Posted by DoctorKz on 2/16/2020 3:24:00 PM (view original):
I can't remember feeling good about a candidate since Reagan ran for reelection in '84. I never liked Romney. I didn't like McCain at the top of a ticket. I thought they were kidding when W announced he was running, although I ended up liking him better than his Dad.
If I was a Democrat i would be having flopsweats about a reenactment of McGovern, Mondale or Dukakis. When they pick the wrong nominee it can get butt ugly...
There is one big difference between Bernie Sanders and the candidates you mention. McGovern, though I revered him when I was 12 years old, was a major turning point in the Democrats going from being the party of the working class to being the party of college-educated liberal professionals. McGovern had little working class support, and so got smashed in the election.
Mondale had some early labor support, but had to win back workers that had either stayed home or voted for Reagan in 1980, but his chosen main issue - cutting Reagan's record deficits, not only had no appeal to working people, but in the face of the beginning of the now decades-long trend to closing factories and crushing unions, and of stagnating wages and rising inequality, it was even wrong as policy.
Dukakis was a technocrat who even managed to make the elder Bush look like the more lively, populist candidate, despite the latter being the most aristocratic candidate nominated by either party since at least JFK, and possible even longer. Again, no policies oriented toward workers, and vulnerable on the wedge issues.
The miscalculation that conservatives - with the partial exception of Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon - are making, is to think that socialism is unpopular. Even centrist Democrats think that. It was only ever partly true - the WORD socialism was scary to people during the Cold War. But no one cares about that anymore, except those who would in any case vote against the most innocuous reform (like Obama's Republican-inspired ACA, which was identical to Mitt Romney's when he was Governor of Massachusetts), the kind that called Bill Clinton and Barack Obama socialists.
Centrist Democrats see socialism as just the logical end of the "too liberal" spectrum.
But Socialism and Liberalism are really virtually opposites. FDR may have been called a liberal, but the New Deal WAS Social-Democratic. No one called LBJ a liberal but his creation of Medicare and Medicaid and some of the (admittedly not well-thought out) Great Society programs were more an extension of the New Deal. This is not about social and culture wars, it is about class struggle.
So many who voted for Trump, and who were in the Tea Party, have a lot in common with many Bernie voters and will be tempted to change sides in November in a Sanders-Trump election, given that Trump's economy is still mostly giving the benefits to the very wealthy (his tax cut almost exclusively benefits the billionaire class). That would not be true of a Bloomberg candidacy, nor of a Klobachar candidacy I think, and certainly not of a Buttigieg candidacy.
So the latest polls show Bernie not only ahead nationally of Trump, and by more than any other Democrat would be - something that was unthinkable in the McGovern-Nixon and Mondale-Reagan elections, and which did not last two minutes during the Dukakis Bush election - but shows him within 2 points of Trump in...wait for it....TEXAS !
That is because not many people in Texas will elect a President on the issue of transgender rights, but they will on the issue of whether they can take their kid to the doctor, whether there will be jobs even after we stop using fossil fuels, or whether they can get their student loans cancelled.