One Way We Know Bernie Is The Real FDR Democrat In The Race

This is not a Pritzker

The MSNBC circle of #NeverTrump conservative Republicans may hate Trump, but they hate Bernie as well, if not even more. One of the most disgusting of the lot, AOC-hater Donnie Deutsch, admitted on the air, on Morning Joe, that if Bernie is the nominee, he'd vote for Trump: "I find Donald Trump reprehensible as a human being, but a socialist candidate is more dangerous to this country... I would vote for Donald Trump, a despicable human being... (at which point Scarborough shut him up before he could say the words). Watch:





Soon after, MSNBC gave Deutsch his own show, which failed to get any viewers, was universally panned and lasted for about as long as his friend The Mooch lasted as Trump's press secretary.

On Monday morning, the Daily Beast published a piece by Lachlan Markay: They Donated to Trump’s Inauguration. Now These Big Donors Are Funding His 2020 Competition. Well, they're funding certain candidates, but not Trump's real 2020 competition. The deranged-- and mostly crooked-- multimillionaires and billionaires who hoped to buy favor from Trump by funneling millions of dollars directly into his pockets through an inaugural committee that was nothing but a payoff scheme for Trump, have been donating to almost everyone-- even John Delaney!-- but Bernie (of course).

In January 2019, Jennifer Pritzker wrote an impassioned plea to her political party: She was a lifelong Republican, but the GOP was driving her away with messaging and policies targeting transgender people.

It had only been a few years since Pritzker, the world’s only known trans billionaire and a Republican megadonor, had chipped in a whopping $250,000 to President Donald Trump’s inaugural committee. But three months after publicly objecting to the GOP’s stance on trans issues, she gave $1,000 to Democrat Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign.

Pritzker is a member of a prominent, wealthy, and politically active family (her cousin J.B. Pritzker is the Democratic governor of Illinois, and his sister Penny was Barack Obama’s commerce secretary). But she is far from the only donor to Trump’s inauguration who has financially supported one of his potential Democratic presidential challengers.

The Daily Beast tallied 15 such donors who collectively gave more than $700,000 to Trump’s inaugural committee but who have since contributed to the presidential campaigns of Democratic candidates, including Buttigieg, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Tulsi Gabbard, Amy Klobuchar, Michael Bennet, John Hickenlooper, Eric Swalwell, and John Delaney.

The donors have a mixed record of prior support for Republicans. Some, like Pritzker, consistently contributed large sums to GOP candidates. Others had more bipartisan giving histories. And some chipped in to the Trump inaugural despite largely supporting Democrats in the past.

Taken together, though, the crop of donors who ponied up to celebrate Trump’s 2016 victory only to actively combat his re-election a few years later represent some notable political defections. And while the Trump re-election effort certainly is not hurting for cash as the election year begins, those defections signal some discontent among donors who, undoubtedly for various reasons, chose to signal their support for the new president just a few years ago.

...Greg Maffei, the chief executive of the Colorado-based media company Liberty Media, is another $250,000 donor to the Trump inaugural who is backing Democrats in 2020. Though he didn’t donate to Trump’s presidential campaign, he did so for Mitt Romney in 2012 and John McCain in 2008.

This time around, though, Maffei has supported the two Democratic presidential candidates from his home state. In March 2019, he gave the per-election maximum of $2,800 to Hickenlooper, the former Colorado governor. Two months later, after a max-out donation to Republican Sen. Cory Gardner, Maffei donated $100,000 to a super PAC supporting Hickenlooper. After Hickenlooper withdrew from the race, Maffei donated the legal maximum to Bennet’s presidential campaign.

...Chrysa Tsakopoulos Demos, the chief executive of California land-development company AKT Investments, is a longtime Republican donor who backed Sen. Ted Cruz’s bid for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. She donated $5,000 to the Trump inaugural, and continued donating to Republicans through 2018, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and Great America Committee, Vice President Mike Pence’s political group.

But Demos’ only federal political contribution so far in the 2020 cycle is the $2,800 she donated last year to Biden’s presidential campaign.

