Don't Tell The DCCC, But There's A House Seat We Can Win Back In West Virginia

West Virginia was Bernie territory in the 2016 primary. Most people know that he beat Hillary in every single county, but fewer people know he also garnered more votes than Trump did in many counties. West Virginia voters are a lot more progressive than people think. WV-02, the district Cathy Kunkel is running to represent, has 17 counties, though most of the population lives in just four. Kanawah is the biggest county in the district and trends blue. Bernie beat Hillary and the two of them combined had more votes than 10 Republicans combined! Although Hillary lost to Trump in the general, Kanawha voted against GOP incumbent Alex Mooney in 2018. Similar story in Jefferson County-- Bernie beat Hillary and the combined votes for those two top Dems were greater than for all 10 Republicans on the ballot. In some of the smaller counties, the two Dems also beat the 10 Republicans. In fact, in Braxton, Calhoun and Clay counties, Bernie beat the combined 10 Republicans on his own! In Randolph County Bernie beat Hillary 2,492 to 1,515 but the more interesting comparison was between Bernie and Trump, who led the Republican field but with just 2,206 votes. In the end, Bernie and Hillary has 4,007 votes compared to 2,828 votes for Trump, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina and Chris Christie combined.

No need to write West Virginia off-- even if he did win every single county and pulverize the status quo Democrat in the general. His 68.9- 26.5% win was one of his strongest showings in the country. West Virginians weren't interested in preserving the status quo. Since Trump was inaugurated in 2017, his job approval has decreased among West Virgina voters by 13 points.

Cathy Kunkel, who earned undergraduate and master’s degrees in physics from Princeton and Cambridge, is nothing like a status quo Democrat. She's been fighting for West Virginians for the last decade. After the 2014 Freedom Industries chemical spill contaminated the drinking water of Charleston and the surrounding region, Cathy co-founded Advocates for a Safe Water System, a community group that fought for three years to win improvements to the safety of the drinking water.

Cathy also co-founded and chaired Rise Up WV, an organization that advocates for expanded healthcare access, public education, and better services for people struggling with addiction. During West Virginia’s 2018 and 2019 school employee strikes, Rise Up WV administered strike funds that raised over $340,000 for striking employees. Rise Up WV has helped to win state legislative victories around healthcare access and to elect new candidates for municipal government and state legislature in the Charleston area.

As an energy policy expert, she has testified before the West Virginia Public Service Commission to defeat an electric utility corporate bailout that would have cost consumers hundreds of millions of dollars; to defend West Virginia’s rooftop solar laws; and to strengthen energy efficiency programs and save consumers money.

She is running for Congress as part of WV Can’t Wait, a coalition of more than 90 candidates running for offices up and down the ballot in West Virginia who have all pledged not to take corporate money in their campaigns. Cathy is unopposed in the Democratic primary and will face Congressman Mooney this fall. Congressman Mooney won his re-election in 2018 with 54% of the vote, and the WV Can’t Wait coalition is working hard this year to turn out the thousands of voters who have become disenchanted with the establishments of both parties.


West Virginia Deserves Better
-by Cathy Kunkel

In recent weeks, Congressman Alex Mooney’s contempt for the people of his district has been on full display. In March, Mooney was one of 40 members of Congress who voted against the Families First Coronavirus Relief Act. Among other things, this bill mandated free coronavirus testing, expanded paid sick days and bolstered unemployment insurance and food assistance. Mooney’s argument was that he wanted to wait and see how the previous round of federal coronavirus spending went before authorizing more spending.

Of course, it turns out that both the Families First Coronavirus Relief Act and its predecessor were a drop in the bucket in terms of addressing the severe economic shock caused by the coronavirus. Shortly thereafter, Congress passed the CARES Act, which authorized $1200 relief payments, pandemic unemployment insurance, the small business paycheck protection program, and a massive corporate bailout fund at the discretion of the Treasury. You might think that a fiscal conservative like Congressman Mooney would have been concerned about these corporate bailouts, but apparently not.

Instead, on May Day, Congressman Mooney co-sponsored legislation (H.R. 6657, the WUHAN Recissions Act) to claw back some of the spending authorized in the CARES Act-- not the hundreds of billions authorized for corporate bailouts, but the hundreds of millions (or less) authorized for the Legal Services Corporation, public transportation, rural telecommunications, international disaster assistance and the Peace Corps. Prior to the pandemic, nearly a quarter of West Virginia’s workforce was employed in low-wage, service sector jobs, and one in five West Virginia kids struggled with hunger. Today, demand at food banks has surged more than 40%, unemployment has skyrocketed and nearly 60,000 West Virginians have lost their employer-provided health insurance during a pandemic.

Yet the struggle of thousands of West Virginians to afford rent, food and healthcare is somehow not as important as cutting funding for programs that Congressman Mooney ideologically opposes. Sadly, this is no surprise given the rest of Congressman Mooney’s record. He voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, against raising the minimum wage and in favor of eliminating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He has even gone so far as to introduce legislation to put the U.S. back on the gold standard.

What West Virginia actually needs in this moment is not Congressman Mooney’s failed ideology, but real relief for working people. That includes rent and mortgage payment cancellations, ongoing economic stimulus payments, paid sick days for all workers and prioritization of small business relief.

And going forward, West Virginia needs Medicare for All and billions of dollars of federal investment to put people back to work building the infrastructure the state needs to move forward. West Virginia could employ thousands of people in building rural broadband, upgrading drinking water and wastewater infrastructure, and fixing the damage that coal and gas corporations have done to the state’s land and water. The pandemic and the ongoing climate crisis highlight the urgency of a Green New Deal to create jobs, protect workers and communities, and lay the foundation for a more diverse and stable economic future for the state.

The Numbers Are In: Trump Has Been Bad For The Economy-- Even Before His Stock Market Collapse-- And There Will Be Electoral Consequences

Trump's economy is coming apart-- and it's not just the coronavirus' impact on Wall Street. Newsweek reported that since Señor Trumpanzee took office, income growth has slowed significantly compared to the growth rate under Obama. Jessica Good heart wrote that "All but two states saw a decline in growth of real median household income under Trump-- including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Florida, four states widely regarded as the key electoral battlegrounds that will likely determine the 2020 presidential election. Middle-class incomes grew at a rate of 2.7 percent from 2016 through 2018, compared to a 5.8 percent growth rate from 2014 through 2016 when accounting for inflation." The states that had it worst-- a decline in real median household income-- were Alaska, West Virginia, South Dakota, and Wyoming, although New Mexico and Connecticut were also hurt badly from Trump's economic policies.

