At The Week Damon Linker endorses Bernie Sanders for president in 2016:
Has any Democrat with national ambitions run for office over the past 30 years without promising a “strong, bold economic program for the middle class and those working hard to get there” (presumably in contrast to the lazy poor people who aren’t working hard)? Without throwing a few punches at vaguely defined “special interests”? Without assuring voters a little defensively (and unconvincingly) that the party isn’t about “expanding the government” or about moving “in one direction or another along the political spectrum”?
Well, there is one Democrat with national ambitions who ran for office without rehearsing center-left cliches. And he did astonishingly well against a candidate strongly favored by the same party establishment that’s spent the past six months drafting the ideas that made up Schumer’s op-ed.
This Democrat, of course, was Bernie Sanders.
Better late than never, I guess. More support this ardent in March 2016 might have been helpful.
As it is if Bernie Sanders is the new face of the Democratic Party, the party is in for a world of hurt. He’s 75 and in 2020 will be 79. It is 20 years past time for the Democratic Party to hand the Silent Generation the gold watch.