...Leonard Wilf, a real-estate developer and co-owner of the Minnesota Vikings, has donated to both Democrats and Republicans. But just a few weeks before the 2016 election, he donated $2,700 to Clinton’s campaign and an additional $5,000 to a PAC supporting her. When Clinton lost, Wilf chipped in $25,000 to Trump’s inaugural committee. With Trump back on the ballot, though, Wilf is once again supporting a Democrat; in March 2019, he maxed out to Klobuchar’s campaign.

Florida physician Azzam Muftah maxed out to Clinton’s campaign in 2016 and wrote a handful of checks to the Democratic National Committee. But he donated $3,000 to the Trump inauguration, and during the 2018 cycle donated to a number of Senate Republicans, including Tom Cotton, Lindsey Graham, Mike Braun, and Jim Risch.

Come 2019, though, Muftah began chipping in to Trump challengers. So far this cycle, he’s donated to both Buttigieg and Booker.

Bruce Mosler, the chairman of real-estate giant Kushman & Wakefield’s global brokerage practice and a $25,000 donor to the Trump inaugural, really likes to hedge his bets. During the 2008 presidential race, he donated to the campaigns of Clinton, Biden, and Rudy Giuliani. In 2012, he supported both Romney and Barack Obama. Four years later, he donated to both Clinton and Trump.

In 2020, though, Mosler is supporting Biden. He’s donated $5,000 to Biden’s PAC and another $2,800 to his campaign.

Monday morning, NJ.com reported that when DCCC-Blue Dog Jeff Van Drew flipped from a Trump-supporting fake Democrat to a Trump-Worshipping Republican, his campaign manager, political operative Josh Roesch slid right into running the campaign of one of the establishment Democrats running against Van Drew, the Kennedy wife in this case.

Roesch, apparently a moron, told NJ.com, "I thought I was working for a Democrat. I’d like to go work for a Democrat still." I hope Amy Kennedy is more of a Democrat than Van Drew ever was. The DCCC recruited him when he was the most-Republican member of any Democrat in the New Jersey state legislature. It's always what the DCCC wants in candidates. These kinds of things may be important to you and I, but among the elites, a Biden or Mayo Pete or a Trump... mostly all the same. A Jeff Van Drew or a Kennedy... same/same. And that's exactly why Bernie stands out and why you won't find people like Josh Roesch, let along a Donny Deutsch, a Jennifer Pritzker or a Greg Maffei backing him. Bernie's the candidate of working men and women, not of the elites. And that's why I've embedded the ActBlue thermometer on the right. Please click on it and make Donny Deutsch, Jennifer Pritzker and Greg Maffei cry.

Last night, Politico published a more serious piece than we usually come to expect from them-- The coming clash between Bernie and Biden by Marc Caputo and Holly Otterbein. And it's about Biden's longstanding record of trying to gut Social Security and Medicare. Bernie staffer David Sirota told them that "Biden has repeatedly worked to cut Social Security, and has never offered up a good explanation for that crusade. His Social Security record is not only atrocious on a policy level, it is an enormous political vulnerability in both a primary and a general election. Bernie Sanders has exactly the opposite record-- he’s fought those cuts and fought to expand Social Security, and that is a contrast Democratic voters deserve to know." And tonight's the night.

Biden’s advisers said the former vice president will be ready to take on Sanders and prevail against his attacks onstage just as he did when opponents Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julián Castro, and Bill de Blasio went after him, only to see their critiques fall flat as they lost ground and exited the race as Biden pressed ahead.

Sanders, though, differs from those other candidates in one important way: He has a devoted base of loyal followers who show no signs of deserting him, many of whom want to see Sanders take the fight to a rival they view as the embodiment of the Democratic establishment by focusing on one of the party’s signature legacy programs, Social Security. He has also already repeatedly criticized Biden for his votes for the Iraq War and free-trade deals on the debate stage without seemingly suffering.

The Sanders team’s expected assault comes as he is at the top of the polls in the first-in-the-nation caucus state of Iowa, but still significantly polling behind Biden among seniors. It’s not guaranteed he will execute the attack on Biden in a sustained way: After previous debates, some of his aides and supporters have been disappointed that he hasn’t confronted Biden more aggressively.