Presidents often claim too much credit and take too much blame for the country's economic performance, economists agree. Indeed, David Cooper, a senior analyst with EPI, who led the analysis of Census data, says that Obama benefited from a prolonged low rate of inflation during the last two years of his presidency. A low inflation rate makes it easier for households to stretch a dollar to cover basic necessities.

But, economists also say Trump has squandered opportunities to support greater gains for middle-class families, and, in some cases, he has backed policies that have worked counter to their interests.

"An infrastructure bill would clearly have [had] a marked impact, especially on middle-level jobs," says Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute's Metropolitan Policy Project. "Manufacturing is going in the wrong direction. I think there are all kinds of policy opportunities that have not been exploited."

Muro sees some warning signs for 2020, such as the manufacturing recession and uncertainty over trade due to the lingering effects of the trade war and now the coronavirus, which has sickened tens of thousands of people in China and shuttered factories. Factory production in the U.S. shrank by 1.3 percent in the past year, according to the Washington Post.

EPI's Lee argues that Trump has taken steps that have hurt the middle class, including the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and the overturning of regulations like overtime protection that shore up workers' paychecks. "The current administration's focus on cutting taxes for the wealthy, expanding tax incentives for outsourcing, and undercutting workers' rights has left ordinary working households in most states barely gaining ground," notes Lee.

But we ain't seen nothing yet. Sane people expect the coronavirus disaster to make the economy far worse. One of those sane people, Matt Stoller, wrote for Wired this week that Covid-19 Will Mark the End of Affluence Politics. For example: "we will, in all likelihood, be locking down travel in some areas of the U.S. for several weeks, as they did in China. People may be advised against gathering in large groups. It's not clear what any of this will mean for campaigning or primary voting, whether most of us will vote by mail or have our votes delayed. Moreover, the coronavirus is going to introduce economic conditions with which few people in modern America are familiar: the prospect of shortages. After 25 years of offshoring and consolidation, we now rely on overseas production for just about everything. Now in the wake of the coronavirus, China has shut down much of its production; South Korea and Italy will shut down as well. Once the final imports from these countries have worked their way through the supply chains and hit our shores, it could be a while before we get more. This coronavirus will reveal, in other words, a crisis of production-- and one that’s coming just in time for a presidential election."

We've been through something like this once before. My book Goliath describes the 1932 campaign for president, one that was carried out at the depths of the Great Depression and during an era when our productive capacity was shut down. Though the crisis at that time was caused by a banking collapse, not a pandemic, the political backdrop was analogous. Eighty-eight years ago, “old order” politicians, as they were known, proved unwilling-- even in the face of crisis-- to have the government apply its power toward the broader public benefit. Their recalcitrance prefigured, in certain ways, the reflexively libertarian thinking of today.





A toxic ideology invited disaster in 1932, as policymakers did little in response to the collapse of thousands of banks and businesses. At the depth of that depression, cotton hit its lowest price in 200 years and steel production fell to 15 percent of capacity. The situation became so desperate that in just one city, Toledo, Ohio, 60,000 of the 300,000 residents stood in bread lines every day. Children were competing with rats for food. And thousands were dying of dysentery. The politics too turned desperate, with one labor leader telling Congress that "if the Congress of the United States and this administration do not do something to meet this situation adequately, next winter it will not be a cry to save the hungry, but it will be a cry to save the government.”

And yet, the old order had no answers. Congress held hearings, but businessmen, academics, and bankers proffered only belt-tightening. Within the Republican establishment, President Herbert Hoover worked 18-hour days, exhorting confidence while refusing to take even basic steps such as having the government guarantee bank deposits. Instead, his administration’s army attacked hungry protesters in Washington, DC, a move that prompted an angry Republican congressman, Fiorello La Guardia of New York, to remind the president: “Soup is cheaper than tear gas bombs.”

Meanwhile on the Democratic side, conservatives and progressives in the party were locked in a bitter battle for the nomination. Many Democrats agreed with Hoover. Maryland governor and presidential candidate Albert Ritchie, for instance, argued that we should rely “less on politics, less on laws, less on government.” Another candidate, Speaker of the House John Nance Garner, claimed the greatest threat was the “tendency toward socialism and communism” and pledged a massive cut in government spending, as well as a sales tax increase. Others turned to extreme racism and xenophobia. Only Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who went on to win a contested convention, campaigned on aggressive government involvement in the economy—or as he put it, a “workable program of reconstruction,” which later became the New Deal.

That era’s political desperation is alien to us for a few reasons. First off, we haven’t faced shortages of such magnitude for a very long time. More importantly, we have for decades lived under a political framework known as affluence, a term popularized by economist John Kenneth Galbraith in the 1950s. As an affluent society, America automatically produces a surfeit of jobs and wealth, and the problem is solely one of distributing the bounty.

Under the siren song of affluence, we began offshoring critical production capacity in the 1960s for geopolitical reasons. In 1971, economist Nicholas Kaldor noted that American financial policies were turning a "a nation of creative producers into a community of rentiers increasingly living on others, seeking gratification in ever more useless consumption, with all the debilitating effects of the bread and circuses of imperial Rome." Still, Bill Clinton and George Bush accelerated this trend throughout the 1990s and 2000s.

Affluence politics is not the politics of being wealthy, though, but rather the politics of not paying attention to what creates wealth in the first place. That is to say, it’s the politics of ignoring our ability to make and distribute the things people need. With the banking collapse in 2008, the election of Trump in 2016 and his mourning of empty factories, and now with Bernie Sanders dominating the early primaries, that era may at last be passing. A pandemic disease outbreak would only hasten this progression and force us back into the politics of production.

