have nurtured warm and corrupt relations with the bankster community. Bernie and Elizabeth are not participating. Mike Casca, a spokesman for Bernie's campaign: "This is exactly what Sen. Sanders means when he talks about a corrupt political system."

Is this message going to get through to Republicans? Probably not. As far as I can tell, most of them, empowered by Trump and Fox to let their Nazi flags fly, have utterly lost their minds.

When historians and political scientists are polled, the 3 top presidents of all time are almost always Lincoln, Washington and FDR-- in that order. Trump is almost invariably rated as the worst president ever. When the general public is polled, the responses are more varied. A recent poll by Ranker, in which over 840,000 people participated, the top presidents came out like this:

• George Washington
• Abraham Lincoln
• Thomas Jefferson
• JFK
• James Madison
• Teddy Roosevelt
• FDR

A new poll by YouGov for The Economist asked "which president was better?" They started with a match-up between Lincoln, generally considered the best president and Trump, generally considered the worst president. The general public picked Lincoln 75-25%. Among Democrats, it was 94% Lincoln and 6% Trump. Among independent voters it was 78% Lincoln and 22% Trump. And among Republicans? 75% Trump and 25% Lincoln.





A plurality of Republicans consider Trump the greatest president in history. (82% of Democrats and 48% of independents consider him the worst.) Republicans say Trump is better than any president polled other than Reagan:

• George W. Bush- Trump 71%
• George H. W. Bush- Trump 71%
• Ronald Reagan- Trump 41%
• Jerry Ford- Trump 82%
• Richard Nixon- Trump 86%
• Dwight Eisenhower- Trump 65%

Friday, author and historian Douglas Brinkley was on CNN talking about Trump's polling numbers. He told viewers that although 50% of Americans now want to see Trump impeached and removed from office, he expects that number to rise as the impeachment hearings continue to be televised and in the headlines. "Trump's heading right into the 2020 election and the Democrats are going to pound Trump on being a kind of fake president, somebody who's subpar in his behavior and who's been running the most corrupt administration since Warren Harding."