The two men’s history over the issue provides a window into their political personas, pitting Sanders, the left-wing outsider against Biden, the moderate dealmaker with a legacy of working with Republicans. Already, that positioning that has proved politically challenging for Biden in the leftward-shifting Democratic primary.

In proposing a Social Security plan during the primary with none of the cuts or changes he once countenanced, Biden has moved more toward Sanders-- a triumph for a progressive movement that fought for years to ensure Democratic politicians would only consider growing the program, instead of raising age eligibility requirements or freezing cost-of-living adjustments to make it pay out less.

“Bernie was key in that evolution,” said Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, who served as Biden’s chief economist and economic adviser from 2009 to 2011.

It was in December 2010 that Sanders filibustered the Biden-negotiated deal with Republicans that extended Bush-era tax cuts, cut the estate tax, continued unemployment benefits and created a temporary Social Security payroll tax cut, or “tax holiday.”

The deal was struck just a month after Republicans, in the words of President Obama, had just “shellacked” Democrats at the polls. Obama and Biden were facing reelection in less than two years; the president wanted to position himself as a reasonable centrist who was serious about deficit reduction. He was mindful he had to deal with divided government in Congress, and feeling the pressure to stimulate the economy with tax cuts because the scars of the recession were not healed.

After Biden briefed the Democratic caucus about the plan, Sanders was angered, said his senior adviser Warren Gunnels: “You can see Bernie sitting there listening to that and his blood starting to boil.”

Sanders said he believed the only concession Democrats received was the jobless benefits extension-- but his team had determined that that such benefits had been extended on a bipartisan basis every time the unemployment rate was as high as it was at the time. And he fretted that temporarily trimming Social Security taxes could ultimately help weaken the program.

So Sanders filibustered, mentioning Biden three times only by his title-- but never saying his name-- on the Senate floor as he blasted the deal the then-vice president negotiated with Republicans.

“I know the vice president recently made the point this was originally a Republican idea,” Sanders said, referring to the caucus meeting. “Why did the Republicans come up with this idea? These are exactly the same people who do not believe in Social Security.”

Biden responded with an op-ed in USA Today a month later where he accused opponents of the deal, without naming Sanders, of spreading “misinformation.”

Sanders failed to stop the measure. And his specific fears about weakening Social Security’s tax structure didn’t come to pass, though Social Security advocates said it helped popularize the idea of payroll-tax holidays.

But it catapulted Sanders into the burgeoning progressive movement’s national spotlight by criticizing Obama and Biden from the left. His speech trended on Twitter and blanketed cable television news, and Sanders’ office was inundated with more calls than they had ever received, an aide said.

“Bernie won the debate outside the Beltway,” Gunnels said. “I really think that lit a spark for the movement that Senator Sanders has led to create. That was really kind of the launching pad.”

Bernstein, Biden’s former adviser, agreed, saying Sanders was “showing himself to dissent from the mainstream Democratic playbook, trying to break from a fold that he felt was not pursuing good politics or policy. There’s clearly been a constituency of Democrats who are seeking a more liberal or progressive set of policies than the mainstream was serving up in those years.”

“That group has gotten a lot more attention from candidates and even the more moderate candidates have to their credit evolved with this constituency,” Bernstein said.

Sanders supporters chuckle at the irony that Sanders’ national political profile-- which is helping him mount one of the biggest threats to Biden’s presidential ambitions-- is, in part, the inadvertent byproduct of Biden’s penchant for cutting deals with Republicans.

Bernstein cautions that, while there’s a “leftward drift in the evolution of our agenda” that Sanders helped harness, Democratic voters are still moderate and Biden is a “full-throated and full-blooded supporter of Social Security.”

While Biden’s campaign won’t discuss his previous support for Social Security cuts and spending freezes, his defenders acknowledge he changed. They say the major reasons for that weren’t due to Sanders, but the bad economy of the recession, the bad faith of Tea Party Republicans who dictated the congressional agenda after winning the House in 2010, and a new perception in Washington political circles that didn’t view deficits, especially from safety-net programs, as nearly as dangerous as they previously had.

Biden’s earliest forays into Social Security cuts happened in 1984, when congressional concerns over Reagan-era deficits grew and he co-sponsored a failed proposal with Republicans to freeze spending, including cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security, which would have had the effect of a financial cut for recipients and a savings for government. Reagan and the Senate Republican leadership opposed it, saying it contained serious cuts to Social Security.