With potential shortages of goods, and restrictions on people’s movement, both parties are heading into unknown territory. It is likely Democrats will use this opportunity to further their case for Medicare for All. Pandemic surveillance and medical bureaucracies focused on billing do not mix well-- stories about astronomical out-of-pocket costs for Covid-19 testing are already circulating. Republicans are likely to take a more xenophobic approach, emphasizing restrictions on foreigners and infected Americans. When it comes to managing shortages, however, both parties are split, just as they were in 1932, between their Wall Street factions that assume affluence and the less mature populist factions that seek assertive public power. The Democratic Party primaries certainly echo those of the Great Depression, with candidates from Bernie Sanders to Amy Klobuchar trying to wrap themselves in FDR’s mantle.

Regardless, the end of affluence politics means focusing on whether medicine is on shelves, not bitter disputes over bloated and wasteful hospital and insurance billing departments. It means caring about bureaucratic competence in government, and accuracy in media, not because these are nice things to have but because they are necessary to avoid immense widespread suffering. It means understanding that pharmaceutical mergers that benefit shareholders while laying off scientists are destructive, not just because they are unfair, but because they make us less resilient to disease. (Shareholders, as it turns out, also have lungs.) Finally, it means recognizing that wealth, real wealth, is not defined by accounting games on Wall Street, but the ability to meet the needs of our own people.

We came to these realizations once before in 1932, and created a vibrant democratic state over the following few decades-- one that rapidly expanded our life spans, defeated the Nazis, and helped create Silicon Valley. The convergence of the Covid-19 outbreak and the presidential election will force us to do it once again. We've lived in the world of unreality for far too long.

As Richmond Federal Reserve Bank president Tom Barkin recently put it, “Central banks can’t come up with vaccines.” It's time to get ready for what that implies.

Yesterday, Trump was in South Carolina giving his supporters exactly the kind of information that will kill them. He called the coronavirus the Democrats' "new hoax... The Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. They're politicizing it. They don't have any clue. They can't even count their votes in Iowa. No, they can't. They can't count their votes. One of my people came up to me and said, 'Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.' That did not work out too well. They could not do it. They tried the impeachment hoax." He's literally going to kill his own supporters. Listen to this:

Republican Oligarch Bloomberg Explains Why He Would Never Win A Presidential Race

Yesterday, in his often excoriating music business newsletter, Bob Lefsetz set his sites on... oligarchs in politics. "You’ve got to be rich," he wrote. "And it always comes down to who you know." That could've easily been the opening lines about a music business post. But not when he turned to the powerful dons who run the Nevada Culinary Union who "bargained for a blue chip health care plan" and have basically said SCREW YOU to anyone who doesn't have a plan as good. (NOTE: Medicare-for-All is better than any union-negotiated healthcare plan and for that matter, better than any healthcare plan offered to corporate presidents in any U.S. company.) Anyway, Lefsetz was quickly on to two detestable targets: Trump and Bloomberg, two beneficiaries of skillful marketing. "Trump," he wrote "won by being a renegade. By talking about how the government does not work and the game is rigged. The government has issues, but one thing’s for sure, the game is rigged. Let’s see, all the people Trump pardoned/commuted today… It’s not like they had public defenders, it’s not like they didn’t have the right to appeal, they were convicted, fair and square, there’s a system, based on laws, and if you sacrifice the law…you’ve got chaos. Which is what we’ve got today... [O]ne thing is for certain, if you’re not rich, you don’t count, you have no voice. Because they don’t want to let you have one. Oh, they’ll let you call in to talk shows, they’ll get you fighting about secondary issues, but they won’t let you challenge the system, which is imperfect but works just fine for them. Which brings me to last night’s John Oliver show, wherein he makes the case for Medicare for all:

Oliver goes through all the negative talking points, blows them away, and if you’re not for Medicare for all after you watch this, you’re greedy or, like members of the Culinary Union, have a blue chip policy.

But there can be no change.

But change happens. The last twenty years have been all about change. Digital disruption. It’s always outsiders with a creaky new way that is cheap and pooh-poohed that ultimately triumphs and kills what came before. Why can’t this happen in politics?

BECAUSE THOSE IN POWER DON’T WANT IT TO!

I’ll vote for any Democrat against Trump. But I must say, the DNC and the media are bending over backward to hand it to Michael Bloomberg. Today the polls came out and the stories were all about Bloomberg’s surge, when Sanders surged way ahead of the field.

Selective reporting.

It used to be different. There was the Fairness Doctrine, making sure the limited news outlets presented both sides.

And if you owned a megaphone, a newspaper, TV or radio station, you were powerful.

You’re less powerful today.

Those in power, the elite, hate technology, even though they selectively use it. I listened to NPR tonight wherein they sang the virtues of the independent bookstore, saying the digital book was neutered. But the sycophantic host even admitted he showroomed the Ron Chernow book on Ulysses S. Grant and bought the digital copy, because the physical book was just too heavy.

This is the establishment, they like it how it was, even though it’s no longer this way.

I get it if you’re a member of the Republican elite. The money and perks have always flowed upward. But the Democratic elite? They have contempt for those below them, believe they know better, spread their own disinformation in pursuit of their goals. There can be change, just as long as they don’t lose out.

And you wonder why the rank and file voted for Trump.

So it all comes down to hope. If Bloomberg is elected, we’ll get rid of the orange menace. But will the fundamental problems of this country be addressed? Of course not, because Bloomberg doesn’t even know how the hoi polloi live.

So Blagojevich broke the law. We don’t want our elected officials selling Senate seats. But we live in a country where our President can lean on Ukraine to neuter the campaign of Joe Biden, which he successfully did!

Mitt Romney did the right thing, and he was excoriated by the right, but…they still love him in Utah, because their society is built on the family and helping one another, morality.

Bernard Kerik was caught red-handed, as was Eddie DeBartolo, Jr. Commit a blue collar crime and you’re screwed, there’s a camera everywhere, you’re going up the river. But white collar crime is seen as less bad, these are good people, we don’t want to ruin their lives, like the judge said in the Stanford rape case. SO WHY DID THEY DO THIS?

That’s what you’ve got to ask. These people thought they were invulnerable, they’d been getting away with bending the rules for years, it’s just that this time they got caught. Whereas you’re lucky if you can get probation on the first offense.

So there’s a different legal system for the rich and poor. And unlike in the old days, the rich no longer worry about the optics. Trump doesn’t care how it looks, Kerik working with the Donald’s henchman Giuliani, Blagojevich appearing on The Apprentice, he just does what he feels like, with a vengeance, vindictively.

