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Sen. Gillibrand: Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren Leaders Of The Democratic Party

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who is seeking a second full term in 2018, is asked to name examples of leaders in the Democratic party. Gillibrand replaced Hillary Clinton in the Senate when she resigned to become President Obama’s Secretary of State.

On CNN Monday morning Gillibrand cited Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren as leaders of the party.

Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are testing Democrats’ left turn

It took a few minutes to find an opening, but when it came, Sen. Elizabeth Warren did not squander her best chance to connect with a heavily black audience inside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in late August.

“I was a Sunday school teacher,” said Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts and a former Harvard law professor, drawing a burst of applause before reciting from memory the verse in the Book of Matthew about helping “the least of these.”

A week earlier, at a black church in Detroit, Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, was handed his own opportunity to show a little-known side of himself to African-Americans: the pastor who introduced Sanders highlighted the senator’s youthful activism in the civil rights movement. But when Sanders took the podium, he made no mention of his attendance at the March on Washington, his arrest during a demonstration in Chicago against segregation or much of anything at all from his biography that could endear him to the congregants at the Fellowship Chapel.

The liberal senators are often linked, spoken of in the same breath as if there is scarcely any difference between them. But as Warren and Sanders work to expand their constituencies ahead of possible runs in the Democratic presidential primary in 2020, the differences between them are becoming more marked. How their overlapping audiences sort themselves out could prove revealing about the party they seek to lead.

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The Democratic center of gravity has plainly shifted leftward, as Sanders demonstrated last week when the senators eyeing presidential bids flocked to his news conference to support his “Medicare for all” legislation.

But between Sanders and Warren, there are important distinctions in political style, and whoever emerges as the dominant progressive candidate in 2020 will test how far Democrats have lurched in the two decades since Bill Clinton steered the party toward the center. The Democratic base’s choice could reveal how willing liberal voters are to disrupt the country’s political system the way Republicans did by nominating President Trump.

VINCENT FORT ANGERED DEMOCRATIC ELITES WHEN HE ENDORSED BERNIE SANDERS. CAN HE BE ATLANTA’S NEXT MAYOR?

ON A RECENT Saturday afternoon in Atlanta’s East Lake neighborhood, Vincent Fort was out working the voters. As the populist wing of the Democratic Party has surged in recent months, it has created an unusual problem for a politician like Fort. Accustomed to being on the outer edge of the party, he now sounds like pretty much everybody else.

Or, as he puts it to one voter, everybody else now sounds like him.

“They want to deal with gentrification and all that,” he says of his opponents, “but they haven’t done it until the epiphany of the last six months.”

Fort, who served as the Democratic whip in Georgia’s state Senate until he resigned to run for mayor, has been a fixture of populist politics in the state for two decades. While politics in Georgia have swung from left to right, Fort served as the rare example of a politician who stuck by his guns, in good times and bad.

Ben Speight, the organizing director of Teamsters Local 728, says endorsing Fort’s bid was a no-brainer for the union. “This is about a guy literally walking the walk, viewing his role as a state senator as a way of amplifying movements,” he observes.

For years, that form of movement politics made Fort a lone voice in the wilderness. But, with radical municipal politics rising in neighboring Jackson, Mississippi and Birmingham, Alabama, there’s a chance that his moment has finally arrived.

This radical money policy would easily pay for Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for all

Last week, Bernie Sanders’ Medicare-for-all dream got a lot more real. Long consigned to the fringes of politics, Sanders’ bill now has at least 15 cosponsors in the Senate. Admittedly, the bill is quite utopian, which has opened it up to criticism. But it should be understood as the opening bid in what will surely be a long and painful bargaining process.

That said, Sanders does have at least one big problem on his hands. Ironically, it’s not a problem created by his leftism or idealism. Rather, it’s created by the important way he actually agrees with the centrist political establishment.

Namely, how will Medicare for all be paid for?

Sanders has released some ideas for new taxes. But he tends to be pretty cagey on the question. At the same time, he doesn’t really deny that his proposal needs to be paid for, leaving him defenseless to charges of unseriousness.

Well, you know what? He should deny it.

It would be totally justifiable on the economics. But it would also drastically expand Sanders’ options for building a majority coalition of legislators.

A conversation with Bernie Sanders about ‘Medicare for all’ by John Nichols

Why do you think single-payer is gaining so much traction at this point?

SANDERS: What I think you’re seeing now is this:

The savage Republican attack (on the Affordable Care Act and other existing health care programs and protections), this effort to throw over 20 million people off the health insurance they have, people are resisting that.

People also understand that the Affordable Care Act did not go far enough. No one will tell you that deductibles are not too high, that co-payments are not too high, that premiums are not too high. The price of prescription drugs is totally unacceptable. Everybody acknowledges that. The Affordable Care Act did not resolve those issues.

People are saying, OK, we made some progress. Twenty million more people have health insurance; that’s important. In states like Kentucky and West Virginia, the number of uninsured plummeted; that is a good thing. But has health care reform gone anywhere near far enough? The answer is that it has not.

So now people are saying: What is the alternative? And then, suddenly, a lot of people are saying: You know what, maybe we should join every other major country on Earth in guaranteeing health care for all people. The good news for us is, we’re not proposing some kind of radical idea. I live 50 miles away — five zero — 50 miles away from Canada; they, without any big deal, under Liberal governments, under Conservative governments, they have a health care system that is far more cost-effective than ours, that guarantees health care to all people with prescription-drug costs that are far lower.