Tag Archives: Democratic Party

national news

Bernie going for it again in 2020? Please, no!

Say this isn’t really happening.

Bernie Sanders, the Democrat in Name Only senator from Vermont, reportedly is hiring additional staff while he gears up for a possible/probable run for president in 2020. I will call him a DINO.

Good grief! Tell me it ain’t happening.

I am not feeling the Bern. I know he has his fans and a strong legion of supporters. I also know he came surprisingly close to capturing the Democratic nomination in 2016.

Here’s my problem with Bernie: He’s not a Democrat. He would be running as a Democrat, but he’s listed in the U.S. Senate roster as an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.

I have another problem with Bernie. His 2020 campaign is going sound like the one-note samba his 2016 campaign sounded. He will tell us that too few people have acquired too much of our wealth; he wants to redistribute the wealth; he wants to provide free college to every student in America (how he pays for it is a mystery to me); and he wants “Medicare for All” Americans.

We have seen during the Donald Trump administration that we also need a coherent, strong and reasonable foreign policy. I do not see Bernie Sanders offering such a thing were he to become elected president.

He’s been to the well already. He doesn’t need to return. I do not want him to run for president. I want a fresher face from which we will hear a fresher voice.

national news

Big field jockeying to challenge an incumbent

In what we used to think of as “normal” political circumstances, the presence of an incumbent president running for re-election would scare off potential challengers.

Donald Trump, though, has torn up and tossed out political norms. He did so with that amazing 2016 presidential campaign. He’s doing so yet again by attracting a potentially huge field of possible foes who would challenge his effort to win a second term.

Trump was elected president in the first campaign for public office he ever sought. His entire adult life has been centered on garnering wealth, promoting himself and assorted other matters related to self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement.

He is in some trouble politically. Questions are swirling around him. A special counsel might be wrapping up an investigation into whether his campaign colluded with Russian operatives who attacked our electoral system.

There might be a whole lot to reveal once Robert Mueller finishes his probe. Thus, we have this potentially gigantic field of Democratic Party challengers. There even might be some Republicans willing to challenge Trump in the 2020 GOP primary.

What is politically “normal” these days? Judging from the size of the field that might be shaping up against Donald Trump, I would say, um, there is not a single thing normal about the upcoming presidential campaign.

national news

Not going to ‘feel the Bern,’ Sen. Sanders

I am baffled as to why U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders even is in the conversation about whether he should run for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination.

I want to make two quick points: He ran for the 2016 party nomination and lost it to Hillary Rodham Clinton. His platform this time around seems to mirror the mantra he recited in 2016 — which is that too few people control too much wealth. This self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” wants to redistribute the wealth to more of us. I guess I’m too much of a capitalist to buy into that notion.

My second point? Sanders isn’t even a Democrat. He ran for the U.S. Senate from Vermont as an independent. He doesn’t belong to a political party, although he does caucus with the Senate Democrats. He votes with them almost without fail. Still, he isn’t a Democrat.

So why is this guy talking about running again for the Democratic Party presidential nomination?

Moreover, why aren’t the media calling him out more vigorously on the phony association he has with a political party to which he doesn’t even belong?

Don’t run, Bernie. Leave the political stage to other politicians who have more to say than you do.

national news, political news

Beto v. Bernie: Let the battle begin

A fascinating struggle is emerging within the Democratic Party between an old warhorse and a rising young political stallion.

It’s the Beto-Bernie brouhaha. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont — who’s actually an independent who caucuses with Senate Democrats — is trying to fend off the surge of support being shown for Beto O’Rourke, the West Texas congressman who came within a whisker of knocking off Sen. Ted Cruz in the 2018 midterm election.

Let me be candid: I am not feeling the “Bern.” Sen. Sanders fought hard for the 2016 Democratic nomination, but fell short. He preached a one-page sermon: too few people have too much wealth and he wants to take some of that wealth away from the rich folks; he calls it “income inequality.”

O’Rourke’s message is good bit more comprehensive. He speaks to an array of progressive issues: immigration reform, education reform, environmental protection, and yes, income inequality.

I’m not convinced either man should run for president in 2020, but if given a choice, I’m going to roll with Beto.

Sanders is trying to undercut Beto’s surge.

As NBC News reports: The main line of attack against O’Rourke is that he isn’t progressive enough — that he’s been too close to Republicans in Congress, too close to corporate donors and not willing enough to use his star power to help fellow Democrats — and it is being pushed almost exclusively by Sanders supporters online and in print.

That is precisely another point that frustrates me about Sanders. He is unwilling to reach across the aisle. O’Rourke, who has served three terms in the House from El Paso, has shown an occasional willingness to work with Republicans rather than fight them every step of the way. We need more, not less, of that kind of governance in Washington.

Nevertheless, the intraparty struggle is likely to be just one of many to occur among Democrats as they struggle for position to battle the Republican Party’s nominee in 2020.