Susan Collins told us Trump learned a lesson…yeah, that he can do whatever he wants!

As for those who support him, it’s less about him than the tribe on the other side. They hate Democrats so much, they’ll endorse the behavior of any Republican, just ask the evangelicals.

So if you live online, you see contrary opinions.

But big media has told us it’s all cranks and their opinions don’t count. Meanwhile, Breitbart and the Daily Caller got Trump elected. Who cares about veracity, that demonstrates power.

And although the right decries authoritarianism in China, it refuses to publicize any story it doesn’t agree with, that doesn’t reinforce its position.

So, you can be an outsider, you can have the illusion of power, because you vote.

But for the first time in my life I’m starting to wonder if it matters. If we organize and come up with a contrary candidate, our own opinion, they shut us right down. Bernie Sanders is a socialist who loves Russia and will ruin the economy, after eliminating Democratic coattails.

Meanwhile, Trump is a guy who really loves Putin, and endorses/enables socialism for the rich, with low taxes, the carried interest rule, government handouts, but somehow that’s different.

It isn’t about Bernie Sanders the man, it’s about what he’s saying, telling the truth in a world where that is abhorred. The everyday person got screwed, and the playing field must be leveled, while everybody is taken care of while they get back on their feet.

But those on both the right and left say this can’t be so. Change must be gradual, and you know there can’t be change because the government is gridlocked, and you’re asking the impossible anyway.

Meanwhile, let’s hand the nomination to a billionaire who just recently was a Republican, who changed the law so he could serve a third term as mayor, who made the elites feel safe while his police force threw those less privileged up against the wall.

But that’s overlooked. Even the sexism. Because this is the guy the elites want, because he’ll just be the anti-Trump, who cares if he gets anything done.

And their plan is working. I was with three twentysomethings just now, all were Bernie fans, now they’re behind Bloomberg, the media has convinced them, they’re defeated. Even though it’s their future at risk.

So what we’ve found is despite our numbers, we ain’t got much power. Even if Bernie Sanders wins a primary, he loses. The owners of this country want it this way.

As for Michael Milken… Wasn’t he the first guy to make so much money on Wall Street? Isn’t he evidence of the basic problem? By pardoning him aren’t we endorsing this kind of behavior, especially if you employ your riches that remain for good causes?

It’s depressing. And everybody is telling us we know nothing and should do what they say. And however it plays out, they’re not gonna lose, but we are.

Meanwhile, we’re fighting each other for scraps and most have no idea how the game is really played anyway. Everybody believes they’re gonna be a successful entrepreneur, become a billionaire. Someone else did it, so why can’t they?

Because that other person had wealthy parents who gave them the best education at institutions where you can make relationships that pay dividends down the road. You never had a chance. And today, both parties are doing their best to snuff whatever light, whatever hope remains, out.

And you wonder why there’s a rash of suicides.

"I'm not a dictionary, but I know what words mean. And I'm not a clock, but I know what time it is." That was from Richard Eskow in his post for Common Dreams earlier this month, Of Course Bloomberg's an Oligarch-- and He's Coming For Your Social Security. "By any common definition," he wrote, "Bloomberg’s an oligarch. He wants to buy your vote. Based on his record, he’s also coming for your Social Security.

An “oligarch,” according to the Cambridge American Dictionary, is “one of a small group of powerful people who control a country or an industry.”

Is Michael Bloomberg such a person? Maybe he’s just really rich and doesn’t control that much. But let's have some background.

With an estimated net worth of more than $60 billion, Bloomberg is the twelfth-richest person on the planet and the ninth-richest person in the United States. That’s a pretty small group of people. But do they control the country? Ferguson et al. found that campaign cash drives election outcomes. That means campaign donors largely control the process.

Gilens and Page found that wealthy people and interests usually get what they want. The rest of us usually don’t, unless what we want is also what they want. The fact that progressives like some of Bloomberg’s positions doesn’t undermine these findings. In fact, it reinforces them.

Bloomberg hasn’t just given money to a number of campaigns. He also controls a media empire. In true oligarchical fashion, he decreed years ago that his news outlets would not cover his political career. He said recently that it would not cover his rivals’ campaigns, either-- a move that drew criticism from journalists and an ethics professor. Less than a month later, however, Bloomberg News violated that edict by running a hit piece against Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

That’s oligarchical behavior.

Bloomberg’s own political history is an exercise in the use of oligarchical wealth to change electoral outcomes. He was unpopular when he first ran for mayor of New York-- a situation he rectified by dramatically outspending his rivals. Even so, Bloomberg only eked out a two-point victory against Democrat Mark Green in his first mayoral race, after outspending him five to one.

The argument between Turner and Johnson involved another compelling example of Bloomberg-as-oligarch. The DNC’s rules said each candidate had to have a minimum number of donors to quality for the debate stage. That rule wasn’t overruled for Cory Booker or Julian Castro, despite calls for greater diversity in the race. But it was overturned for Bloomberg, who had donated more than $1 million to the DNC and a related organization a few short weeks before.

Will Michael Bloomberg Cut Your Social Security?

If you thought there were problems with Joe Biden’s Social Security record, wait until you see Bloomberg’s. His record of espousing austerity economics has including a special enthusiasm for cutting Medicare and Social Security.

As he told Face the Nation in 2013:

No program to reduce the deficit makes any sense whatsoever unless you address the issue of entitlements, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, interest payment on the debt, which you can't touch, and defense spending. Everything else is tiny compared to that.

Bloomberg has called for raising the retirement age, a move that would cut Social Security benefits for all retirees and create physical hardship for many older workers.

These are bad ideas. They make for even worse politics. Voters love Social Security. A Pew study released in March 2019 found that “74 percent of Americans say Social Security benefits should not be reduced in any way.”

And voters don’t like entitlement cuts, or the Bloomberg-endorsed thinking behind them. That can be seen in a GBAO/Center for American Progress survey conducted in October 2019. Less than half of Republicans, one-third of Democrats, and roughly one-third of independents agreed with the Bloomberg-like statement that “our national debt is way too high, and we need to cut government spending on the biggest programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.”

