[rad-green] Face facts, Bernie Sanders is electable: USA Today

*https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/02/20/bloomberg-only-looks-electable-bernie-sanders-really-is-column/4812232002/
<https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/02/20/bloomberg-only-looks-electable-bernie-sanders-really-is-column/4812232002/>*

*USA Today          February 20, 2020*
Face facts, Bernie Sanders is electableIt’s true that at one point calling
yourself a “Democratic socialist” would be a bridge too far for many
voters, including Democrats. But that was before people began to realize
how unmoored the American capitalist system is from any sense of ethics or
morality.
*Kirsten Powers,Opinion columnist*

There has been a mass freak-out among the Democratic establishment as
Bernie Sanders continues to surge in the polls. In two surveys released
Tuesday, the Vermont Senator has opened up a double-digit lead over his
closest competitors in the Democratic primary.

The desperation has caused many Democrats to set their sights on former New
York City mayor Mike Bloomberg as the man who will save us all from Donald
Trump. But first he’ll have to save us from Bernie Sanders. The billionaire
businessman has paid a pretty penny for every point he has risen in the
national polls to overtake the prior moderate savior, Joe Biden.

For most of the primary season, politicos, commentators and journalists
have dismissed the Sanders candidacy at best or attacked and misrepresented
it at worst with the New York Times editorial board myopically comparing
Sanders to Trump and calling his policy prescriptions “overly rigid,
untested and divisive.” How often do we hear it claimed with soothsayer
certainty, “A Democratic Socialist will never be elected president in the
United States?”

You know who else will “never” be elected president of the United States? A
former reality TV star with zero governing or policy experience who attacks
war heroes, the parents of war heroes, brags on tape about grabbing women
by the p___y, and…well, you get my point.

This is not to say that because Donald Trump became president — after
improbably winning a Republican primary praising single payer health care,
attacking the Bush family, the Iraq War and challenging other previously
sacred cows on the right — that anyone can become president. It’s to point
out how the ground has shifted in terms of what is possible in politics.
The old rules simply do not apply, so we should stop using them.

It’s true that at one point calling yourself a “Democratic socialist” would
be a bridge too far for many voters, including Democrats. But that was
before people began to realize how unmoored the American capitalist system
is from any sense of ethics or morality. The level of economic inequality
and suffering from lack of affordable health care, crushing debt, and a
discriminatory and racist for-profit incarceration system in one of the
world’s wealthiest countries is astonishing. People are exhausted from
working non-stop trying to just survive financially in a system that
dangles the carrot of financial stability or wealth always slightly out of
reach except for a favored few. Nothing about this is normal and that is
fundamentally Bernie Sanders’ so-called “radical” argument.
Bloomberg's 'moderate lane'

As Bernie’s new foil, Bloomberg is waving the “moderate lane” banner of
electability and claiming that Bernie’s kooky notions (which are just
considered normal behavior in many industrialized countries) go too far for
American voters. These are the same voters who would cut off your hand if
you reached for their socialist Medicare or Social Security. Still, the
premise of Bloomberg as electable slipped seamlessly into the public
debate. Of course, Bernie fares just as well, and sometimes better, than
Bloomberg in hypothetical matchups against Trump but the electable moniker
has mysteriously eluded him.

What ultimately will make the Democratic standard bearer electable is his
or her ability to excite and turn out voters. This is why the most
pertinent issue for Bernie’s electability argument has been his weak
history attracting African American support. While he made significant
inroads since 2016, much of that critical voting bloc has been locked up
with Joe Biden. But that is shifting. Tuesday’s NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist
found that Bernie has narrowed that gap to just three points, and he tops
Bloomberg by 12 points.

Either way, it’s hard to believe that the mayor who expanded “stop and
frisk” in New York City and defended it all the way up to a month before he
announced his candidacy is going to excite black voters, particularly young
black voters who have made their preference for Bernie manifest. For that
matter, why would any Democratic voter, regardless of their race, be
excited about a candidate who lacked the imagination to grasp that being
treated like a criminal just for existing would be a traumatizing
experience for black and brown people?
[image: Democratic presidential hopeful Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders
speaks during the ninth Democratic primary debate of the 2020 presidential
campaign season co-hosted by NBC News, MSNBC, Noticias Telemundo and The
Nevada Independent at the Paris Theater in Las Vegas, Nev. on Feb. 19,
2020.]

Moreover, Bloomberg’s performance in his first Democratic primary debate
last night was imperious and underwhelming. He absurdly claimed that the
NDA’s women at his company signed were “consensual” and refused to agree to
let them speak openly about their experiences working for his company. He
stumbled through an explanation of stop-and-frisk claiming, “it got out of
control,” when he was the one who had total control over it. Responding to
Bernie’s contention that billionaires should not exist, Bloomberg claimed
he is giving all his money away. But trying to buy your way into the
presidency is not charity. He came out of the gate attacking Sanders,
claiming he had no chance to beat Trump, because he’ll scare moderate
voters.
Biden voters back Bernie

But a Buzzfeed reporter surveyed moderate Democratic voters at a Biden Iowa
event last month and one after another said despite their concerns about
Sanders, they’d pull the lever for him if he won the nomination.

There’s no doubt that if Bernie is the nominee Republicans will continue to
conflate Democratic socialism with communism and pretend that Venezuela is
Sanders’ ideal society even though Bernie has said he is a Democratic
Socialist in the vein of the Scandinavian countries, home to the world’s
happiest people. Republicans will lie about what Bernie believes the same
way they will lie about whoever becomes the Democratic nominee.

Democrats should have learned by now to not let Republicans pick their
candidates for them. Remember when conventional wisdom in 2016 said Nancy
Pelosi should be replaced because Republicans used her as a proxy to attack
all Democrats as too liberal and out of touch? “After Democrats’ Losses
Nancy Pelosi Becomes a Symbol of What Went Wrong,” a New York Times
headline blared following the 2016 election.  Pelosi managed to cling to
her power and Republicans made the San Francisco pol the star of many of
their 2018 campaign ads against Democrats in swing districts. Yet, the
Democrats took back the House with the largest midterms margin in history.
Then Pelosi emerged as one of the only Democratic leaders able to
effectively stand up against Trump.

Ultimately, there’s no reason to believe that voters are being motivated in
any meaningful way by ideology this cycle. People who are more afraid of a
single payer health care system and free college than they are of Donald
Trump and his creeping authoritarianism are probably not Democratic voters
or even Democratic leaning independents.
Bernie's socialism isn't communism

Bloomberg derided Bernie’s views as “communism” in last night’s debate,
echoing Republican talking points. On the campaign trail last year, Sanders
explained his vision of how Democratic socialism would work: it’s “an
economy in which you have wealth being created by the private sector, but
you have a fair distribution of that wealth, and you make sure the most
vulnerable people in this country are doing well.”

Whatever people’s fears about Bernie’s democratic socialism, the fact
remains he’s running for president, not king, of the United States. Some of
his solutions are dead on and others less so. But he cannot enact any of
them without the support of Congress. This means he will have to use his
bully pulpit to bring the country around to his point of view if he wants
to enact change. American voters are capable of grasping this this.

It’s well past time to bury the “Bernie is unelectable” trope.

Kirsten Powers, a CNN news analyst, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of
Contributors. Follow her on Twitter: @KirstenPowers
<https://twitter.com/KirstenPowers>

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