This must have been a difficult opinion essay for The Viper (Michelle Goldberg) in her time in the virtual serpentarium in the NY Fishwrap's Opinion department. Readers of this blog may note that today's essay was the third in succession by the trio of opinion writers known in this blog as the The Cobra (Maureen Dowd), The Krait (Gail Collins), and today — The Viper (Michelle Goldberg). See the postscript below for further clarification. However, The Viper's disclosure in today's essay was startling because she is married to a key advisor in Senator Elizabeth Warren's presidential campaign. But that may not matter if Senator Warren does not surge in the NH primary ahead of Senator Bernie Sanders. If this is (fair & balanced) proof that politics can complicate lives, so be it.
PS; The source of this blog's noms de stylo serpent reference to the three women on the NY Fishwrap's Op-Ed staff began with this 2001 essay by The Cobra (Maureen Dowd) who's been joined by her distaff colleagues: The Krait (Gail Collins), and — most recently — The Viper (Michelle Goldberg).
[x NY Fishwrap]
The Harrowing Chaos Of The Democratic Primary
By The Viper (Michelle Goldberg)
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
Although I’m a pessimist by nature, deep down I think I always believed that the Republic would survive Donald Trump.
The majority of Americans have never accepted him, and his ascendancy fueled a nationwide civic awakening, starting with the Women’s March and proceeding through airport protests, health care town halls and finally the midterms. It’s been devastating to see how quickly so many American institutions have been corrupted — the Department of Justice turned into an engine of Trump’s paranoid vendettas, the State Department purged of nonpartisan professionals, evidence of Trump’s Ukraine extortion scheme buried by his Senate lackeys. It’s outrageous that the country’s being forced to endure four full years of lawless kakistocracy, but surely, I thought, the majority would put an end to it in the next election.
But now that election is approaching, and the debacle of the Iowa caucuses only highlights how the Democratic Party is threatening to fracture. In its aftermath, we’re left with a national race led by two very old and extraordinarily risky general election candidates whose weaknesses were underscored by Iowa’s results, muddled as they were.
Bernie Sanders’s supporters have argued that he can expand the electorate to make up for the suburban moderates he’s likely to lose, moderates who were, incidentally, responsible for many of the gains Democrats made in 2018. But while Sanders claimed a popular vote victory in Iowa, there was no surge in voter turnout since the last election, and an NBC News entrance poll showed that the number of first-time caucusers actually went down.
Sanders still has the advantage of energy and ardor; young people are overwhelmingly on his side, and his campaign will be carried along by the same sort of ebullient cultural ferment as Barack Obama’s. (When the pop megastar Ariana Grande met Sanders in November, she wrote on Twitter, “I will never smile this hard again.”) I try to talk myself into believing that his passionate base, combined with a polarized electorate, will be enough. Still, with the survival of American democracy at stake, it seems like a wild gamble for Democrats to turn the fight against Trump into a referendum on Democratic socialism at a time when Americans’ personal economic satisfaction is at a record high.
Here’s the place for disclosure: My husband is consulting for Elizabeth Warren, the candidate I believe in more than any other. But I recognize that Warren has electability challenges of her own, and the truth is I’d be fine with any nominee who could generate enthusiasm without scaring suburbanites, if I could only see who that was.
I’m not the only one feeling panicked. The recent rush of mayoral endorsements for Michael Bloomberg is partly just a function of the money he’s poured into cities through his philanthropic work, but it also indicates a worrying lack of confidence in the existing field.
Michael Tubbs, the innovative mayor of Stockton, Calif., who pioneered a universal basic income experiment in his struggling city, became a national co-chair of Bloomberg’s campaign in December. “Every candidate at this stage of the primary has real serious questions about how they’ll bring the party together after they become the nominee,” he told me.
How did it come to this? Mostly, I blame Joe Biden and those in the Democratic establishment who pushed his campaign. It’s been obvious for some time now that Biden is not nearly as vigorous as he once was. While he’s always been gaffe-prone, his speech has grown tentative and meandering in a way that engenders sympathy but also profound anxiety. In Iowa, where voters had a chance to see him up close, the most recent results show him with a distant fourth-place finish. Even if he somehow limps to the nomination, the general election will be a grim slog, like racing on a wounded horse.
Yet with his unmatched biography and name recognition, he deprived younger center-left candidates like Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Michael Bennet of oxygen even as he failed to consolidate centrists himself. That’s left the erstwhile novelty candidate Pete Buttigieg as Biden’s strongest competitor for moderate votes, but while he’s shooting up the polls in New Hampshire, he has virtually no support among voters of color.
According to the polling experts at FiveThirtyEight, Sanders now has a 1 in 2 chance of winning the majority of delegates in the Democratic race. The next most likely scenario, with 1 in 4 odds, is that no one does, which would spell a contested convention.
Should that happen, there will be forces in the Democratic Party that try to block Sanders. (A few members of the Democratic National Committee have already discussed rule changes meant to thwart him, though so far it’s just been marginal chatter.) But if Sanders emerges from the primaries with a plurality of votes, denying him the nomination would be not just unfair but potentially suicidal. I worry about Sanders’s chances against Trump, but a candidate foisted on the party over the furious remonstrances of a disempowered base would almost certainly fare worse, while permanently alienating the young people who should be the Democratic Party’s future.
The way things are going, the fate of American democracy could soon be Bernie or bust. I envy those who find that exhilarating rather than terrifying. ###
[Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. She received a BA (English) from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo and an MS (journalism) from the University of California at Berkeley.]
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