Sanders’ campaign pointed out last week that Biden in 1995 recalled on the Senate floor his four prior attempts to balance the budget, saying that he had been ready “to freeze all government spending, including Social Security, including everything.”

Before his second failed bid for president, Biden in 2007 said he would “absolutely” consider Social Security and Medicare spending limits but noted the political risks in pursuit of balancing the budget.

“The political advisers say to me is ‘whoa, don’t touch that third [rail],’” Biden said in a 2007 Meet the Pres” interview. “Look: the American people aren’t stupid.”

During the 2012 reelection, Biden struck a different posture when he told voters in Virginia that “I guarantee you, flat guarantee you, there will be no changes in Social Security. I flat guarantee you.” But after reelection, the Obama administration, locked in negotiations with Republicans over what was known as the “fiscal cliff,” offered to change the way cost-of-living adjustments are calculated. Ultimately, the plan went nowhere because Republicans refused to consider tax increases and progressive Democrats balked, led partly by Sanders, at the Social Security plans.

Biden’s campaign accused Sanders and his team of failing to account for the liberal work the former vice president and president did for safety-net programs by passing Obamacare, the 2009 stimulus bill and the 2010 tax cut package that included the Social Security “tax holiday” that was deemed effective by some economists and his team said was a “godsend for working Americans hit indescribably hard by the financial crisis.”

...To progressives, though, Sanders was a voice in the wilderness standing up for Social Security during that time.

“It was a very lonely place,” said Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works and a Sanders supporter. “There was a cacophony of calls for doing something about the debt and Bernie Sanders basically rejected the premise that that’s what it was about...In 2010, the ‘grand bargain’ was at the peak of its popularity in the elite media, in the elite political circles in D.C., in this reinforcing bubble that decided that it made a lot of sense to cut benefits.”

Rebecca Traister: Pundits Haven't Been Able To Keep Up

Two rich hereditary Donnies from Queens-- both hate Bernie

Let's call this Part II of this morning's post on Sydney Ember's dishonest, biased journalism. Because, well... there is Donny Deutsch and other like him, self-appointed pundits. Unlike Ember, most of them don't pretend to be reporters, just a rodeo clowns. And, alas, MSNBC turned into what it has turned into. As Rebecca Traister opined for New York Magazine yesterday, our political pundits aren't able to keep up and are "totally ill-equipped for the historic task ahead of them."

She noted that "Beyond their representational expansion, many of the candidates are offering up compelling, progressive policy ideas: pushing the party into fights for single-payer health care, subsidized child care, free college, a Green New Deal, a stronger commitment to reproductive justice and a push for more humane immigration policies. But we’re also getting our first real taste of the punditry that will frame this next year and a half, and so far, it is the opposite of fresh, diverse, or forward-thinking. Rather, the analysis coughed up by some of the nation’s loudest and most prominent talking heads sounds familiar and stale. The dispiriting truth is that many of those tasked with interpreting our politics are-- in addition to being extremely freaked out by the race they’re covering-- totally ill-equipped for the historic task ahead of them." It's a different problem than the Times' problem of foisting a monstrosity like Ember on us as though she were a professional reporter instead of Satin's spawn.

Where many Americans have seen the emergence of compelling and charismatic candidates who don’t look like those who’ve preceded them (but do look more like the country they want to lead), some prominent pundits seem to be looking at a field of people they simply can’t recognize as presidential. Where many hear Democratic politicians arguing vigorously on behalf of more justice and access to resources for people who have historically been kept at the margins of power, some prominent columnists are hearing a scary call to destabilization and chaos, imagining themselves on the outside of politics they’ve long assumed should be centered around them.

Altogether, what’s emerging is a view of a presidential commentariat that-- in terms of both ideas and diversity-- is embarrassingly outpaced by the candidates, many of whom appear smarter, more thoughtful, and to have a nimbler grasp of American history and structural inequities than the television journalists being paid to cover them.