I was going to assert that Donald Trump would be that person. However, given all that has happened in the past two weeks or so . . . I am not quite as certain that the president be the one to take the GOP fight forward.

International news

It ain’t the ‘Democrat Party,’ young man

I now want to pick a few nits with one of the right-wing wackos who works for Donald John Trump.

Stephen Miller, a senior policy guru for the president, says the administration will do “whatever is necessary” to build a wall along our southern border.

Oh, but then he relies on that goofy perversion of the identity of the opposing political party.

“The Democrat Party has a simple choice,” Miller said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “They either can choose to fight for America’s working class or to promote illegal immigration.”

Democrat Party? That’s what he calls the Democratic Party.

Hey, I get that it’s a minor point, but then again it really is more of a major point than the Rs would care to acknowledge. The hard-liners’ insistence on using the perverted ID of the Democratic Party is intended to demonize a great political organization. One does not hear such a thing coming from Democrats who might be inclined to refer to members of the “Republic Party.” That, too, would disparage — if not denigrate — the other great major political organization.

As for Miller’s assertion that Democrats might want to “promote illegal immigration,” that is another branch broken off from the demagogue’s tree. No patriotic American wants to “promote” illegal immigration. We all want border security. Many of us just don’t want to build a wall to seal us off from our neighbors.

Those Republican demagogues, though, are intent on demonizing the opposing party (a) by perverting the party’s name and (b) by suggesting they want to “promote” the commission of crimes.

Get serious, young man.

national news, political news

Bush 41’s death means end of ‘old’ GOP? Let’s hope not

More than a few talking heads have ruminated since the death of former President George H.W. Bush about the future of the Republican Party and whether the party of which Bush was a proud member will return in its former image.

Some have said “no.” I don’t subscribe to that idea.

Today’s Republican Party has been taken over by those loyal to a president who doesn’t define his own ideology — such as it is — by anything resembling traditional GOP values.

The GOP has taken a dramatically different course from where it used to travel. I’ll offer three examples

  • President Bush was a supreme coalition builder. He did that very thing when assessing how to kick Iraqi forces out of Kuwait in the late summer of 1990. He brought together more than 30 nations to (a) provide fighting forces on the field or (b) give money to finance the military initiative that became known as Operation Desert Storm; some nations, of course, did both.
  • The Republican Party of old once touted fiscal responsibility. It loathed a federal budget deficit. It preferred to curb spending and, yes, curb taxes. The current GOP has enacted a tax cut but has done damn little to curb spending. Thus, the deficit is ballooning again.
  • The Party of Lincoln used to be an inclusive outfit. It welcomed people of all races, ethnicities, creeds. It has become another kind of party these days. It is seeking to shut the door on those seeking asylum from tyranny in their homelands. Politicians who belonged the former Republican Party helped a Democratic president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, enact the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of the mid-1960s over the objection of many southern Senate Democrats who clung to their segregationist history. Imagine that happening today.

I cannot predict whether the old Republican Party will return, let alone when that might occur. I try like the dickens to avoid cynicism. My hope still springs forth that there will be a better day ahead.

President George H.W. Bush — although he was far from perfect — still in many ways embodied the ideals of a once-great political party. Those ideals have been pushed aside. We’ll bury Bush 41 in a few days. While we’re at it, how about trying to exhume the remains of a Republican Party that he represented?

national news

Happy 93rd birthday, RFK

Robert F. Kennedy would have turned 93 today.

The late U.S. attorney general and U.S. senator from New York died 50 years ago at the hands of an assassin who shot him in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen after Bobby Kennedy had just won the California Democratic Party presidential primary.

He was 42 years of age when he died.

I have grieved ever since over that loss.

RFK was my first political hero, although I don’t like using the h-word when talking about politicians. They aren’t heroic figures any more than athletes are heroes.

I did admire him greatly.

But to think on this day that a young, ambitious politician died at an age that is younger than the younger of my two sons fills me with an odd sense of my own mortality.

We need a politician like RFK among us today. We are a nation divided by race, by social status, by partisan politics. Bobby Kennedy sought to elevate us above the divisions that ravaged the nation when he sought the presidency in 1968, that most turbulent of years.

It was Bobby who climbed aboard that flatbed truck in Indianapolis on April 4, 1968 and informed the crowd of mostly black supporters that “Martin Luther King was shot and killed.” The crowd gasped in horror. RFK then went on to call for “love” and “compassion for one another.”

As other major U.S. cities erupted in violence that night, Indianapolis remained calm.

I don’t know whether Robert Francis Kennedy would have attained the highest office in America had death not taken him that night. My heart tells me there was a path to the Democratic nomination and to election. But … that must remain for others’ speculation.

The nation lost a champion for humanity five decades ago.

Today, though, I want to salute the fellow who entered this world 93 years ago today and embarked on a too-brief journey in a quest to heal the wounds that harmed us.

