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      Just How Liberal Is California? The Answer Matters to Democrats Everywhere.

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      LOS ANGELES — California is awash in money, with so many billions in surplus revenue that the state cannot enact programs fast enough. Democrats hold veto-proof majorities in the Legislature, and Gov. Gavin Newsom has a $25 million campaign war chest to fend off any token opposition in his re-election bid.Yet all is far from tranquil in this sea of blue. Deep fissures divide Democrats, whose control of state government effectively gives them unilateral power to enact programs. As elections approach, intraparty demands, denunciations and purity tests have exposed rifts between progressives and moderates that seem destined to become more vitriolic — and more consequential. We are about to find out just how liberal California is.The answer will shape policy as the most populous state wrestles with conflicts over seemingly intractable problems: too many homeless, too many drug overdoses, too many cars, too many guns, too much poverty. Although some dynamics are peculiar to California, the outcome will also have implications for the parallel debate swirling among national Democrats. Because if progressives here cannot translate their ideology into popular support that wins elections, it will not bode well for their efforts on a national scale.California has long been more centrist than its popular image. The “Mod Squad,” a caucus of moderate Democratic state lawmakers, has had outsize influence for more than a decade. As the Republican Party became increasingly marginal, business interests that had traditionally backed Republican candidates realized they could have more influence by supporting conservative Democrats. That paradigm accelerated with the shift to a system in which the top two finishers in a primary advance to the general election, regardless of party affiliation. Designed to promote more centrist candidates from both parties, it often results in face-offs between two Democrats.A contest emblematic of the California divide is unfolding in Los Angeles. From a crowded field of mayoral candidates, the two most likely to advance offer a stark contrast: Representative Karen Bass, a stalwart liberal embraced for both her politics and her background in community organizing, and the billionaire developer Rick Caruso, who has sounded the familiar refrain that it’s time for a businessman to clean up the failures of the political class. In a bow to the overwhelmingly Democratic electorate, Mr. Caruso, best known for his high-end shopping malls, recently changed his registration from no party preference to Democrat — even though the race is nonpartisan. For her part, Ms. Bass has called for freeing up more police officers for patrol (and hiring replacements for administrative duties) and equivocated on abolishing cash bail, positions that alarmed some of her natural allies.It is hard to know just how much the pandemic, on top of the Trump years, has scrambled the political calculus. We have traffic jams at the ports that rival those on the roads, restaurant tables where cars once parked, hotels that catered to tourists now sheltering the homeless. Anger over closed schools and mask mandates has triggered a record number of recalls (most notably the landslide that recalled three San Francisco school board members, on which progressives and moderates agreed). In the far northern county of Shasta, a group including members of a local militia won control of the board of supervisors by recalling a Republican ex-police chief who had not been sufficiently anti-mask or pro-gun. A prominent anti-Trump Republican consultant called the vote a “canary in a coal mine” for the direction of his state party.If mask and vaccine mandates have become the litmus test for the far right, the left has chosen as its defining issue a far more complex — but seemingly unattainable — goal: single-payer health care. When a bill (with an estimated price of more than $300 billion a year) made it to the Assembly floor, progressives threatened to deny party support to any Democrat who voted no. Far short of the necessary yes votes, the sponsor, Ash Kalra of San Jose, a progressive Democrat, pulled the bill rather than force a vote that could be used against his colleagues. He was pilloried as a traitor by activists.The Working Families Party, which has pushed for progressive priorities in the New York State Legislature, recently established a branch in California in hopes of having similar influence and endorsing and supporting progressive Democrats. The group’s state director, Jane Kim, a former San Francisco supervisor who lost the 2018 mayoral race to the moderate London Breed and then helped Bernie Sanders win the California primary, argues that the state’s electorate is more liberal than its elected officials, who are beholden to the influence of large corporate donors. Still, in the 2020 general election — with a record-setting turnout — voters defeated almost all ballot initiatives that were priorities of the progressives, opting not to restore affirmative action, nor impose higher taxes on commercial and industrial properties, nor abolish cash bail, nor expand rent control.In the arena of criminal justice, where voters and lawmakers have consistently made progressive changes in recent years, the growing