BENNET MAKES IT OFFICIAL, JOINS PRESIDENTIAL RACE
Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet has become the 21st Democrat running for president. He promises to boost the middle class and mend America’s broken political system.
Michael Bennet, Colorado’s senior U.S. senator, is running for president on promises to boost the middle class and mend America’s broken political system.
Bennet, who successfully recovered from prostate cancer surgery last month, announced his campaign Thursday morning.
“My plan is to run for president,” Bennet said on “CBS This Morning.” “I think this country faces two enormous challenges; one is a lack of economic mobility and opportunity for most Americans and the other is the need to restore integrity to our government.”
The senator is scheduled to barnstorm Iowa, beginning in the rural west and heading east through the weekend.
Bennet, 54, is the 21st Democrat to get into the race to take on President Donald Trump. The 2020 field is the largest and most diverse in the nation’s history. And with the first votes in the primary still more than half a year away, the ever-expanding list of candidates is vexing for many Democrats who want nothing more than to see Trump booted from office.
Bennet’s announcement follows former Vice President Joe Biden’s entry into the race last week. Biden leads in most polls and raised more than $6 million in his first 24 hours as an official candidate, a record this cycle.
The field also includes U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the runnerup in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, who has an army of devoted followers. Five other senators are running, including Elizabeth Warren, who recently visited Colorado, and Kamala Harris. A handful of U.S. House members are also vying for the nomination.
Bennet is the second Coloradan to join the 2020 race. Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper joined in March. The two men have been friends for decades. At one point, Bennet worked for Hickenlooper. At another, the two were rivals for the Senate seat Bennet now holds.
“Right now the Democratic Party doesn’t stand for very much at the national level, with respect to what the American people think,” Bennet said. “This is the opportunity for us to show what we stand for — a competition of ideas.”
Like Hickenlooper, Bennet has a long way to go in raising his national profile. While he made headlines this year after attacking Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, he does not have the same name recognition of other candidates. A CNN poll Tuesday put both Hickenlooper and Bennet — and a couple other candidates — at 0 percent support.
“It’s already a pretty crowded field. There are some big-name candidates who are racking up endorsements, a significant amount of money, and support from activists,” said Seth Masket, a University of Denver political scientist who is studying the primary. “People aren’t all that committed to candidates, but coming up with a rationale for him rather than any one of a number of qualified candidates is going to be difficult at this point.”
Bennet was set to announce his candidacy in April. Instead, he shared that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Since then, he’s undergone surgery and is now cancer-free.
“I think Mike just has to get out there and show what he has to offer,” said Helen Varner, who hosted Bennet’s first Iowa house party in Dubuque earlier this year. “I think he’s a great candidate, and I’d love to hear more from him. I knew (cancer) wasn’t going to stop him.”
Bennet’s entry into the race comes just two months before the first official Democratic primary debate. To be on the stage, he must secure 65,000 donations from across the country or receive at least 1 percent in three different polls selected by the national party.
Making it on the stage will be a key first test of the nascent campaign.
His campaign acknowledged his late entry into the race puts him at a disadvantage. However, it plans to work overtime to make sure Bennet is on the stage.
Bennet’s key campaign promises in these early days will be focused on income inequality and dysfunction in Washington. Earlier this year he called income inequality the greatest threat to America in an interview on “Meet the Press.”
“Think about what we’ve
done since 2001. We’ve cut taxes by $5 trillion,” Bennet said in February. “Almost all of that went to the wealthiest Americans. We’ve spent $5.6 trillion, the president says $7 trillion on wars in the Middle East.
“So that’s $11, $12, $13 trillion that we did not spend to address the most important issue facing this country, which is our lack of economic mobility and the huge income inequality that we have.”
And on the eve of his announcement, he said on Twitter: “Our democracy cannot function when there is vast economic inequality like we have today.”
Bennet won’t be the first candidate to make income inequality a key message. Sanders and Warren have made restoring the middle class a central message of their campaigns.
And Hickenlooper, who earlier this week backed a staggered $15 dollar minimum wage, is expected to roll out a full economic policy agenda this weekend in New Hampshire.
Bennet’s critique of the political system and promise to fix Washington comes as no surprise as he lambasted the Freedom Caucus, a group of conservative House members that grew out of opposition to President Barack Obama and united to block a number of efforts, and Trump in early stops in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Blend of Washington and the West
Bennet, the son of former diplomat Douglas J. Bennet, was born in India. He grew up in Washington, D.C., before attending Wesleyan University. He later earned a law degree from Yale.
He worked for Ohio Gov. Richard Celeste and then in the Clinton Justice Department.
After moving to Colorado with his wife, Susan Daggett, Bennet joined Anshutz Investment Co. as the managing director.
He led the company’s reorganization.
In 2003, he left Anshutz to help Hickenlooper run the city of Denver as chief of staff.
Two years later, he was selected to lead Denver Public Schools, where he set out an ambitious reform agenda that has had mixed results but is still the foundation of the work going on today in the state’s largest school district.
Bennet was first appointed to his Senate seat in 2009. He went on to win it the next year in a nail-biter of an election against Ken Buck, who now represents Colorado’s 4th Congressional District. Bennet easily won re-election in 2016, despite being the only Democrat up for re-election in a swing state.
In Washington, the senator has had a low profile but developed a reputation for being thoughtful and nuanced.
An East Coast native, he has fashioned himself as a pragmatic Western politician going to work on the Senate’s agricultural committee.
Most recently, Bennet helped secure passage for the so-called farm bill.
Bennet has been known to study controversial issues such as Obama’s Iran nuclear deal for months before announcing his position.
He has taken hard votes, including helping to pass the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, months before he asked voters to return him to Washington in 2010. And he worked hard to help rewrite the nation’s education laws in 2015.
Bennet also was part of the so-called Gang of Eight — a bipartisan group of senators who wrote an immigration reform bill that passed the Senate before being blocked in the House.
Bennet was more successful in helping to rewrite the nation’s education laws, i.e. the Every Student Succeed Acts, which Obama signed into law in 2015.
Within the state’s Democratic establishment, Bennet is well regarded as a progressive statesman. However, Bennet’s favorability in MorningConsult’s most recent quarterly approval ratings stood at just 39 percent. He has been criticized at times by the state’s environmentalists and union leaders.