Trump sets Democratic field ablaze with anger

[corbe]

Trump sets Democratic field ablaze with anger

The price of entry for the 2020 presidential primary is ferocious opposition to the president.

 By Gabriel Debenedetti
  | 02/06/17 05:09 AM EST
 


The Democratic base is so roiled and enraged after only two weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency that a take-no-prisoners posture toward the White House is emerging as the price of entry for the 2020 primary.

An election that could have focused on economic inequality and the excesses of Wall Street — the issues that animate the left’s leading tribunes, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — is already shaping up as a contest about the intensity of the resistance to Trump.

“In almost 20 years of doing this, I’ve never felt like we’re in a moment like we are now,” said Anne Caprara, a senior adviser for the Priorities USA Action super PAC and a veteran Democratic campaign operative. “This is the moment in history. People will look back and ask what you did, and there’s a real palpable recognition of that among elected officials.”

The urgency of the moment is not lost on the party’s leading 2020 hopefuls. Many of them — including Warren and fellow Sens. Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand and Kamala Harris — abandoned their schedules two weekends ago to appear at protests in their home states or in Washington, grasping the imperative to be both public and distinctive in their opposition to Trump’s executive order on refugee travel. Then Warren, Sanders, Gillibrand and Booker voted against approving Elaine Chao for secretary of transportation, one of Trump’s least controversial picks and an unmistakable thumb in the eye of Chao’s husband, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

“People will say, ‘Where were you when he appointed Jeff Sessions? Where were you when he picked a Supreme Court justice?’ That will be a real question in primaries, and I wouldn’t want to be the candidate on the wrong side of that,” said longtime strategist Bob Shrum, warning of the importance of public resistance in a week when Democratic senators began boycotting votes on Trump picks altogether.

Leading Democratic strategists warn that the first signs will appear in midterm elections, in which the primary electorate will demand more than just marching outside the White House or grabbing a bullhorn at an arrivals lounge. They’ll be expecting something close to 100 percent rejection of Trump’s agenda — making the coming years complicated for members of Congress, who have to vote on it, rather than the governors and mayors who get to assume a more offensive posture.

Base voters are likely to want their politicians to press on specific issues against Trump, not just on his generally objectionable behavior, say operatives who are weighing how to counsel ambitious lawmakers. If each candidate is anti-Trump, the thinking goes, the best way to distinguish oneself is to distill an original anti-Trump message focused on a concrete policy point.

“I don’t really have any doubt that, setting party or ideology aside, all of us as Americans are going to be talking to our kids and grandkids about this time in American history and what we were doing,” said former Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander, who narrowly lost that state’s U.S. Senate race in 2016. “And that means we all have to maximize the platform that we have.”

Democratic pols at every level have instinctively reacted to the idea that party voters are demanding a response commensurate with the scale of the perceived threat. After many of them caught grief for missing the women’s marches to appear at a donor conference the previous weekend, for example, three of the candidates for Democratic National Committee chair rushed to George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston to protest publicly after their candidate forum on Jan. 28.

It's not just traditional progressive leaders who are leading the charge to respond to the base. Among the most prominent faces of the anti-Trump airport protests were a pair of moderate governors who have previously clashed with liberals, but who nevertheless manned the front lines in the wake of Trump’s immigration order. Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe rushed to Dulles International Airport, while New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered public transit to John F. Kennedy International Airport reopened so more of his constituents could demonstrate.

In Virginia, the site of one of the Trump era’s first primaries in 2017, the president’s presence is already inescapable in the governor’s race.

“I’ve always tried to respond and speak up for the values and principles that I believe in, and I’ll continue to do that,” said Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, a candidate for the seat. “It’s just that he’s put them front and center in the first few days he’s been president, so he’s stirred up a hornet’s nest.”

“Sadly, I think Donald Trump’s actions leave us in a place where the question is no longer how to engage with the Trump administration, but how do we engage Republicans in Congress to oppose these actions that are a threat?” added former Rep. Tom Perriello, Northam’s primary opponent, who appeared at Dulles two weekends ago. “There’s an awareness that this is not some latest turnover of partisan power. This is a much deeper threat to our democratic institutions. I think the question is whether some of the Republican electeds who feel the tingle in their spine — if they can find their spines — can form a bipartisan resistance.”

Gone are the concerns about appearing overly obstructionist — an accusation frequently tossed at McConnell during Barack Obama’s presidency. Officeholders are now chasing a base that will not tolerate any sign of accommodation.

“Everyone is getting to the same point,” said Democratic pollster Margie Omero. “This is not like after George W. Bush won, where people had different kinds of strategies.”

Protesters gathered outside Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s Brooklyn apartment last week to demand he take a harder line on Trump, in a demonstration marketed as, “What the f*ck, Chuck?!"