Trump has given Democrats an opening on Social Security. His administration is currently engaged in a de factor program to cut Social Security disability benefits, by forcing millions of disabled people to endure the punishing process of eligibility screening as often as every six months. Newsweek reports that the Social Security Administration concluded that this would lead to $2.6 billion in benefit cuts and an additional 2.6 million case reviews between 2020 and 2029. It’s a brutal assault on the health and security of a vulnerable population.

Trump also said he intends to pursue additional cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid after the upcoming election, when he no longer has to worry about public opinion. Worse, he did so at the annual gathering of billionaires in Davos. That reinforces the perception that he’s imposing hardship on the majority to help a privileged few.

Most leading Democrats understand that there is wide support for protecting and expanding Social Security. Most leading candidates-- including Joe Biden-- have offered some form of Social Security expansion. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has embraced the idea in principle. There’s an opportunity here-- if Bloomberg doesn’t stop them from taking it.

...Given his virtually unlimited resources, Bloomberg could theoretically win both the nomination and the presidency. By my calculation, Bloomberg could pay the same “unit price” he paid to make himself mayor of New York-- $88 per voter-- and make himself president for $12 billion. He’d even have $50 billion set aside for a rainy day.

The nomination would presumably cost less than the presidency, so he has a better shot at that. But it would be a bad look for the Democrats to become the first party in modern history whose candidate openly bought the nomination. But then, Bloomberg’s used to getting the rules changed just for him. When he wanted to run for a third term as mayor, Bloomberg used all the tools at his disposal (one of which led to an ethics complaint) to change the city’s rules. Once he got what he wanted, Bloomberg then pushed to change the rules back. It seems that some privileges should be labeled, “for oligarchs only.”

Am I saying that all the members of Congress who have endorsed Bloomberg are corrupt and should be defeated in primaries? Pretty much. YES! Right now there are a dozen of them, 10 Blue Dogs and New Dems and one-- Bobby Rush-- an outright criminal who takes bribes from everyone, not just Bloomberg. All these members should have the guts to withdraw their endorsements of Bloomberg today after his disqualifying performance last night. Instead, this morning, 3 other money-hungry Democrats endorsed him-- Blue Dog walking cesspool Josh Gottheimer (NJ), Pete Aguilar (New Dem-CA) and Nita Lowey, who is retiring from Congress and knows she'll never have to face the voters again.

• Harley Rouda (New Dem-CA)- F
• Juan Vargas (New Dem)- D
• Scott Peters (New Dem-CA)- F
• Stephanie Murphy (Blue Dog-FL)- F
• Ted Deutch (FL)- C
• Lucy McBath (New Dem-GA)- F
• Bobby Rush (IL)- B
• Haley Stevens (New Dem-MI)- F
• Mikie Sherrill (Blue Dog-NJ)- F
• Gregory Meeks (New Dem-NY)- F
• Max Rose (Blue Dog-NY)- F
• Ben McAdams (Blue Dog-UT)- F

71 Pro-Labor Candidates Just Filed to Run in West Virginia…Together

At the very end of last year, reporting for the American Prospect, David Dayen explained why he thinks the West Virginia gubernatorial election is the most important race in the country, with "implications that endure the farthest into the future." Dayen wrote that the election "just might inaugurate a new kind of people-centered politics in the heart of what’s assumed to be Trump country... Smith’s bet, that building a people’s movement will generate a deeper well of support to take back West Virginia from a corrupt political structure, would be transformational. It would deliver a roadmap for how to organize in rural towns thought to be lost to the right wing forever. It would identify how to bring in infrequent voters who have given up on politics. It would lay out how to break a corrupt establishment and return government to its people, on principles that bring people together rather than driving them apart. If this can work, it opens up an entirely new style of politics, one rooted in something so simple it’s absurd that it seems so novel: respecting the wishes and needs of the electorate. 'My whole life, I’ve been told that voters are the problem, they vote against their own interests,' Smith says. 'We believe the opposite. Voters are the answer to the problem, not the problem themselves. We think the people closest to the problem should solve it.'"

In 2019 we endorsed Stephen Smith for governor of West Virginia and introduced you to the West Virginia Can't Wait movement. That movement has almost morphed into a political party now, replacing the moribund state Democratic Party, which is little more than a political machine for Joe Manchin. "This has never happened before in our nation," Stephen told me a couple of days ago, "let alone in a place like West Virginia. The wealthy Good Old Boys hate it. But there aren’t nearly enough of them to stop us if we join together and demand what West Virginia has never had before: government by and for our people, not just the powerful."

I asked Stephen to expand those sentiments into a guest post. Please read it-- and if you like what he has to say, consider contributing to his campaign by clicking on the 2020 Blue America gubernatorial thermometer above. David Dayen is right about how important this race really could be for the whole country.

Guest Post
-by Stephen Smith

Two years ago, West Virginia educators sparked a nationwide strike movement. Now, the state’s working class is leading the nation again. On Saturday, a coalition called West Virginia Can’t Wait gathered more than 200 supporters outside the state House chambers to announce that 71 candidates.

Candidates include 11 teachers and school service personnel, like Brittney Barlett (an English teacher running for Delegate in Lewis County) and Johnny Nick Hager (a school bus driver running for Mingo County Commission). Tina Russell is a Black social worker who’s running against an incumbent who suggested that if he discovered his children were gay, he would drown them. Rosemary Ketchum is running a vibrant grassroots campaign for Wheeling City Council; when she wins, she will become the first openly transgender person to hold elected office in West Virginia. The vast majority of candidates are running for the first time.

In a state where less than 20 percent of the legislature are women, less than 10 percent are working class, and less than 5 percent are people of color, the West Virginia Can’t Wait candidates represent the state across race, county, gender, and class lines. And every one of them has signed a pledge, which was read on Saturday at the Capitol by Congressional candidate Cathy Kunkel: “I promise not to take corporate cash… I promise never to cross a picket line… I promise never to hide from a debate… I promise never to punch down.”

Dozens of the WV Can’t Wait candidates filed for office at the Capitol, posing for photos with friends and family who never could have imagined being in this spot. “I’ve never been to the Capitol. I didn’t know where I was supposed to go. But I knew I needed to fight for a state where my kid could grow up and make a living,” said veteran David Childers, a first-time candidate for the state senate in the rural 14th district.