Happy birthday, Bobby. Many millions of us still miss you.

national news

Call it a day, Sen. Sanders

I am going to admit that I ain’t feelin’ the Bern.

There’s chatter churning out there that U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who aligns with the Democrats, is considering another presidential run in 2020.

Please! No! Not again!

Sanders sang a one-note aria while running for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2016: It centered on income inequality and how the “1 percent is holding the vast majority of wealth” in this country.

I supported Hillary Clinton’s candidacy over Bernie Sanders, mainly because I felt uncomfortable with Sanders’s lack of stated understanding of the whole range of foreign and domestic issues that any president confronts.

Now he’s considering another run at it. A Politico story tells how he is setting up a showdown with U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat who’s also considering a presidential run in two years.

I’m not yet sure who should get the party’s nomination to challenge Donald Trump for the presidency, assuming he runs for re-election.

Sen. Sanders is nowhere to be found on my list of preferred candidates. It has nothing to do with his acknowledgment of being what he calls a “democratic socialist.” I do agree in part with his view that too few people in this country control too much wealth. I do not believe his notion of providing a free public college/university education for all Americans is even possible, let alone reasonable.

He’s had his run. He came up short in 2016. I still believe the Democratic Party’s best chance at winning the White House rests with someone fresh and new.

Sen. Sanders is neither of those things.

Don’t do it, Bernie.

national news

Is this the year midterm turnout blows up?

Americans generally take far less interest in midterm elections than they do in presidential elections, not that presidential election years are much to brag about.

Sure, about 60 percent of Americans vote for president. When it comes to voting on those “off years” for members of the U.S. House and Senate, the turnout drops off considerably.

There’s some chatter in states that have opened early voting for this year’s midterm election that turnout might actually approach presidential election year numbers.

That would be a very good thing.

As important as it is to elect presidents, it’s the congressional races that produce more of a direct impact on people’s lives.

In Texas, the top of our ballot includes a race for the Senate that is generating a lot of interest: Democrat Beto O’Rourke is challenging Republican Ted Cruz for Cruz’s Senate seat. O’Rourke is drawing big rally crowds; Cruz is going to campaign next week with the president of the United States.

The issue for O’Rourke is whether the interest he is spurring will produce big vote totals on Election Day. The jury is still out on that one. Indeed, Democrats are beginning to worry out loud that they won’t.

Still, Texas’s vote turnout performance lags at or near the bottom of the 50 states in these midterm cycles.

Oh, how I want that to change.

Maybe it will, given the stakes. Many millions of Americans — including me — want Democrats to take control of Congress to act as a check against the Donald Trump agenda. The House might flip from GOP to Democratic control; the Senate remains a much steeper hill to climb.

However, the turnout looks as though it will exceed recent midterm election percentages. Hey, it’s a start.

political news, State news

Beto flush with cash, but will it deliver the votes?

Beto O’Rourke is raising lots of money in his quest to become the next U.S. senator from Texas.

Campaign finance records show that O’Rourke raised $38 million for the third quarter of 2018, a record for a Senate contest. His opponent, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz? About $12 million.

Here’s the question of the day: Will this prodigious fundraising by th Democratic challenger translate to votes in the fall? If it does, O’Rourke would become the first politician elected to a statewide office in Texas since 1994.

The Texas Tribune reported: “The people of Texas in all 254 counties are proving that when we reject PACs and come together not as Republicans or Democrats but as Texans and Americans, there’s no stopping us,” O’Rourke said in a statement.

I remain — much to my chagrin — skeptical at this moment that O’Rourke’s cache of cash is going to put him over the top. I keep seeing public opinion polls that put Cruz up by 4 to 6 percentage points. In a state as large as Texas, with its estimated 15 million registered voters, that remains a steep hill to climb, especially in Texas with its long-held tradition of electing candidates purely on the basis of their Republican Party affiliation.

I’ll stipulate once again that I intend to vote for O’Rourke on Nov. 6. I don’t want the Cruz Missile re-elected. I no longer want him representing my state. I am not a native Texan, but by God I’ve lived in the state long enough — more than 34 years — to declare my Texanhood.

My wife and I, after all, chose to live in Texas way back in 1984.

I do remain a bit dubious of candidates’ boasting of the amount of money they raise. O’Rourke is proud, as he declares, that the vast bulk of his campaign cash comes from individual donors. That’s highly commendable. Is it enough to put this young man over the top and into the Senate seat now occupied by Cruz?

What I don’t hear about is the so-called “ground game” that successful candidates deploy to win elections. A candidate with tons of dough need to invest that money in hiring individuals and groups of individuals to do the important work that needs doing, such as targeting the precincts where they see the greatest advantage.

Oh, and getting out the vote. Manning phone banks. Making calls constantly to Texans in those targeted precincts, encouraging them to get off their duffs to be sure to vote.

My hope is that Beto O’Rourke spends his money wisely and effectively, understanding full well that it shouldn’t burn a hole in his proverbial pocket.