concern about crime (some justified by data and some not) will soon test the commitment to move away from draconian sentences and mass incarceration. The conservative Sacramento district attorney, Anne Marie Schubert, is running for state attorney general on the slogan “Stop the Chaos,” tying her opponent, the incumbent Rob Bonta, to what she calls “rogue prosecutors” like the progressive district attorneys in Los Angeles and San Francisco, who are targets of recall campaigns.In June, San Franciscans will decide whether to recall District Attorney Chesa Boudin, a referendum on his performance as well as a vote that moderates have framed as a cornerstone of the fight to “take back” their city from progressives. In a city decidedly less liberal than its reputation, Mayor Breed has referred to members of the board of supervisors as “a very, very extremely left group of people.”With near-record office turnover — a result of reapportionment, term limits, frustration and fatigue — the winners of the coming elections will collectively reshape the political landscape for many years. A quarter of the 120 state legislative districts will have new representatives next year, and among those departing are some of the most influential lawmakers.It would be nice to think that change will usher in a new generation of leaders, one that builds on the excitement and enthusiasm generated, especially among young people, by the 2020 Sanders campaign. It is hard not to root for young activists. They will live or die with the consequences of decisions being made today on air, water, housing, schools.In a recent poll, young adults who were asked the most pressing issue for the governor and Legislature to work on this year were twice as likely as those over 35 to cite jobs and the economy, and were far less concerned about crime. They were also more optimistic, with more than half saying California was headed in the right direction.The pandemic might yet prove to be the disruption needed to trigger big political shifts, comparable with those triggered in the arena of jobs and work. So far, it seems to have driven people further into their corners. The next generation will have to find a way to fill in that hollowed-out middle, just as they will have to bridge the ever-growing chasms in wealth, which in turn drive so much of the political divide.Miriam Pawel (@miriampawel) is the author of “The Browns of California: The Family Dynasty That Transformed a State and Shaped a Nation.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Democratic Socialists Have a Long Road to Electoral Victory

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      In my political circles, the socialist and activist left, the recent defeat of India Walton, a democratic socialist candidate for mayor of Buffalo, seemed all too familiar, even if she lost in an unusual way to the incumbent Democratic mayor, Byron Brown. Ms. Walton prevailed against Mr. Brown in the Democratic primary, but for the general election, he ran a write-in campaign to retain his position.That outcome saddens and disappoints me. Like many admirers of Ms. Walton, I believe she was terribly mistreated by the New York Democratic Party, which largely fell in line behind Mr. Brown, even though he was not running as a Democrat. It’s not fair that Ms. Walton had to run against him twice, with the weight of a lot of centrist Democrats and Republicans behind him in the general election, and that he enjoyed the support of several prominent labor unions and much of the city’s and state’s larger party infrastructure. (Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand did endorse Ms. Walton.)Nevertheless, I am willing to say something far too few leftists seem willing to: Not only did Mr. Brown win, but he won resoundingly (the race is not officially over but stands at roughly 59 percent for Mr. Brown to 41 percent for Ms. Walton); it’s time for young socialists and progressive Democrats to recognize that our beliefs just might not be popular enough to win elections consistently. It does us no favors to pretend otherwise.What too many young socialists and progressive Democrats don’t seem to realize is that it’s perfectly possible that the Democratic Party is biased against our beliefs and that our beliefs simply aren’t very popular.They frequently claim that Americans want socialist policies and socialist politicians but are prevented from voting for them by the system. Or they argue that most American voters have no deeply held economic beliefs at all and are ready to be rallied to the socialist cause by a charismatic candidate.This attitude toward Ms. Walton’s defeat specifically and toward the political landscape more broadly is part and parcel of a problem that has deepened in the past five years: So many on the radical left whom I know have convinced themselves that their politics and policies are in fact quite popular on a national level, despite the mounting evidence otherwise.As New York magazine’s Sarah Jones put it over the summer, “Should Democrats mount a cohesive critique of capitalism, they’ll meet many Americans where they are.” We are held back, the thinking frequently goes, not by the popularity of our ideas but by the forces of reaction marshaled against us.But the only way for the left to overcome our institutional disadvantages is to compel more voters to vote for us. Bernie Sanders’s two noble failures in Democratic presidential