Progressive Voices Speaking Out
Ralph Northam is still governor of Virginia, though it seemed that he would be run out on a rail when the story or stories of him being blackface surfaced on Friday, Feb. 1. Just about every progressive with a PC bone in his or her body called for him to immediately resign.
Imagine that you are applying for a job that doesn’t start for nearly 700 days and during that time you can’t do anything to prepare yourself mentally, psychologically and physically for the challenges.
It may be hard to believe, but in the history of the United States, we have never had consecutive Democrats elected to the presidency. Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson both became presidents because of the deaths of their predecessors.
Since the Clinton era, the Democratic Party has been increasingly reliant on white-collar professionals who may be progressive on social issues but are uncomfortable with “big government” and wealth redistribution.
So, if Howard Schultz wants to run as an independent in 2020, I will beg to differ with other progressives and say that it’s okay, but with a major caveat.
Harris was speaking to an audience stacked in her favor. What was missing was representation of the voters that Hillary Clinton seemed to forget in the 2016 presidential election. The white blue-collar Reagan Democrats who were Donald Trump’s margin of victory in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Is this what it’s come to? Someone running for office must have a background story that is so gripping that we think that he or she came out of a Dickens novel. If the candidate can’t wow the socks off voters with how compelling his or her “womb-to-candidacy” story is, she might as well forget about running.
Somehow, I was led to believe that voting was a fundamental part of democracy. And when a majority exists, and not vote can take place – well, that more than just a shame; it’s not democracy.
The primary will eventually devolve into a contest of personality rather than policy and we’ll judge candidates by their fundraising totals and not their policy agendas. Hopefully before we get there, we’ll have had a serious assessment of the candidates and thought about not just “who can beat Donald Trump” but “who do we want to be President.”
Kamala Harris, California’s junior senator and perhaps a 2020 presidential candidate, is walking into the quagmire of political correctness with a nominee for the federal court in Nebraska. It has to do, in part, with religion. Most politicians tend to avoid questions related to religion because the risk of offending someone is far greater than the payoff of criticism, however justified.