Warren, the progressive icon, was forced to defend her vote to approve Ben Carson’s nomination for Housing and Urban Development secretary, taking to Facebook to explain a move that had party members accusing her of "selling us out" at the DNC meeting in Houston last weekend. Still facing heat, Warren expanded on her apology in a speech to the Congressional Progressive Caucus in Baltimore on Saturday.

“Like a lot of you, I’m still finding my way, finding my footing, day by day, step by step,” she said. “We make mistakes. But with each passing day, we learn.”

<..snip..>

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/donald-trump-2020-democrats-234672

[corbe]

  Quotes from the Article:

“Like a lot of you, I’m still finding my way, finding my footing, day by day, step by step,” she said. “We make mistakes. But with each passing day, we learn.”

   Chief BS has been in the Senate 4 years and still hasn't figured it out, what a dumba$$.

“This is a grass-roots reaction at a level of intensity that I haven’t seen in the Democratic Party since Vietnam,” said Shrum. “It even exceeds the reaction to Iraq, which was more a slow simmer than this kind of explosive reaction.”

   Nixon's overwhelming Electoral Victory should have told them that dog don't hunt.

[Norm Lenhart]

"Trump sets Democratic field ablaze"

Could have stopped there and the would would have been better for their combustion.

[bilo]

It's early, but I wouldn't count out the Rats yet. Now we're hearing from Trump people that obamacare won't get replaced for at least a year. I'm going to wait and see but if the Pubs can't deliver on this what else is going to fall by the way side.

[endicom]

Now we're hearing from Trump people that obamacare won't get replaced for at least a year. I'm going to wait and see but if the Pubs can't deliver on this what else is going to fall by the way side.

That should have been expected. What existed before Obamacare is gone. It don't exist no mo. Everything involved in providing health care, including insurance, had to change to accommodate Obamacare.

That's how socialistic systems work. They eliminate the old systems so we can't simply revert.

[Frank Cannon]

Gone are the concerns about appearing overly obstructionist — an accusation frequently tossed at McConnell during Barack Obama’s presidency. Officeholders are now chasing a base that will not tolerate any sign of accommodation.

LOL. Good luck with that. The Rats are officially a regional metropolitan party. They're not going to be able to expand beyond that with this strategy.

[Doug Loss]

"Moderate" governors Terry McAuliffe and Andrew Cuomo?  This article is a leftist wet dream, nothing more.

[libertybele]

The DEMS were/are the party of slavery.  They still believe in big government dominating and controlling peoples lives, and making one dependent on big government. IF the GOP and Trump can deliver jobs and get some of these people who have been on the gravy train for years working the DEMS will continue to flop around trying to stay afloat.  The only platform they have left is to continue to lie and try to convince people that liberalism is better and that it is the GOP who is trying to take from them and bind them.

The DEMS are angry because they themselves know that liberalism doesn't work.  They felt that they finally had put America in the position that the number of people so dependent on government would exceed the number of people who weren't so reliant on government, thus continuing to capture the White House. Trump beat them at their own game; he was able to reach some of those same people and point out that the DEMS game wasn't working and he and the GOP could make it better.  He also captured some of the vote of those that also knew that BOTH parties had failed the American people.

[Wingnut]

Gone are the concerns about appearing overly obstructionist — an accusation frequently tossed at McConnell during Barack Obama’s presidency. Officeholders are now chasing a base that will not tolerate any sign of accommodation.

LOL. Good luck with that. The Rats are officially a regional metropolitan party. They're not going to be able to expand beyond that with this strategy.

They are like The East Coast–West Coast hip hop rivalry only with old white has-been and never-was rat politicians who can't rap or dance!  Everyone else in fly-over country is saying; "WTF"

[Fantom]

That should have been expected. What existed before Obamacare is gone. It don't exist no mo. Everything involved in providing health care, including insurance, had to change to accommodate Obamacare.

That's how socialistic systems work. They eliminate the old systems so we can't simply revert.

"Reverting" would be as easy as destroying our health care was.


Repeal obamacare with a "sunset" transition period for those who wish to stay on it.... "if you like your obamacare you can keep it." Say one year as is for them, then transfer the costs to those still on it in year three..... after 2019... play the game.

Otherwise kill obamacare for everyone else.... insurance across State lines. That will stop socialist/marxist States from denying affordable health insurance to the masses.

Yes there are two paths you can go by, but in the run. There's still time to change the road your on.

[Right_in_Virginia]

"Moderate" governors Terry McAuliffe and Andrew Cuomo?  This article is a leftist wet dream, nothing more.

Agree! @Doug Loss

McAuliffe is a moderate?   

[DiogenesLamp]

Trump sets Democratic field ablaze with anger

I'm thinking gasoline might have been a better choice. 

[beandog]

"Moderate" governors Terry McAuliffe and Andrew Cuomo?  This article is a leftist wet dream, nothing more.

I think they mean moderately socialist as compared to Jerry Brown or Bernie Sanders.