Bernie sanders

Why Bernie Sanders has no heir

The Democratic establishment has never looked more vulnerable to progressive upheaval; Biden's supposed leadership bridge to a new generation leads nowhere. "Moderate" darling transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg has seen his slim national prospects dwindle with every near-miss in the air and toxic train derailment on the ground. Vice President Kamala Harris has been about as visible as Biden was on the 2020 campaign trail — and a geriatric Capitol Hill leadership class appears on its last legs. The scene is set for the party’s progressives to strike. And yet there is little relief in sight for the party’s left wing as its own geriatric champion rides off into the sunset.

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Is Bernie Sanders the Barry Goldwater of the left?

Forgive the analogy that follows. Is Bernie Sanders the Barry Goldwater of the left? Has Sanders, to echo the words of George Will on Goldwater, lost two primary campaigns but won the future? What reminds us of Goldwater is the clarity of Sanders’s proposals and the force with which he expressed them. Medicare-for-All, canceling student debt, free college tuition; paid for by soaking the wealthy with new taxes. Sanders made all of this thinkable, because most of his ideas are popular. The Sanders moment arrived at a time of political reorientation that would have been unthinkable during the Cold War years. Polling showed that half of millennials have unfavorable views of capitalism. Seventy percent say they are likely to vote for a socialist candidate.

Marianne in Milford

Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson has been passing her time doing campaign events in New Hampshire since announcing earlier this month. Cockburn headed down to one in Milford and it was, well, quite the experience. A little over twenty people were in attendance, not including campaign staffers, and the candidate worked the room chatting with voters before the event began. A local news crew was standing by. Taking the podium, the candidate wasted little time getting to the heart of her message: the system is corrupted, it is cruel — and it needs to be "fundamentally changed." To Cockburn, her proposals suggested "revolutionized" might be a more aptly chosen verb. Marianne characterized the modern American system as utterly brutal: “But let’s be very clear here.

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WATCH: Markwayne Mullin’s macho Teamster throwdown

Cockburn looked on at what he at first took to be a run-of-the-mill sports bar fight at 4:30 in the afternoon — only to realize it was Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin throwing down with Teamsters president Sean O’Brien in the hallowed halls of Congress. Mullin, a Republican, came in guns a’blazing to a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing, saying he is “not at all against unions,” before listing the reasons unions are bad. The exchange between Mullin and O’Brien is painful to watch — and the transcript reads pretty much like what you'd expect to hear before a fistfight in a Chili’s parking lot. Cockburn has assembled, for your reading pleasure, a play-by-play highlight reel of the clash...

The liberal rednecks of Northern California

"San Francisco is the only city I can think of that can survive all the things you people are doing to it and still look beautiful,” said Frank Lloyd Wright. You might say the same thing about Marin, the county you enter upon crossing the Golden Gate Bridge from out of the City of Fog, where my mother moved several years ago to be with my stepdad. Arresting in its natural beauty, gratifying in its varied and delicious cuisine, shocking in its exorbitant property values, Marin ranks in the top ten nationally for median household income. My mother’s town, like many around it, has not a little character. There's the old colonial Spanish influence, evidenced in the mission churches and the names of some of the communities: San Rafael, Corte Madera, San Anselmo, San Geronimo.

How Kyrsten Sinema could hamstring Bernie Sanders’s fundraising

Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s decision to formally quit the Democratic Party could have serious consequences for America’s most famous socialist. While Democrats in Arizona and across the country figure out how to handle the Senate’s newest independent, the cogs in the Democratic Party’s machine are already kicking her to the curb. Their actions could have major ramifications for some of her Senate colleagues. Moments after Sinema declared her independence, her longtime progressive firm, Authentic, dropped her because its employees felt that working with her was tantamount to “devil’s work.” Now, NGP VAN, the Democratic Party’s top data firm, is cutting ties with her because she left the party. Here’s where it gets complicated for the Democratic Party.

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The gerontocracy goes on a spending spree

Like characters in a dystopian novel, the elderly bore the worst of it. Dianne Feinstein, whose friends were already whispering about how there she really was, was found walking back and forth between her private room and common area, which she was required to come to over and over again just to get through the 16-hour ordeal. Chuck Grassley, only a year younger, confessed to taking 10-minute naps and struggling to stay awake, while lamenting how he missed his family. Patrick Leahy, 84 and coming off hip surgery, was lucky. He received more comments about the Batman sticker on his wheelchair than he did questions about why he was even there in the first place. “Pat, I’m glad you’re here,” the comparatively juvenile Tim Kaine (64)  remarked. “We shouldn't have to suffer alone.