primaries galvanized young progressives and helped create political structures that have pulled the party left. They also helped convince many of a socialist bent that only dirty tricks can defeat us. In the 2016 primary, the superdelegate system demonstrated how undemocratic the Democratic Party can be. Mr. Sanders won every county in West Virginia, for example, but the system at the time ensured that Mr. Sanders did not receive superdelegates in proportion to his vote totals (many superdelegates defied the wishes of the voters and supported Mrs. Clinton). In 2020, it was widely reported that after Mr. Sanders’s victory in Nevada, former President Barack Obama had an indirect role as the minor candidates in the primary rallied behind Joe Biden to defeat the socialist threat. There is little doubt that the establishment worked overtime to prevent a Sanders nomination.But the inconvenient fact is that Mr. Sanders received far fewer primary votes than Mrs. Clinton in 2016 and Mr. Biden in 2020. He failed to make major inroads among the moderate Black voters whom many see as the heart of the Democratic Party. What’s more, he failed to turn out the youth vote in the way that his supporters insisted he would.Whatever else we may want to say about the system, we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that the voters of the liberal party in American politics twice had the opportunity to nominate Mr. Sanders as their candidate for president and twice declined to do so. If we don’t allow this to inform our understanding of the popularity of our politics, we’ll never move forward and start winning elections to gain more power in our system.This may be seen as a betrayal of the socialist principles I stand for, which are at heart an insistence on the absolute moral equality of every person and a fierce commitment to fighting for the worst-off with whatever social and governmental means are necessary. But I am writing this precisely because I believe so deeply in those principles. I want socialism to win, and to do that, socialists must be ruthless with ourselves.The idea that most Americans quietly agree with our positions is dangerous, because it leads to the kind of complacency that has dogged Democrats since the “emerging Democratic majority” myth became mainstream. Socialists can take some heart in public polling that shows Americans warming to the abstract idea of socialism. But “socialism” is an abstraction that means little without a winning candidate. And too much of this energy seems to stem from the echo-chamber quality of social media, as young socialists look at the world through Twitter and TikTok and see only the smiling faces of their own beliefs reflected back at them.Socialist victory will require taking a long, hard road to spread our message, to convince a skeptical public that socialist policies and values are good for them and the country. Which is to say, it will take decades.Americans have lived in a capitalist system for generations; that will not be an easy obstacle for socialists to overcome. If you want socialist policies in the United States, there is no alternative to the slow and steady work of changing minds. My fellow travelers are in the habit of saying that justice can’t wait. But justice has waited for thousands of years, and we all must eventually come to terms with the fact that we don’t get to simply choose when it arrives.Fredrik deBoer is the author of “The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice” and publishes a daily newsletter.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      It’s All or Nothing for These Democrats, Even if That Means Biden Fails

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      If President Biden’s “Build Back Better” bill dies in Congress, it will be because moderate Democrats killed it.Over the past month, those moderates have put themselves at the center of negotiations over the $3.5 trillion proposal (doled out over 10 years) for new programs, investments and social spending. And they’ve made demands that threaten to derail the bill — and the rest of Biden’s agenda with it.In the House last week, a group of moderate Democrats successfully opposed a measure that would allow direct government negotiation of drug prices and help pay for the bill. One of the most popular items in the entire Democratic agenda — and a key campaign promise in the 2018 and 2020 elections — federal prescription drug negotiation was supposed to be a slam dunk. But the moderates say it would hurt innovation from drugmakers. Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona has likewise announced her opposition to direct government negotiation of the price of prescription drugs.Similarly, a different group of moderate Democrats hopes to break the agreement between Democratic leadership and congressional progressives to link the Senate-negotiated bipartisan infrastructure bill to Biden’s “Build Back Better” proposal, which would be passed under the reconciliation process to avoid a filibuster by Senate Republicans.The point of the agreement was to win buy-in from all sides by tying the fate of one bill to the other. Either moderates and progressives get what they want or no one does. Progressive Democrats have held their end of the bargain. But moderates are threatening to derail both bills if they don’t get a vote on infrastructure before the end of the month. “If they delay the vote — or it goes down — then I think you can kiss reconciliation goodbye,” Representative Kurt Schrader of Oregon, one of the moderates, told Politico. “Reconciliation would be dead.”Of course, if the House were to vote on and pass the infrastructure bill before reconciliation was completed, there is a strong chance those moderates would leave the table altogether. