The Democratic Party is not only in disarray, but they seem to have no idea what to do to correct course.
So far, the progressive wing seems to agree that it’s best to push all the way left: to run on single-payer and “free” college, to establish a pro-abortion purity test, to curse at every public speaking opportunity, and to engage in unseemly and increasingly violent “resistance” efforts that insult the millions of Americans who voted for President Trump.
The establishment wing is thus far maintaining the status quo: they’re keeping the Congressional leadership that led them to historic electoral defeats across the board, sticking to knee-jerk opposition to and obstruction of the duly-elected president’s agenda, and murmuring about the continuation of the Clinton dynasty in the person of Chelsea Clinton.
It’s hard not to laugh . . . until you read Politico‘s “big” story on New York’s Democrat governor Andrew Cuomo’s ability to “beat Trump” in 2020. This isn’t the first time Politico has promoted Cuomo for 2020.
In a glowing piece that treats Cuomo like the Second Coming of Obama, Politico posits that Cuomo is the perfect remedy for the Democrats’ woefully bare bench, Andrew Cuomo Could Beat Trump … If He Can Win Over the Left First:
The scene is unfolding in the shabby headquarters of the Hotel Trades Council just off Times Square in the late spring of 2017, but it’s not hard to imagine the speech somewhere in the Rust Belt in 2020, with a Democratic nominee trying to reclaim the Upper Midwest for his party.“The truth is the middle class is under attack. The working families are under attack,” Andrew Cuomo bellows, his tough-guy accent coming in a little thick. “Middle-class wages are behind where they were 20 years ago. Think about it. All the pundits on TV say, ‘We don’t understand why there is such anger and anxiety.’”Standing before a crowd of unionized hotel workers several hundred strong, the governor of New York rails against Republicans for feeding workers like them a lie all these years. He speaks to them like he alone understands what they have been going through, watching wages disappear while the rest of the country gets richer. “It’s the labor movement that built the middle class and it’s the labor movement that’s going to have to rebuild the middle class in this country,” he thunders. He has the room, completely.Cuomo is a big-name politician who has long seemed an extremely unlikely national candidate — until now, when suddenly he’s seeming like a very likely one. In theory, he is here to ceremonially sign a bill that would allow union members to deduct their union dues from their state taxes, but it’s clear what he is really doing today is waging a bigger argument against President Donald Trump.“You want to deport immigrants? I say to them, start with me, Andrew Cuomo, the grandson of Andrea and Immacolata Cuomo, Italian poor immigrants,” he tells a roomful of people who are mostly immigrants.The hotel workers stand up. They cheer. “Andrew Cuomo for president!” Someone yells. And then all at once. “2020! 2020!”. . . . New Yorkers love to assume that their politicians are national figures by default, even as one by one they flame out on the big stage. For much of his career, Cuomo has looked like another in this long line: someone too nakedly ambitious, too pushy, with too messy of a personal life—too, well, New Yorky—to play much beyond Buffalo and the Battery. But suddenly it seems that Americans are willing to pull the lever for a muscular, messy, rough-edged leader shouting for the common man, and suddenly the governor is starting to show up on a lot of people’s lists.
Politico rightly notes that the major stumbling block for Cuomo running in the 2020 Democrat presidential primary comes from the “newly energized” left who sees him as a centrist who caters to the 1%.
The progressive Slate was quick to post a rebuttal entitled “We Need to Stop This ‘Andrew Cuomo 2020’ Nonsense Immediately.”
Politico has a big piece Friday suggesting that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo could defeat Donald Trump in 2020 as the Democrats’ presidential nominee if he is able to win over “the left.”For the most part, we can dismiss this concept without even addressing the already tiresome idea that what a Democratic voting base that has spent the past six months getting jazzed up about aggressive resistance and unapologetically liberal policies is actually fixin’ to do in 2020 is nominate a moderate centrist triangulating triangulator who—as Politico points out itself!—lowered taxes on millionaires and has close ties to his state’s most powerful corporate executives.
The progressive left’s problems with Cuomo are rooted in his not being progressive enough. On the right, however, the feeling is that he is far too progressive to appeal to middle America.
Cuomo not only publicly announced that “conservatives are not welcome” in New York, but he also signed the anti-Second Amendment SAFE Act that even New Yorkers blatantly rejected and ignore.
If upstate New York is a harbinger for things to come, then the resulting pushback on Cuomo’s SAFE Act is resounding.
But in pushing for passage of strict new gun laws, Mr. Cuomo alienated a vocal constituency across upstate New York, a region he has otherwise wooed. In court, gun owners have challenged the constitutionality of the laws; on lawn signs and bumper stickers in places like the Catskills and western New York, they demand their repeal.
Counties, towns and villages have passed resolutions denouncing the laws, and some counties have even demanded that their official seals not be used on any paperwork relating to them. In response to an open records request, the governor’s office shared hundreds of pages of such resolutions, from far-flung places like the Adirondack town of North Hudson, with 238 residents, to more populous areas like Erie County.“The calculation when it was passed was people were going to get mad for a little while and then get over it,” Stephen J. Aldstadt, the president of the Shooters Committee on Political Education, said. “I don’t think people are getting over it.”
Self-declared “collectivist” Cuomo is a big believer that government can “solve all problems.” He is for open borders, a $15 minimum wage, banning fracking, “free” college,” and he actively “protects” abortion to the degree that he sought to enshrine abortion into the ninth month in New York state law. Add to this, if need be, that the New York City subway fiasco points to his incompetence, and there is about zero chance he would win any non-centrist, non-Democrat votes anywhere in the country.
The Politico piece makes the same mistake that Democrats are making across the board: they confuse “populism” with socialism and/or communism. One of the primary problems with this misreading of the country is that the Americans who voted for Trump’s brand of populism want jobs, opportunity, and liberty. The exact opposite, in other words, of what Democrats offer.
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