Let presidential candidates get older and older

Will Joe Biden be feeling the Bern in 2024? According to a memo leaked to the Washington Post, private-jet-flying socialist Bernie Sanders has not “ruled out” the possibility of throwing his red beret into the ring for a third time. The memo, written by Sanders’s advisor and 2020 campaign manager Faiz Shakir, read: “In the event of an open 2024 Democratic presidential primary, Senator Sanders has not ruled out another run for president, so we advise that you answer any questions about 2024 with that in mind.” The timing of this memo is interesting. Just days before the leak, the Hill reported that President Joe Biden had told former president Barack Obama that he is “planning to run for reelection in 2024.

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When Biden joked that he’d ‘beat the hell’ out of a congressman

Five Guys has always been Cockburn’s first choice for a greasy cheeseburger — breakfast of champions, says he — but Good Stuff Eatery, a Capitol Hill joint, is a solid second. So it is that Cockburn finds himself with a new respect for Congressman Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, who was recently interviewed by Politico while eating at Good Stuff. Yet for sheer artery-clogging goodness, you can’t beat the story Khanna told about President Joe Biden. Per Politico, Khanna said he was once chatting with the president about the difficulties facing the Democratic senatorial caucus (as one does). “Mr. President,” he said, “why don’t you just get Bernie Sanders and Joe Manchin in the room and hammer this out?

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The three reasons Bernie Sanders couldn’t beat Joe Biden

From our UK edition

He took nearly a month to assess the state of his campaign after a whopping 15-point defeat in the crucial battleground state of Michigan. But after private deliberations with his wife, Jane, and some lobbying from his senior political advisers, Bernie Sanders came to the conclusion that continuing his presidential campaign would likely do more harm than good. On Wednesday he decided to call it quits, telling his supporters that there was 'no alternative’. Mathematically, he was right. Sanders was trailing former Vice President Joe Biden by over 300 delegates in the primaries and would have needed to win over 60 per cent of the remaining delegates to capture the Democratic Party nomination.

Bernie lost because he’d already won

So — it turns out there are no socialists in pandemic elections. Bernie Sanders has suspended his campaign, which in normal times would be major news. Amid the panic of the coronavirus crisis, however, most people won’t be that interested. The still incomplete Democratic primary already feels like ancient history, a relic of the BC (Before COVID-19) time. Nevertheless, Sanders’s decision is significant. It means that one of the most consequential American politicians of the 21st century will never be president. Sanders has arguably had as great an impact on American politics as Donald Trump. He didn’t ultimately succeed, but his revolution is unstoppable. It was harder for Bernie to win on a tide of economic anger in 2020 than it was in 2016.

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Bernie Sanders suspends campaign

And then there was one. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont suspended his campaign this morning, setting up a head-to-head between Joe Biden and Donald Trump for the presidency. In a livestream on his website, Sanders said 'few would deny that over the past five years, our movement has won the ideological struggle. 'The future of this country is with our ideas.' Sanders will remain on the ballot during all remaining primaries and continue to gather delegates in order to influence the Democratic policy platform. Biden will now be uncontested at the Democratic National Convention, which has been pushed back a month to August. That's if it happens at all.

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Joe Biden is winning

By the middle of January, I’d read some version of the headline “Biden Can Still Rescue His Presidency” so many times that it seemed an algorithm had taken over from the editors. The New York Times placed it above a column by Bret Stephens, a prominent anti-Trump conservative and a member of the pundit pack that earnestly wished the president Godspeed when he entered the White House more than a year ago. Stephens, like most of his colleagues, argued that Biden was “flailing — and failing” — because of what the paper’s news pages have described as a “legislative agenda in shambles.

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The TIME 100 is a confederacy of dunces

To be chosen as one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people is usually an accolade worth fighting for. Yet this year, it seems to be the celebrity equivalent of the booby prize. Cockburn imagines that it was put together by various subversive elements within the publication who hoped to see the mass ridicule that its various choices, both of subjects and of writers, have led to. They will not be disappointed. That an airbrushed photograph of Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex, takes pride of place in the ‘Icons’ section says all that you need to know. He, poor boy, looks as if he has been captured by a militant group and is being made to put out a hostage video, while she — quite literally — is wearing the pants.