The day after the first pair of debates, Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough declared them “a disaster for the Democratic Party,” and hoped that no one had been watching (in fact, they had been watching; ratings were startlingly robust). Scarborough particularly bemoaned candidates’ opinions on immigration-- namely that crossing the border should be reclassified as a federal misdemeanor, not a crime; and that immigrants should be entitled to health care-- chiding that these ideas “may make Democrats feel really good about themselves,” but would lose them the election. This week, Scarborough went on a Twitter tear, venting against “woke Democrats” and their drive left, later deleting his thread.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post’s Robert J. Samuelson asserted that the Democratic candidates resemble “a gaggle of graduate students.” At the debates, all of them, he conceded, “seemed articulate and intelligent … None, however, seemed ‘presidential.’” At the New York Times, Never Trump conservative Bret Stephens was worse, arguing that if Democrats continue to do things like speak Spanish and argue for universal health care, they’ll not only “lose the elections,” they’ll “deserve it,” and suggesting that the candidates’ fights on behalf of immigrants, workers, the uninsured, and the economically struggling shows that Democrats are more invested “in them instead of us,” a formulation in which “us” seems clearly to stand for the white and the well-off, and “them” is … everyone else.

In particular, Stephens criticized Kamala Harris’s “scurrilous attack” on Joe Biden during the second debate, in which she confronted the former vice-president over his praise for segregationists he’d boasted of working alongside in his Senate career and pointed out that the very busing measures he’d sided with Republicans to oppose had been what enabled her to attend an integrated elementary school. Stephens compared Harris critically to Barack Obama, writing of the former president’s ability to “[make] you feel comfortable no matter the color of your skin,” and argued that Harris, by contrast, made “white Americans feel racially on trial.”

Of course, newspaper columnists-- especially conservative ones like Stephens-- are going to columnize, and increasingly, they do so in company that is slightly more diverse, ideologically and in other ways, than it was even a few short years ago. But Stephens’s troubling assertion that a black person’s description of her experience of discrimination is tantamount to a prosecution of white people found a broader foothold in television commentary. During post-debate coverage, MSNBC host Chris Matthews-- who is still tasked with interviewing presidential candidates, despite having been revealed to have joked before a 2016 interview with Hillary Clinton about putting a “Bill Cosby pill” in her water-- was questioning Harris about the stories she’d told about friends not being allowed to play with her because she was black. Prefacing his question about race with the assertion that he did not “like the word ‘race,’” Matthews asked her, “How did you come out of that and not have hate toward white people generally?” Matthews was surely trying to side with Harris in some way, but did so by framing her challenge of segregationist policies, rooted in her personal experience, as logically akin to a hatred of white people-- precisely the specter of punitive racial resentment that Stephens had been trying to rouse.

Cable news analysis hit another low when Donny Deutsch, an advertising and branding executive who for years had his own CNBC show and was recently hired by MSNBC to host a weekly political talk show, said of Elizabeth Warren, whom he has predicted will lose 48 states should she become the nominee: “I think she’s delightful, I think she’s wonderful, I’m a big fan, I just don’t think she has what it takes to beat this president the same way... an idealized version of Joe Biden [does].” When challenged by MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell, Deutsch got defensive: “I am understanding Donald Trump, the way he connects with this country, and the strength he exudes. We need to exude a stronger strength.” Deutsch exuded his own stronger strength by affirming that he is “a guy who’s done this for 30 years and watched human behavior.”

In this, if nothing else, Deutsch was correct: He has been doling out weird gender essentialism for eons. In his 2005 book Often Wrong, Never in Doubt, Deutsch wrote, “I cannot remember a time in my career when I was not having either a flirtation with a woman in the office, or a friendship, a fantasy, or all of the above. I am at my best when women are there to energize and excite me.” More recently, he told Nicolle Wallace of Joe Biden: “I love him onstage next to Trump. I love his height. I love that he threatened to get into a fistfight with Trump.” Back in 2008, Deutsch loved vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin in a different way, as a “new feminist ideal:” “I want her watching my kids … I want her laying in bed next to me,” Deutsch said at the time, arguing that “women want to be her, men want to mate with her.”

The problem here is not simply that Matthews and Deutsch still have their high-paid media jobs, despite lengthy records of mediocre analysis, grotesque speech about women, and relative cluelessness about race. It’s that their jobs are crucial to how the story of the presidential race will be told to the millions of people who watch them.