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, for example, wants to table the reconciliation bill. “Instead of rushing to spend trillions on new government programs and additional stimulus funding, Congress should hit a strategic pause on the budget-reconciliation legislation,” Manchin wrote this month.Moderate Democrats want Biden to sign the bipartisan infrastructure bill. But it seems clear that they’ll take nothing if it means they can trim progressive sails in the process, despite the fact that many of the items in the “Build Back Better” bill are the most popular parts of the Democratic agenda.Here, it’s worth making a larger point. In the popular understanding of American politics, the term “moderate” or “centrist” usually denotes a person who supports the aims and objectives of his or her political party but prefers a less aggressive and more incremental approach. It is the difference between a progressive or liberal Democrat who wants to expand health coverage with a new, universal program (“Medicare for All”) and one who wants to do the same by building on existing policies, one step at a time.Moderates, it’s commonly believed, have a better sense of the American electorate and thus a better sense of the possible. And if they can almost always count on favorable and flattering coverage from the political press, it is because their image is that of the “grown-ups” of American politics, whose hard-nosed realism and deference to public opinion stands in contrast to the fanciful dreams of their supposedly more out-of-touch colleagues.Given this picture of the ideological divide within parties, a casual observer might assume that in the struggle to move President Biden’s agenda through Congress, the chief obstacle (beyond Republican opposition) is the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and its demands for bigger, more ambitious programs. Biden was, after all, not their first choice for president. Or their second. He won the Democratic presidential nomination over progressive opposition, and there was a sense on the left, throughout the campaign, that Biden was not (and would not be) ready to deal with the scale of challenges ahead of him or the country.But that casual observer would be wrong. Progressives have been critical of Biden, especially on immigration and foreign affairs. On domestic policy, however, they’ve been strong team players, partners in pushing the president’s priorities through Congress. The reconciliation bill, for instance, is as much the work of Bernie Sanders as it is of the White House. As chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Sanders guided the initial budget resolution through the chamber, compromising on his priorities in order to build consensus with other Democrats in the Senate.Progressive Democrats want the bill to pass, even if it isn’t as large as they would like. They believe, correctly, that a win for Biden is a win for them. Moderate Democrats, however, seem to think that their success depends on their distance from the president and his progressive allies. Their obstruction might hurt Biden, but, they seem to believe, it won’t hurt them.This is nonsense. Democrats will either rise together in next year’s elections or they’ll fall together. The best approach, given the strong relationship between presidential popularity and a party’s midterm performance, is to put as much of Biden’s agenda into law as possible by whatever means possible.But this would demand a more unapologetically partisan approach, and that is where the real divide between moderates and progressives emerges. Moderate and centrist Democrats seem to value a bipartisan process more than they do any particular policy outcome or ideological goal.The most charitable explanation is that they believe that their constituents value displays of bipartisanship more than any new law or benefit. A less charitable explanation is that they see bipartisanship as a way to clip the wings of Democratic Party ambition and save themselves from taking votes that might put them in conflict with either voters or donors.What is true of both explanations is that they show the extent to which moderate Democrats have made a fetish of bipartisan displays and anti-partisan feeling. And in doing so, they reveal that they are most assuredly not the adults in the room of American politics.There is nothing serious about an obsession with the most superficial aspects of process over actual policy and nothing savvy about leaving real problems unaddressed in order to score points with some imagined referee.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. 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      Senate Begins Budget Political Theater With $3.5 Trillion at Stake

