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Socialist Bernie Sanders is running for President

Socialist Bernie Sanders is running for President

Last updated on: May 1, 2015 at 5:35 am by Gene Veith

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Socialist Bernie Sanders is running for President 2015-04-30T19:18:26-04:00 Gene Veith

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Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, an Independent who identifies himself as a Socialist, is running for president on the Democratic ticket. You may think, another socialist? But Sen. Sanders is at least open about his radicalism, and he has a constituency in the Democratic party.

Charles Lane discusses how the Democratic party has veered sharply to the left since Bill Clinton ostensibly brought the party to the center. Now Hillary Clinton is having to present herself as “progressive,” despite her corporate ties and her record. So now she is running against many of her husband’s policies.

From Bernie Sanders Announces He Is Running for President – NYTimes.com:

Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, announced Thursday that he was running for president as a Democrat, injecting a progressive voice into the contest and providing Hillary Rodham Clinton with her first official rival for the party’s nomination.

Avoiding the fanfare that several Republicans have chosen so far when announcing their candidacies, Mr. Sanders issued a statement to supporters that laid out his goals for reducing income inequality, addressing climate change and scaling back the influence of money in politics.

“After a year of travel, discussion and dialogue, I have decided to be a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president,” Mr. Sanders told his supporters.

Mr. Sanders’s bid is considered a longshot, but his unflinching commitment to stances popular with the left — such as opposing foreign military interventions and reining in big banks — could force Mrs. Clinton to address these issues more deeply.

On a patch of grass known as “The Swamp” outside of the Capitol, Mr. Sanders later articulated before a horde of media and a few curious onlookers why he was running. He acknowledged that he faced big financial challenges but said that, as a politician with the “most unusual political history of anyone in Congress,” he was optimistic about his chances. . .

Mr. Sanders, 73, has said that he will not run a negative campaign and that he has never run an attack ad in his life. A self-described “Democratic socialist” and grumpy grandfather-type, Mr. Sanders has promised to steer the Democratic Party toward a mature debate about the issues he is passionate about.

From Charles Lane, Hillary Clinton always seems to be zigging while others zag:

The big story here is that an avowed socialist who voted with the Democratic Party in the Senate, but wouldn’t join it, now feels comfortable seeking its presidential nomination. This says a lot about the party’s long-term ideological trajectory, and Clinton’s compatibility with it, or lack thereof.

Charles Lane is a Post editorial writer, specializing in economic policy, federal fiscal issues and business, and a contributor to the PostPartisan blog. View Archive

Though hardly a conservative, her record puts her to the right of a Democratic Party that has been gradually taken over by its left wing in the 20-plus years since a centrist Bill Clinton, accompanied by then-first lady Hillary, first gained the White House, as former Clinton White House political strategist Doug Sosnik argued in an influential 2014 article for Politico Magazine.. . .

Alas for Hillary, the record of her husband’s administration — and even her own record as a senator and as a secretary of state sympathetic to the use of force abroad — reflected the lessons of older events — specifically, the defeat of Michael Dukakis by George H.W. Bush in 1988 and the loss of the House of Representatives to Newt Gingrich’s Republicans in 1994, both of which taught Democrats to fear getting outflanked on the right.

As a result, she now faces the Sanders challenge. Indeed, so discredited is centrism within the Democratic Party that former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, who planned a similar left-populist campaign against Clinton, finds himself on the defensive over his law-and-order policies as mayor of Baltimore in the early ’90s. In tune with those different times, O’Malley’s approach is now being blamed for police brutality in Charm City.

Oh, the ironies. Hillary figured in conservative demonology as the radical power behind her husband’s throne and got blamed for the failure of an allegedly overly liberal Clinton administration health insurance proposal; so she remade herself as a centrist.

Now that’s inconvenient, so she must recast herself as a true progressive. On Wednesday, Clinton offered criminal justice reforms that implicitly repudiate tough federal sentencing laws that her husband signed, and she lavishly praised David Dinkins — the one-term Democratic mayor of New York whose perceived failures to control crime paved the way to his election defeat by Republican Rudy Giuliani in 1993.

Meanwhile, she has almost been silenced on President Obama’s proposed free-trade agreement with 11 Pacific Rim nations — itself possibly a last vestige of Democratic pro-business centrism. She supported it as secretary of state, and it’s a lineal descendant of her husband’s North American Free Trade Agreement. Yet labor and other liberal interest groups are trying to establish opposition to free trade as the post-Obama party line — it’s a key issue for Sanders. So Hillary is reduced to noncommittal platitudes.

She seems always to be zigging when history zags. Whether this costs her the nomination, though, is another question. She enjoys the backing of a vast network of elected officials, donors and hangers-on; the chance to elect the first female president will induce many Democrats to swallow their ideological misgivings.

The likely effect — and intent — of a Sanders challenge is to push both Clinton’s campaign and her administration, if there is one, further left, thus consolidating liberal control of the party.

The risk, for Clinton and the Democrats generally, is that they over-interpret the country’s mood, which is increasingly culturally liberal — but still deeply skeptical of federal competence and trustworthiness. “Democratic activists will need to reconcile the public’s desire for smaller government with their own progressive impulses,” Sosnik warned.

Almost 20 years have passed since President Clinton declared, “The era of big government is over.” If Hillary hopes to be the next President Clinton, that’s one part of her husband’s legacy she may not want to repudiate.

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