This is the suffocatingly grim reality: Even after the peeling off of a layer of the political media’s most prominent interlocutors during #MeToo-- including Charlie Rose, Mark Halperin, Bill O’Reilly and Matt Lauer-- television coverage of the 2020 election is still being led by men who have sketchy histories around gender and power. Even after a midterm season in which women-- many of them women of color, some of them very progressive-- won elections in historic numbers; even in the midst of a presidential crisis during which poor, black, brown, and immigrant communities have been made more vulnerable than ever, and have been brought closer to the center-- finally-- of left political engagement and activism; even given all of this, so many of the voices interpreting the events around us still belong to the guys who’ve been clumsily telling us what to think about politics for ages.

Of course, it’s the swiftness of the political current that is making so many long-entrenched pundits so uncomfortable. They feel left behind and are convinced that the electorate reflects their own perspectives-- as Donny Deutsch said last week to O’Donnell, “I guarantee you 90 percent of our audience agrees with me.” These analysts feel that a Democratic Party that’s moving left is ditching not just them, but their platonic ideal of a Democratic voter--concocted in the same spirit that Deutsch may imagine an “idealized version of Joe Biden”: a white centrist they are sure not only represents the average American, but the Democratic base. But in all of their hand-wringing, they seem not to have noticed that, in fact, assumptions about a safe center are crumbling in the hands of a new generation of political leaders willing to make a stirring case for radical ideas.

Support for the Green New Deal, a policy proposal which was treated as a joke not just by Republicans but by many in the Democratic Party and the press upon its inception, appears to have risen precipitously; a majority of voters support Medicare for All (even as many don’t totally understand what it entails). The majority of Americans support the kind of wealth tax that Elizabeth Warren is proposing, even as some economists criticize it as unrealistic. In fact, in this period during which mainstream political analysts talk so much about the perils of Democrats getting ever more progressive, a study released by the University of North Carolina last month showed American support for left-wing policy to be at a 60-year high, suggesting that perhaps the prescription being offered by these men-- which if I’m piecing it all together correctly would be a moderate show of masculine prowess and deficit-wary conservatism that makes white people feel good about themselves-- might be the very thing that has kept many voters from investing energetically in the Democratic Party until now. And the thing they fear most-- these women and nonwhite guys with their angry voices and memories of being discriminated against who are not tall enough to debate Trump-- may be what galvanizes the party.

The disconnect between the candidates and how the candidates are being received by many in the political media also tells us something about how politics, even presidential politics, remains much more susceptible to speedy alteration than institutional journalism.

After all, 11 years ago, when Deutsch was on television holding forth on Sarah Palin’s maternal hotness, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-- who’s not running for president but is clearly one of the transformational figures who’s bugging the hell out of many of these same men (Deutsch has predicted that she is “going to hand the presidency back to Donald Trump”; Stephens described her form of democratic socialism as “political hemlock”) was a college freshman. Elizabeth Warren was a law professor; Kamala Harris was the district attorney of San Francisco; Julián Castro was a former San Antonio city council member who’d lost his first campaign for mayor and was about to embark on his second. If you’d told many of the men covering 2020 that these would be the energetic leaders of a Democratic Party in 2019, they might have laughed. But they would have done their laughing on television or in newspapers because many of them … were doing the same, or similar, jobs as they are today.

We’re regularly told-- sometimes by these very same guys!-- that powerful white men are frightened, under attack by a mob of politically correct bullies who lack nuance. Yet in reality, these men’s own missteps-- joking about slipping a roofie to a presidential candidate, bragging about flirting with women at work, having lied about their own journalism careers, as current MSNBC anchor Brian Williams did-- have not resulted in permanent expulsion from their jobs. In fact, many of these men have been paid handsomely to continue telling their authoritative version of the story of American politics, over a period of decades during which those politics have been transformed, ideologically and representationally.

The absolute security and steadiness of their powerful perches has meant that many of these pundits have never been truly forced to think seriously about how they’ve benefited from racial and gendered bias, how colleagues and subjects who are smarter and more talented than they are don’t have their reach, their pulpits, their platforms.