Candidates also delivered their “People’s State of the State” address, unveiling the WV Can’t Wait policy platform which had been crowd-sourced during 156 Town Halls. 47 “Platform Parties” and more than 11,000 face-to-face conversations with voters. It includes the first state-level Wealth Tax in the nation, a massive shift from corporate tax giveaways to local businesses and entrepreneurship, full cannabis legalization, aggressive caps on drug prices, public financing of elections, and more-- 32 plans in all, which are being rolled out at wvcantwait.com.

Delegate Danielle Walker, from the 51st House District, was one of 8 candidates who delivered part of the People’s State of the State.

“We will choose the side of miners, by granting a state Black Lung Pension Fund and a jobs guarantee. We will choose the side of women, and advance the nation’s most ambitious guarantee of child care, health care, education, reproductive rights, and economic opportunity. We will choose the side of Black and Brown people, and pass the nation’s most ambitious plan to end mass incarceration and attack the racial discrimination that persists in education, hiring, and health care. We will choose the side of the LGBTQ+ community, and pass the nation’s strongest EHNDA laws, ban conversion therapy, and recognize the dignity of every human being. We will choose the side of homeless people, fighting for a homes guarantee. We will choose the side of veterans by guaranteeing not only higher education and job opportunities, but also our country’s most ambitious mental health care plan, a veterans nursing home in Beckley, and a tax credit for those who have served. And we will choose the side of people with disabilities, by clearing the IDD/Waiver waiting list, ending discrimination in pay and transportation, implementing the Olmstead Act, and growing a disability jobs program.” (View other detailed plans on small business, wages, the overdose crisis, and more at wvcantwait.com.)

The WV Can’t Wait strategy is having some early successes. In addition to recruiting and training 71 candidates and defining many of the key issues in the race, many of those candidates are getting early traction. In my own race, we have an early lead in the polls and we have outraised every other candidate in the race-- on both sides of the aisle! Our campaign has more than doubled the previous record for small dollar donations in a West Virginia governor’s race.

Movements are not led by candidates… those people get the most credit. But they are not the ones who sacrifice the most or work the hardest. The most crucial leaders in any movement are the people who do the most work for the least recognition. These people come from every walk of life, but they tend to be mostly women, mostly working class, mostly young people. These people sacrifice what’s most precious to them-- money, security, time with their families-- because they believe in something bigger than any one of us. Our movement is no different. This is the first union campaign staff in West Virginia history.

West Virginia’s primary is May 12th. Follow the West Virginia Can’t Wait movement at facebook.com/wvcantwait.

Should We Think Of Trump As An Illiterate Buffoon Or As Someone With A Disability?

One of the reasons why I don't like using RealClearPolitics' polling averages is because they include Rasmussen, a company known for delivering polling numbers their clients pay for. But even with a ridiculous Rasmussen poll included, the RealClearPolitics polling average for Trump's job approval shows that just 45.2% of the electorate approves of the job he's doing, as opposed to 52.3% who don't. A more accurate poll, by Morning Consult in mid-December, shows that just 41% of registered voters approve and 56% disapprove. That 41% approve of the job Trump is doing is mortifying, not about Trump but about our countrymen.

David Graham's essay in Monday's Atlantic, The President Who Doesn't Read, might confirm your decision to oppose Trump. The the ignoramuses who approve of the job Trump is doing-- whether 41% or 45.2%-- actually like him more precisely because he is allergic "to the written word" and to them his reliance on oral communication is anything but a liability in office. He's just like they are, just like the moron they used to watch on that TV sitcom he presided over that caused them too aspire to be just like him-- and to vote for him.

In Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff wrote that Trump’s indifference to the printed word has been apparent for some time. Wolf: "He didn't process information in any conventional sense. He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-­literate." Wolff quoted Gary Cohen: "It’s worse than you can imagine... Trump won’t read anything-- not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers, nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored." Trump himself: "I like bullets or I like as little as possible. I don't need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page. That I can tell you."




Graham: "In March, Reuters reported that briefers had strategically placed the president’s name in as many paragraphs of briefing documents as possible so as to attract his fickle attention. In September, the Associated Press reported that top aides had decided the president needed a crash course on America’s role in the world and arranged a 90-minute, map-and-chart heavy lecture at the Pentagon." Trump prefers to absorb his information on TV-- especially on TV that talks admirably about him. Wolf painted an ugly picture: "If he was not having his 6:30 dinner with Steve Bannon, then, more to his liking, he was in bed by that time with a cheeseburger, watching his three screens and making phone calls-- the phone was his true contact point with the world-- to a small group of friends, who charted his rising and falling levels of agitation through the evening and then compared notes with one another."

Trump has always loved the telephone: Stories of him calling business associates and friends, or reporters, whether under his own name or pseudonyms, litter his business career. (There are limitations, Wolff suggests: Aides found that Trump “could not really converse, not in the sense of sharing information, or of a balanced back-and-forth conversation.”) His conversations with friends are a crucial source of information and pressure release. Shortly after taking office, per The Times Trump told a friend, “I can invite anyone for dinner, and they will come!” The ability to invite-- and one presumes call-- anyone and have them reply flatters Trump’s ego and seems to be one of the few parts of his position that he enjoys.

In view of this oral fixation, Trump’s affection for Twitter is not as paradoxical as it seems. It requires only 140, and now 280, characters at a time, is often fed by what he’s watching on TV, and it is only outgoing: The president need not read himself to tweet effectively. The conversationality of Twitter fits his M.O., too. While Trump is billed as the author of many books, it’s clear he didn’t actually write them. Art of the Deal ghostwriter Tony Schwartz savaged him during the campaign, while Trump has blamed errors in other books on mysterious speechwriter Meredith McIver. It’s not like these books are great literary achievements, anyway. What Trump imparts to them is his conversational shtick. Unlike past presidents, there’s little evidence of a written record of letters or other correspondence, either. The paradigmatic Trump epistle is a cease-and-desist letter from counsel.

Trump’s particular affection for television is notable. As a Baby Boomer, he is a member of a generation raised on television and still especially fond of it. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, people in Trump’s age cohort watch an average of four hours of television a day, meaning his reported four-to-eight-hour habit is only somewhat greater than the norm. But that demographic also spends the most leisure time reading-- almost an hour a day, per the BLS, by far the greatest of any age group.