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      Once again, the Senate will begin a marathon “vote-a-rama,” dealing with dozens of nonbinding amendments before the one vote that counts, passage of a $3.5 trillion budget blueprint.WASHINGTON — Some senators have tried to ban the process. Others simply say it’s the worst part of their jobs.Even Senator Robert C. Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat who created and fortified some of the chamber’s most complex rules before his death, warned the so-called vote-a-rama process could “send some old men to their deaths.”Still on Tuesday, as the Senate turned to a $3.5 trillion budget blueprint that begins the Democrats’ push to expand the social safety net, the tradition of considering hours upon hours of nonbinding budget amendments will once again get underway — with senators forcing politically sensitive votes on their rivals as campaign operatives compile a record for possible attack ads.Only one vote really matters: If all 50 Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents give final approval to the blueprint, Senate committees can begin work this fall on the most significant expansion of the safety net since the 1960s, knowing that legislation cannot be filibustered under the Senate’s complicated budget rules.But before that final vote, which looked set to come either late Tuesday or early Wednesday, senators were having to deal with a blizzard of advisory amendments, and like every vote-a-rama that preceded it, it was painful.“It’s a little bit like an extended visit to a dentist,” said Ross K. Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University. “The whole process is an exercise in ‘gotchas.’”The Budget Act limits Senate debate to 50 hours on a budget resolution, but over time the Senate has developed its vote-a-rama custom, which allows for an accelerated voting procedure on amendments even after the 50 hours have expired. In recent years, the practice has allowed just minutes of debate for each amendment followed by a short vote.In practice, any senator can prolong the process by offering new amendments for votes until he or she runs out of steam. The result is a procedural food fight with a silly name that does little other than keep Capitol denizens up past their bedtimes and cause twinges of political pain. (Vote-a-RAHM-a? Vote-a-RAM-a? Depends on the senator.)The amendments can range from the serious to the absurd. During a debate over health care in 2010, Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, forced a vote banning coverage of erectile dysfunction drugs for convicted sex offenders as a way to try to embarrass Democrats who supported the legislation. That prompted Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, to condemn the amendment as a “mockery of this Senate.”But the power of the political “gotcha” is diminishing with overuse. This is the third vote-a-rama this year alone. During the last episode in March — the longest open vote in modern Senate history — the Senate entertained 37 votes on amendments. During February’s vote-a-rama, there were 41.Should Democrats successfully pass the blueprint and draft a multi-trillion-dollar package, a fourth vote-a-rama is expected in the fall.“The budget resolution is usually the platform for political theater, and both sides having votes that are designed to make a statement because none of it is binding,” said Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, who plans to retire next year.Both parties have historically lamented the vote-a-rama process, but neither wants to give it up. Typically, the party in the minority — in this case, the Republicans — revels in the uncomfortable votes it can force upon the majority party that typically controls the chamber, its floor time and what gets voted on.Republicans hammered Democrats on Tuesday over the size of the spending package, the planned tax increases to pay for it and liberal proposals to rein in climate change, which they deride as part of the “Green New Deal.”Senator Bernie Sanders, who is in charge of the Senate Budget Committee, said his plan was simply “to defeat all of the poison pill amendments.”T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesSenators filed hundreds of amendments, including a list from Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, setting up votes to, among other things, add to the budget 100,000 police officers and promote a “patriotic education in K-12 schools” that teaches “students to love America.”Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, had previously vowed “to ferociously attack” the Democrats’ plans. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, said on Tuesday that Senate staff members had processed hundreds of amendments and pledged that “every single senator will be going on the record over and over and over.”Democrats largely appeared sanguine before the whole exercise. Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent in charge of the Senate Budget Committee, said his plan was simply “to defeat all of the poison pill amendments.”“That’s the whole point,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts. “They want to try to make us take what they think will be votes that they can use in television ads. This isn’t about legislating. This is just about jockeying for political advantage.”“We’ll have to endure a certain amount of that,” she added, “but we’ll get the budget resolution passed.”Even Republicans acknowledged that, at least with the budget blueprint, it would ultimately be a fruitless endeavor to derail a proposal that Democrats said they had the votes for.