Bernie Sanders isn’t the candidate to support in 2020
Since the midterms have ended, I’ve started looking to potential candidates in the Democratic Party for the 2020 elections.
One such candidate that I continue to follow is Sen. Bernie Sanders from Vermont. He has run as an Independent and a Democrat and is considered by everyone bordering the aisle to be an extremely far-left candidate.
Sanders was that during the lead-up to the 2016 Presidential Election. He is what Sydney Ember, political reporter for the New York Times, charges him to be, the “Lion of the Left,” but as Ember also astutely observes, he is “not the only one roaring”.
Sanders isn’t the stand-out and far-left voice in the Democratic Party; he isn’t even the stand-out Socialist voice in the party.
With the promotion of Democrats like Member-elect for U.S. House of Representatives from New York’s 14th District Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders isn’t a lone voice in the Democratic Party.
There is power in numbers and in like-mindedness, but there is also something detrimental in that. Sanders may get pushed by the wayside in favor of these new (and popular) political figures.
But that isn’t the only reason Sanders may not be the best choice for the party.
In the United States, we have a bifurcated political party system. Even though we don’t, we have to try to find commonalities and a consensus on a variety of issues or our country suffers.
As during the 2016 election, Sanders is the outlier politically. Democratic Socialism is radical in this country. And while we have these far-left political figures, like U.S. Congresswoman-elect Ocasio-Cortez in New York, spurred on by young people and older people alike, the Democratic Party has to think pragmatically.
While Sanders may be the choice we want to make, he is the choice I wish we could make. He is the far-left voice that many young people actually took stock of.
Many of us looked up to Sanders’ tenacity, his resoluteness and his ability to cut through the political pandering, but that was a time when we thought a Democratic president was in the cards after Obama.
We thought after the first black president, we were either going to get the first female president or the first Jewish, Socialist-leaning president.
We were wrong and the political climate has now changed. Trump has changed our country. He has changed the way governance looks, sounds and even how effective it can be. The Democratic party needs to choose wisely, because they want, and in my opinion, they need to win.
The only way to win is to look to more centrist candidates. If we look at the results of the midterms, the Blue Wave (while not totally effective in the end) hinged on Democratic candidates not running on the more touchy subjects of abolishing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or Medicare-for-All.
Democratic centrists have the ability to push the country back in a blue direction, Sanders with his far-left, still determined radical, politics doesn’t have the optics to do it.
The Democratic Party needs to move in the moderate direction if we want control of the executive branch again.
If former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton couldn’t secure the white female demographic for the Democrats, even though she literally spoke to those demographics, represented that subset of American society, a new tactic has to be taken.
Sen. Cory Booker, though I have my issues with his politics, could be a good candidate for the Democratic Party. While the leaking of those documents pertaining to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s hearing is a hurdle to have to jump over, he can spin it.
It is Booker’s connection to Wall Street, something which he was criticized for heavily back in 2013 by liberals, which could provide him that support from fiscal conservatives.
Being part black is a racist hurdle in and of itself, but former President Obama was able to make it over that obstacle and Booker could as well.
Of course, I’m not throwing all of my eggs into one basket with Booker. There are other more centrist Democratic political leaders that could be promoted in 2020, and they should be.
And if that means sacrificing true progressive and far-left ideals that the Democratic Party should be promoting, it might have to happen.
Sanders, while my favorite candidate and probably one of the political candidates I ever felt actually listened to young people without patronizing countenance, can’t be the Democratic Party’s choice.
The Democratic Party has to make sacrifices to make change, to fix wrongs and to do major damage control.
A presidency riddled with human rights violations and misogynistic, xenophobic, homophobic, islamophobic rhetoric needs to end, and moderacy has to be the answer.
We can’t feel the Bern this time around.