There’s a reason so many 65-to-74-year-olds read a lot: Many of them are retired, and don’t have to do work. Trump, by contrast, has one of the most demanding jobs in the world. One reason that it’s demanding, however, is that the holder is expected to consume, digest, and absorb prodigious amounts of information via reading, and there’s little to suggest that Trump is doing that. Instead, he has taken that time up with phone conversations, television, and golf, another forum for oral communication. (Per Philip Bump, Trump played golf every 4.7 days in 2017, good for 10 full 24-hour days and far higher than Obama’s rate as president.)

Trump denies this, of course. “All my life I've heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office-- in other words, when you're president of the United States,” he said earlier this year. “So I studied Afghanistan in great detail and from every conceivable angle.”

The president's actions show little such sign of preparation and study, while displaying faulty understandings of many things. After visiting Saudi Arabia and hitting it off with the country’s leaders, he forcefully backed Riyadh in its dispute with Qatar and many other issues, over the objections of some of his staff-- even publicly contradicting Tillerson. In December, however, he suddenly became concerned about the humanitarian crisis in Yemen. The minimal thought put into several of Trump’s core views on China became clear when President Xi Jinping was able to change his entire view of the Korean incident in 10 minutes-- 10 minutes of oral conversation, of course.

Then there was his more recent decision to recognize Jerusalem as capital of Israel and move the U.S. Embassy there. That decision was controversial but not without defenders, and the U.S. insisted the move did not settle the final status of Jerusalem in peace talks with the Palestinians. Apparently Trump did not get (or perhaps did not read) the memo, because in a tweet earlier this week he said that the U.S. had “taken Jerusalem, the toughest part of the negotiation, off the table,” rattling both Israelis and Palestinians.

The refusal to read, and the resulting limits of Trump’s understanding of complicated issues, doesn’t mean that every decision he makes is bad. Indeed, it can be liberating-- allowing him to act on instinct, even in the face of expert reservations. My colleague Krishnadev Calamur, for example, writes that the anger that led the White House to freeze aid to Pakistan this week is understandable. But the shaky grasp of the underlying currents means Trump is more likely to blunder on any given case, and Trump’s misstatements and missteps earn him mockery and undermine his stature around the world.

Perhaps no single area better summarizes Trump’s strange tendency than his press shop. He was reportedly driven to distraction by Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s ill-fitting suits and bumbling demeanor, and eventually Spicer was pushed out in favor of Sarah Sanders, a calmer and more commanding force in the Brady Room. But in its written work, the White House press team continues to commit errors and gaffes and issue typo-flecked statements.

While most problems faced by presidential administrations are incredibly complex, the solution to problems caused by a president who does not read is fairly simple: He ought to start reading. Simple and easy are very different matters, though, and expecting a man who has always preferred chatting and watching television to the printed word to become a reader at 71 would be foolish. There’s no Trump pivot, especially not to the bookshelf.

Since we're talking about words, you can't imagine how excited I was the other day to see RJ Eskow did a Progressive's Guid To Corporate Dem-Speak. Unless is the first week you're reading DWT, you likely already know how insane it makes me to see people misuse words like "moderate" and "centrist." Eskow tackled the latter but not the former, presumably because it's the corporate media more than corporate Dems who are the culprits in the misuse of "moderate." Eskow introduced his piece by nothing that "Certain words and phrases are routinely used by 'centrist' political candidates. By design, these terms are imprecise, emotionally charged, and often self-contradicting. In fact, the word 'centrist' is just such a term, since polling shows that the economic viewpoint of these candidates-- especially regarding health care, Social Security, education and other social programs-- is often well to the right of the general public. In his guide to centrist terminology I had an initial impression that he was mostly thinking about Mayo Pete, until I read it a few times and realized it was primarily a critique of Status Quo Joe.

• Centrist: Someone who presents a corporate-friendly agenda with less fervor than the typical Republican, with a modest measure of regulation as demanded by circumstances and with a patina of social liberalism.

• Choice (when applied to a public good): A word used as an attempt to distract people from the flawed state of the American social contract by forcing them to choose from an array of semi-functional, overpriced private-sector products. This allows policymakers to subsidize private corporations at public expense, while at the same time providing the public with something that loosely resembles-- but is not-- a functioning social safety net.

• Compete (as in, “prepare workers of the future to compete”): A word used to describe what workers will be required to do to survive in the new, Randian economy. For example, to become competitive, workers are sometimes expected to run through a gauntlet of poorly conceived and insufficiently funded educational programs to re-train them for the “new economy” (defined below), often under the assumption that there is a secret app designer hiding inside every laid-off manufacturing employee. To “compete” after training, workers should be prepared to fight like crabs in a barrel for low-paying jobs that provide no employment security or benefits. (See also: “Jobs of the future,” defined below.)

• Free stuff: A term of contemptuous dismissal for public services that are commonly available in other developed countries, and which any decent society would make available to all human beings.

• Friend of mine (as in, “John McCain was a friend of mine”): A declaration of sentimental attachment not only to an individual across the aisle, but also to a long-passed era of comity between powerful individuals from both political parties. The term reflects an unwillingness to accept the cynicism and depravity of today’s GOP. It may also indicate a willingness to use “bipartisanship” as a cover for offering conservative policies by pretending they are needed to attract Republican votes (which they will not do).

• Health care consumers: People who are forced to choose from a bewildering array of inadequate private health options, based on future needs they can’t anticipate, as offered by private corporations that benefit financially by confusing them now and denying them medical care later. The word “consumers” allows policymakers to accuse individuals of not being “smart shoppers” when things go wrong, thereby deflecting blame away from both themselves and the corporations.

• “I don’t think anyone has a monopoly on bold ideas”: I don’t have any bold ideas.

• “I know how to get things done”: I intend to keep using a political approach that hasn’t gotten anything done for years.

• “I will not raise taxes one penny on the middle class”: I’ll let corporations keep ripping the nearly-vanished “middle class” off instead, charging people more than they’d pay in taxes while providing less in services-- and without public oversight or accountability.

• “I’m pragmatic”: I don’t believe that a country that won two world wars, rebuilt its economy with the New Deal after the Great Depression, created Medicare and Social Security, developed the internet at public expense, and sent several manned missions to the moon can do big things.