And in this small but serious way, some of these pundits do reflect one angle of what’s been happening in the primary field: the front-runner status of Joe Biden, a man who has flamed out of two previous presidential primary campaigns-- one in which he was caught plagiarizing, one in which he spoke in affably racist terms about his competitor, Barack Obama, then won less than one percent of the Iowa caucus vote-- yet has nonetheless continued to wield political power, and to lead this year’s presidential pack in terms of fundraising, polling, and press coverage.

Biden, like many of the most prominent men covering him, was born into a world in which every system was set up to help him build and preserve his own power, even-- in fact by definition-- at the expense of others. These guys are on some level unprepared for a universe in which others, people whose childhoods were shaped by the busing policies they were creating, might one day stand up and challenge them; in which a woman whose family once teetered on the brink of home foreclosure might fight them tooth and nail on bankruptcy reform, or in which they would be forced to reckon with a debate stage filled with those who felt it important to speak Spanish.

These pundits may turn out to be right that these dynamics will make some voters feel as uncomfortable as they are being made to feel, and that those voters will ultimately prefer people who, like Trump, call back to a more comfortingly hierarchical past.

But the argument that many of the presidential candidates they’re covering are forcefully advancing is something I’ve rarely heard as clearly from potential front-runners before: that this comfortable path backward, even in service of electing a Democrat, is unacceptable and a reflection of the very inequities that have left the nation broken and perilous for so many. They are insisting on a different, faster, smarter, lefter turn toward the future.

If only our pundits could catch up to them in class.

Hmmm... What To Run While Everyone Is Watching Game Of Thrones

Donny Deutsch is another one of those faux celebrities who is famous for being famous, like Paris Hilton. Like Trump, he's from Queens and went to the University of Pennsylvania and got some notoriety by appearing on The Apprentice. He became addicted to being on TV when he was still a kid-- as a contestant on a game show-- the Match Game-- winning $5,000. He joined his father's advertising company and eventually got rich by selling it for $265 million dollars. And now he's cable-TV-famous, mostly as a regular on Morning Joe.

About a year ago he got in a little bit of trouble for saying aloud what many normal people wonder about, basically that people who voted for Trump are "like Nazis." Last month, though, he said on MSNBC that he would vote for Señor Trumpanzee rather than anyone-- Bernie-- he thinks is a socialist.

This past Friday he appeared on MSNBC's Deadline: White House with Nicolle Wallace" to examine Trump's mental health. He read from the website Profile Of The Sociopath: "They never recognize the right of others and see their behaviors as permissible, their victim is merely an instrument to be used. There’s no remorse, shame or guilt, they don’t see others around them as people, but only targets and opportunities. Instead of friends they have victims and accomplices who end up as victims. They’re callous and have a lack of empathy. They’re unable to empathize with the pain of their victims, having only contempt for others’ feelings of distress and readily taking advantage of them. They believe they’re all powerful, all knowing, entitled to every wish. No sense of personal boundary and no concern for their impact on others." Undeniable who that sounds like. And in case you missed it, Deutsch elucidated:

We have to be frightened and outraged. This president is showing the behavior of every autocratic despot in the history of the world... And there starts to need to be fear and outrage and not just analysis."

But he'd vote to reelect him instead of seeing Bernie become president? Nicolle didn't ask him. Strange guy. If you don't see it that way-- better a sociopath than Bernie-- please consider chipping in to Bernie's 2020 presidential campaign. His average contribution has been $20 this cycle. You can hive more; you can give less. We suggest $20.20 in the hope that 2020 represents the year that we don't only get rid of the psychopath in the White House but that we replace him with a transformational political figure you is not just another one of the long line of mediocre presidents we've had since FDR, but someone who will actually do something to challenge and overcome the fundamental ills of our society. Bernie's that person. And we don't often get such a clear-cut choice. Deutsch is one of those multimillionaires-- nice being an heir, isn't it?-- who would rather have a dangerous psychopath in the White House than a Democratic Socialist who would make multimillionaires pay their fair share of taxes. I bet you don't feel that way. He's wrong! Please click on the ActBlue thermometer on the right and help replace Trump with Bernie.