Dems audition for 2020 presidential race

WASHINGTON — The annual confab for progressives Tuesday might have been mistaken for a daylong seminar to teach rich liberal donors about a middle America that is increasingly incomprehensible to them.

But it was much more than that. It was the beginning of a long audition — for party leaders and for 2020 presidential contenders.

Some of the biggest names in Democratic politics could be found in the subterranean conference center in downtown Washington, road-testing their plans for the party’s salvation. The speaking slots at the Center for American Progress’ annual Ideas event, watched closely by some of the left’s most well-heeled donors and well-connected politicos, were particularly coveted in this time of reinvention for Democrats, when the race to carry the party’s mantle and form its message is wide open.

Time at the podium, or waxing intellectual with other panelists on the white leather couch behind it, was sought after, but also fraught this year. Those who took the stage, including New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, billionaire philanthropist Tom Steyer and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, wrestled with the question of how far the left’s anger can go to win back the country for Democrats, and how far the party should go in moving its focus to a different message, perhaps an optimistic one. They jockeyed to offer a vision the kingmakers in the audience could embrace.

“Democracy works best when those involved in the fight are not afraid to stand up for what they believe in, and even throw a punch once in a while,” Warren said in a fiery closing speech that questioned the logic of shifting focus away from the affronts she said President Donald Trump and the Republicans had made to democracy. “While we would rather talk about great ideas, we can’t climb that hill by ignoring ... the damage this president and this Republican Congress have done to our democracy.

“A lot of folks say Democrats should not get

“I’d like to have this family,” he said, as he urged them to join him.

Trump joked that he had promised not to reveal the

distracted with that stuff,” she said. “Inside baseball, they say. No one cares, they say. I disagree.”

At least one representative from the states where the party so misjudged the electorate in 2016 tried to offer some blunt talk.

Ohio’s Sen. Sherrod Brown, a fierce ally of organized labor, took a nuanced jab at the identity politics that serve Democrats so well in urban areas but which Donald Trump used to build resentment in the less diverse regions reeling from the loss of manufacturing and mining jobs.

“If we are going to be a progressive movement that is about human rights and civil rights, it is also about workers’ rights and it is about trade unionism, and it is about raising wages and giving (it to) workers regardless of race,” Brown said. “I don’t talk about black workers and white workers and Latino workers. I talk about workers. ... That is the way you sell that message.”

He warned against a simplistic view of flyover states that assumes voters are only motivated by jobs in a narrow set of industries.

“We need to talk about work differently,” Brown said. “Some people on the coast call my state the Rust Belt and that diminishes who we are and it demeans what we do. Workers in my state are looking for somebody in elected office to talk about the dignity of work, to talk about whose side you are on. I don’t hear that enough from elected officials.”