• “Ideology” (as in, “I don’t believe in rigid adherence to any political ideology”)" A pejorative term for principles and/or core values.

• “Jobs of the future”: Menial piecework tasks, parceled out through apps that force workers into 12-hour days in the hopes they can eke out a living through a lifetime of endless servility.

• “Managed competition”: Managed confusion. (See “Choice,” above.)

• “New economy”: Same as the old economy (circa 19th century), but the boss wears a turtleneck or a hoodie.

• “Our country needs to balance its budget like a family sitting around the kitchen table”:

Definition 1: I don’t understand how finance works.
Definition 2: I don’t want you to understand how finance works.

• “Pipe dream”: Any bold idea I don’t support.

• “Privatization”: Theft of public resources.

• “Public/private partnership”: See above; the exploitation of public resources for private profit.

• “Purity test”: Any belief or policy I won’t espouse because it would alienate my funders, but that I won’t openly oppose because it’s popular with voters. It implies that people who support it are rigid and unreasonable, rather than principled and thoughtful.

• “Reaching across the aisle”: A coded message to big-money donors that you will not fight for the policies you claim to believe in.

• “Realistic” (as in, “Your proposal (backed by a large majority of voters) isn’t realistic”): We don’t live in a functioning democracy and I don’t plan to do anything about it.

• “Rich kids/Trump’s kids” (as in, “I don’t want to give free college to Donald Trump’s kids”): 1) I believe that social program X is a commodity, not a public good; 2) if I really cared about economic inequality, I’d raise taxes on the Trumps of this world to pay for it, and 3) my logic could be applied to elementary schools, too, so I hope you don’t think about what I’m saying too much.

• “Something we can get done” (as in, “The public option is something we can get done”): A cautious proposal that can’t get passed as long as Republicans control the Senate, but will not inspire voters to turn the Senate Democratic. In other words, something that can’t get done.

• “Universal coverage”: The stated goal of providing every American with inadequate health insurance that ensures neither financial security nor decent medical care.

• “You can be progressive and practical at the same time”: I am neither progressive nor practical.

Yesterday the New York Times published their Of Course Bernie Can Win editorial-- and by Bret Stephens, no less. If you missed it, it's worth reading the whole thing. I'm sure the Biden and Trump campaigns did, carefully. It begins with a quote from Richard Feynman, an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. What's he got to do with feeling the Bern? "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself-- and you are the easiest person to fool." The Times made that relevant to the 2020 election by revising it slightly: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself that Bernie Sanders can’t win-- not just the Democratic nomination, but also the presidency itself."

The warning applies to me as much as to anyone else who has spent the past months, or years, insisting that the senator from Vermont doesn’t have a chance. What it comes down to is this: We don’t want Sanders to be elected, so we tell ourselves he can’t.

According to the theory, Sanders’s support has a hard ceiling: It may be intense, but it’s also cultlike and off-putting. Too many Americans know enough about socialism to want a president who wears the term proudly (even if he insists it’s of a more benign variety). He embraces nearly all of the same policies, like Medicare for all, that raised Elizabeth Warren high in the polls but are now dragging her down.

And then there are those clips of him saying nice things about the Soviet Union, or defending the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, or finding the silver lining in the Castro dictatorship in Cuba. Didn’t Jeremy Corbyn, whose ideological affinities run in the same direction, just lead Britain’s Labour Party to disaster?

It all sounds superficially convincing-- and eerily familiar. It’s what many conservatives kept saying about Donald Trump around this time four years ago.

As with Sanders, Trump was seen as being way outside his party’s mainstream: a protectionist in a party of free traders; an isolationist in a party of interventionists; a libertine in a party of moralists. As with Sanders, Trump barely belonged to the party whose nomination he sought. As with Sanders, Trump’s message was that he was fighting a “rigged system.”

And as with Sanders, the ideological distaste for Trump among conservatives was matched to the conviction that he couldn’t possibly win. Let’s Elect Hillary Now, was the title of one conservative lament about the popularity of supposedly unelectable Republicans, written toward the end of 2015. I know the article well because I wrote it.

Trump won because he was willing to say loudly what his supporters believed deeply; because, in his disdain for what politicians are supposed to be and do, he exuded authenticity; because he was hated by the people his base found hateful; because he had an opponent who, in the minds of his supporters, epitomized corruption and self-dealing; and because he offered radical cures for a country he diagnosed as desperately ill. Despite being the oldest man ever elected president, he seemed (to his voters) fresh, true, bold, and sorely needed.

So it is, and would be, with Sanders. Depth of conviction? Check. Contempt for conventional norms? Check. Opposed by all the right people? Check. Running against a “crooked” opponent? Check. Commitment to drastic change? Check. Like Trump, too, he isn’t so much campaigning for office as he is leading a movement. People who join movements aren’t persuaded. They’re converted. Their depth of belief is motivating and infectious.

The strength of Sanders’s movement is reflected in his blowout fund-raising numbers-- nearly $100 million for 2019-- which only rose in the wake of his heart attack. If Sanders wins Iowa (where polls have him in a dead heat for first), and New Hampshire (where he has a slight lead), then the argument about his supposed non-electability will begin to crumble-- including among older black voters, who have so far been among Joe Biden’s most important pillars of support.

But even if Sanders won the nomination, how would he win the election? Perhaps more easily than people suspect.

Intensity among Democratic-leaning voters will never be greater. There will likely be no third-party challenger like Ralph Nader to shave his margin, or an influential “NeverSanders” wing among liberal pundits. He will find crossover support from former Trump voters in places like Ohio and Michigan, just as Trump found it from former Obama voters. To energize African-American support, he could choose Eric Holder or Stacey Abrams as his running mate.

Nor will scare tactics work any better against Sanders than they did against Trump. Overwrought comparisons with Hugo Chávez will wear thin, just as comparisons between Trump and Benito Mussolini did. The easiest move in American politics is to show yourself to be less scary than your caricature. Ronald Reagan’s devastating “There you go again” line against Jimmy Carter can be a Sanders quip, too.

Stephens concludes with some conservative nonsensical palaver but admits in the end, despite his own ideological preferences, that "To say Sanders is unelectable is indefensible." He's not quite ready-- nor will he ever be-- to agree that Bernie will be America's greatest leader-- only great leader-- since Franklin Roosevelt.