Nominee Bernie?
If he wins, this moderate will vote for him
I’m the quintessential moderate Democrat. I volunteered for Hillary Clinton in 2016. The temperate Barack Obama of the 2012 election excited me far more than the inspirational Barack Obama of the 2008 election. I may think “Medicare for All” is good policy, but I also think it’s a pipe dream and an unnecessary purity test. I think lowhanging fruit is a positive description, not a negative one.
I also have doubts about Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. His grasp of policy — even policies, like breaking up big banks, which he has talked about for decades — has been shaky. Some of his plans miss the mark. Canceling student loan debt, for instance, is a redistribution to the upper-middle class. The math behind how to pay for his ambitious proposals is, at best, optimistic.
I don’t want Sen. Sanders to be the Democratic presidential nominee. Yet if he is, he will have my vigorous, unambiguous support. I will donate, I will volunteer, and I will vote.
My fellow moderates must make the same promise. America will be better off under a “President Sanders.”
The first reason is the most obvious — if Sen. Sanders is the nominee, the only alternative is President Donald Trump. There will be no third-party savior. Wisely or not, our system is set up for two-candidate elections. The last serious third-party candidate, Ross Perot, received roughly 20% of the popular vote in 1992. He received zero electoral votes.
If Sen. Sanders is the only realistic alternative to President Trump, then, we have to compare him with President Trump. Despite the grumbling, Sanders is a far better option.
An existential threat
Consider the most egregious sins of the Trump administration — family separation, support for white nationalists, siding with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin over the U.S. intelligence community, disregard for the rule of law, attempts to undermine future elections, and giving powerful positions to people who are incompetent, immoral or both. Let alone the administration’s half-baked proposals to get rid of birthright citizenship or build a wall that blows over when it’s windy.
These are the sorts of sins that undermine American democracy itself, that are an existential threat to America as we know it. Sen. Sanders — like any Democrat — would put an end to all of them immediately. White nationalists would go back to their caves and Central American children would be released from their cages; Putin would lose all sway over the White House; Betsy DeVos would no longer be a Cabinet-level secretary.
A President Sanders could also begin to rebalance a judiciary that has moved far to the right during the Trump administration. We need to protect not only the Supreme Court — though liberal justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg (age 86) and Stephen Breyer (age 81) are closer to the end of their terms than the beginning — but also circuit courts and district courts, where President Trump has placed 50 and 133 judges, respectively. With another four years, conservatives would have an unbreakable judicial majority for a generation. Moderates understand the importance of incremental change, and progressive judges are critical to that process.
Further, a President Sanders would expand — rather than curtail — civil rights. The past four years have seen expanded use of “voter ID” laws, an attempt to suppress minority response to the census through a “citizenship question,” a curtailing of legal immigration and a travel ban targeting Muslims, not to mention the effective end of the Voting Rights Act.
When people cannot vote
Moderates believe that the best change happens in the voting booth, rather than by executive fiat. When people cannot vote, however, that ceases to be the case.
Finally, our political system would likely curtail a President Sanders’ most far-reaching impulses. As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman argues, the public — let alone the Senate — wouldn’t go along with Medicare for All, massive deficit-funded spending increases, large cuts to military spending or total student loan forgiveness.
Yes, there are policy areas where President Sanders would have wide latitude — mostly regulatory enforcement of financial and environmental standards — but that would be little more than a corrective to a Trump administration that has all but ended regulatory enforcement.
We moderates pride ourselves on realism and incrementalism. We understand that a 50% solution — or even a 10% solution — is better than no solution at all. We are not ideologues. We pursue the best available options, not the best options we can dream up.
Now is not the time for us moderates to become our own form of ideologues. We need to be more realist than ever before. If we are worried about electability, we should by all means work to nominate another Democrat.
Yet if he is the nominee, we need to support Bernie Sanders with every ounce of fight we have within us.