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What Biden’s recent endorsers said about Kavanaugh and #MeToo

Tara Reade, a former Senate staffer for Joe Biden, claimed in an interview last month that the former vice president had put his hand up her skirt and digitally penetrated her in 1993. Since the March 25 interview, new evidence has emerged that seems to corroborate Reade's story: her mother called into Larry King's radio show about the incident in 1993, and her brother, a friend, and a neighbor all recall being told the story by Reade. Nonetheless, despite making multiple media appearances in the month since the allegation, Biden has not addressed Reade's claim directly, though his spokespeople have denied it on his behalf. The former VP is nonetheless holding a 'Virtual Women’s Town Hall' on Tuesday.

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Fall in line, fellow kids: meet ‘Ziad the Activist’

Ziad Ahmed cares.At least, that’s what he’s trying to convince you of with every fiber of his being in a recent video he posted to TikTok, the Chinese spyware program and social media app. https://twitter.com/ziadtheactivist/status/1248801095322939392?s=20 Ziad chastises his fellow campus progressives for not choosing to bend the knee to Joe Biden, mere days after Bernie Sanders terminated his anti-climactic bid for the presidency of the United States.In and of itself, his is not an uncommon position. Much of the Democratic establishment, from its mouthpieces on MSNBC to its ‘wonks’ at the Center for American Progress, have been making the same argument.

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The genius of Joe Rogan

From our UK edition

Last month, just before coronavirus conquered the airwaves entirely, millions of Americans gave up two hours to hear a professor of epidemiology discuss the emerging pandemic. Despite its huge reach, not to mention its quality, the interview wasn’t broadcast on any of the news networks. Rather it was the work of a former martial-arts pundit and hallucinogenic-drug enthusiast who also happens to be one of America’s most popular — and influential — podcasters. Although it racks up some 190 million downloads a month, The Joe Rogan Experience tends to fly somewhat under the cultural radar — particularly in Britain. Even worse, his brash style and predominantly male fan base means that Joe Rogan is sometimes unfairly labelled an arch-reactionary.

America is socialist, dummy

It’s widely agreed that Bernie Sanders fell short in the Democratic primary because he described himself as a socialist. As a movement, socialism has never had mass appeal in America. Even at its strongest, in 1912, it garnered fewer than one million votes for presidential candidate Eugene Debs, who was trounced by Woodrow Wilson. More often, Americans have used the word ‘socialism’ as a synonym for communism, to signify everything America doesn’t stand for. Pundits put Sanders’s failure down to his attempts to give the word a positive spin. On the other hand, a dispassionate glance at American history shows that Uncle Sam has already gone a long way down the road of democratic socialism.

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Biden bus rolls over Bernie in Florida, Illinois and Arizona

Joe Biden is projected to win all three states that voted in the Democratic primary on Tuesday night, advancing his delegate lead over Sen. Bernie Sanders. Biden won Florida by a wide margin, garnering nearly 62 percent of the vote compared to Sanders’s 23 percent. Hillary Clinton defeated Sanders by a similar margin in 2016. Florida awards 219 delegates proportionally, putting Biden that much closer to the 1,991 delegates required to secure the nomination in the first round of voting at the Democratic National Convention. Poll workers in Florida noted lower turnout than usual due to fears over the coronavirus, a phenomenon that could have hurt Biden due to his popularity among older voters.

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Coughing crotchety codgers at a dull DC coronavirus debate

Two gentlemen considered at 'high risk' of contracting COVID-19 met tonight in the Washington DC studio of CNN, to pitch themselves to an on-edge nation as the best alternative to Donald Trump. The Sunday night face-off between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders was initially supposed to be in Phoenix, Arizona, as the state votes on Tuesday. But that was in The Before Time. Even the CNN panel was socially distanced before the debate, with panelists spaced six feet apart across two studios, as opposed to the usual eight people crammed behind the desk like a pack of hot dogs. This memo clearly didn't get sent down the hall to where the debate was being held, as Jake Tapper, Dana Bash and Univision's Ilia Calderón sat unhealthily close together.