“We just continue to have conversations with colleagues on the other side of the aisle, encourage them not to support it, but I just think we’re going to get rolled,” said Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa. “They’ll wipe the slate clean at the end of the process.”Occasionally, though, a binding vote can take place. Republicans, for instance, could try to insist the Judiciary Committee be cut out of the budget reconciliation process, thus blocking the inclusion of a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants. (But the committee’s inclusion also meant a wider array of amendments could be considered under Senate rules, given the committee’s expansive jurisdiction.)The votes also occasionally produce a moment of truth for politicians. After many Democrats hemmed and hawed over stating their views on a $15 minimum wage this year, a forced vote on an amendment during the vote-a-rama in March revealed seven of the chamber’s more centrist Democrats opposed the increase.Despite the political risks, Mr. Baker said the votes during a vote-a-rama did not typically end up substantially hurting political candidates. Constituents tend to judge their senators on major policy issues, not votes that fly by, often after midnight.“Those kinds of votes can prove to be problematic but in a torrent of amendments, I think it becomes part of the noise,” he said. “That doesn’t mean they’re not going to be scared about it.” More

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      Elizabeth Warren Grapples With Presidential Loss in New Book

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      In “Persist,” the Massachusetts senator delves into gender issues and her own shortcomings after her failed bid for the Democratic nomination.The question came at a campaign cattle call in April 2019, just a few months after Elizabeth Warren announced her presidential bid: How would she address “the urge to flee to the safety of a white male candidate?”After a question-and-answer session spent presenting her plans to address maternal mortality, criminal justice, housing, redlining and tribal sovereignty, that remark came as “a big bucket of cold water,” Ms. Warren, the Massachusetts senator, writes in a new memoir about her failed campaign.“We all knew the fear she was talking about,” she writes. “Could we — should we — support a woman?”Her book, “Persist,” addresses Ms. Warren’s effort to grapple with that question. Obtained by The New York Times before its release next week, it offers a peek into Ms. Warren’s personal view of her loss — a defeat she largely blames on a failure to explain how she would pay for her health care plan, the established following of Senator Bernie Sanders, the name recognition of Joseph R. Biden Jr. — and her own shortcomings.“There’s always another possibility, a much more painful one,” she writes. “In this moment, against this president, in this field of candidates, maybe I just wasn’t good enough to reassure the voters, to bring along the doubters, to embolden the hopeful.”Ms. Warren is determined not to wallow in her defeat, focusing most of the book on her policy prescriptions, some of which have been adopted by the new Biden administration. She offers reflections on the racial justice protests that roiled the country after the primary, devoting a significant portion of a chapter on race to her decision to identify as Native American earlier in her career — a “bad mistake,” she says. And she writes a moving tribute to her oldest brother, Don Reed Herring, attributing his death from the coronavirus last year to a failure of government.“This book is not a campaign memoir,” she writes. “It is not a rehash of big public events. It’s a book about the fight that lies ahead.”Yet, frank discussion of her gender — and the obstacles it poses — runs throughout the 304-page book. Though she never attributes sexism directly for her loss, she provides plenty of evidence that it remained a serious factor in the race. Stories of discrimination against women run throughout her book, as she recounts the struggles of her own career trajectory and offers prescriptions for changes like paid leave and affordable child care.Again and again, Ms. Warren suggests that Democratic voters were wary of nominating a second woman, fearing another defeat to Donald J. Trump. She “had to run against the shadows of Martha and Hillary,” she writes, a reference to Martha Coakley, who lost two statewide campaigns in Massachusetts, and Hillary Clinton.While Ms. Warren expected to face some sexism, she details in the book, her plan was simply to outwork those expectations with a strong team, vibrant grass roots organizing and plenty of policy plans.“I would do more,” she says. “I would fill up every space with ideas and energy and optimism. I would hope that my being a woman wouldn’t matter so much.”That idea collided with the reality of the contest fairly quickly. When calling donors early in her campaign, Ms. Warren was taken aback by the number of times potential supporters mentioned Mrs. Clinton’s defeat.Publisher: Metropolitan Books“I wondered whether anyone said to Bernie Sanders when he asked for their support, ‘Gore lost, so how can you win?’ I wondered whether anyone said to Joe Biden, ‘Kerry lost, so clearly America just isn’t ready for a man to be president,’” she recounts thinking as she lay in bed after her first day spent raising money for her presidential bid. “I tried to laugh, but the joke didn’t seem very funny.”After being passed over as vice president and Treasury secretary, Ms. Warren has kept a lower-profile in recent months, preferring to exert her influence through private conversations with the White House. Her top aides have been tapped for powerful posts throughout the administration and Democratic National Committee.She offers praise for Mr. Biden — “a good leader and fundamentally decent man” — and most of her former rivals throughout the book. A dust-up with Mr. Sanders — “fearless and determined” — over whether he told her in a private 2018 meeting that a woman could not defeat Mr. Trump is largely ignored.But one former opponent gets far more withering treatment. Ms. Warren spends several pages detailing her determination to take down Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, in a February 2020 debate, saying she believed his decision to spend nearly a billion dollars of his personal fortune to skip the early primaries “undermined our democracy” by essentially handing the nomination to the richest man.Ms. Warren describes herself as “stunned” when Mr. Bloomberg ignored her early attacks: “Like so many women in so many settings, I found myself wondering if he had even heard me,” she writes.Her debate performance was largely credited with ending Mr. Bloomberg’s bid. But Ms. Warren can’t resist mentioning an “an unexpected kick” in response to her attacks — a comment that she was too “mean and angry.”“And there it was, the same damn remark made about every woman who ever stood up for herself and threw a punch,” she writes. “Repeat after me: fighting hard is ‘not a good look.’” More

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      How Biden United a Fractious Democratic Party Under One Tent

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHow Biden United a Fractious Party Under One TentPresident Biden and progressive Democrats are united by a moment of national crisis and the lingering influence of his predecessor. But the moment of harmony may be fragile.Members of President Biden’s administration have sent careful signs that they are listening to liberal Democrats.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesLisa Lerer and Feb. 9, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETFor years, Bernie Sanders and Joseph R. Biden Jr. wrestled over the Democratic Party’s future in a public tug of war that spanned three elections, two administrations and one primary contest.But when Mr. Sanders walked into his first Oval Office meeting with the new president last week and saw the large portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt opposite the Resolute Desk, the liberal luminary felt as if he were no longer battling Mr. Biden for the soul of the party.“President Biden understands that, like Roosevelt, he has entered office at a time of extraordinary crises and that he is prepared to think big and not small in order to address the many, many problems facing working families,” Mr. Sanders said in an interview. “There is an understanding that if we’re going to address the crises facing this country, we’re all in it together.”After a 15-month primary contest that highlighted deep divides within the party, Mr. Biden and his fractious Democratic coalition are largely holding together. United by a moment of national crisis and the lingering influence of his predecessor, the new president is enjoying an early honeymoon from the political vise of a progressive wing that spent months preparing to squeeze the new administration.Democrats have remained resolute about pushing through Mr. Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus rescue plan over near-unanimous dissent from Republicans, and they are determined to hold former President Donald J. Trump accountable for his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol violence in the impeachment trial that starts Tuesday.Liberal standard-bearers like Mr. Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts are holding their fire. The progressive “Squad” in the House — Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and her allies — have focused their rage on the Republicans who inspired the siege of the Capitol.And activists who have built careers out of orchestrating public pressure campaigns have been disarmed by the open line to the White House they enjoy, and by the encouragement they receive from its highest levels — a signal that the administration is tending to the Democratic base in a way that wasn’t done during the Obama or Clinton years.The moment of unity could be fragile: Sharp differences remain between Mr. Biden and his left flank over issues like health care, college costs, expanding the Supreme Court and tackling income equality. A battle looms over whether to prioritize a $15 per hour minimum wage in the administration’s first piece of legislation; the debate flared anew on Monday when a report from the Congressional Budget Office said the $15 level would significantly reduce poverty but cost hundreds of thousands of jobs.Yet in the embryonic stage of the Biden administration, Democrats appear to be largely coexisting under their big tent.Even Mr. Biden’s decision to hold his first high-profile White House meeting with Republican senators, and not Democrats, didn’t faze progressives who urged him to stand firm in the face of efforts to whittle down his $1.9 trillion stimulus package.“Biden said he would reach out to Republicans,” Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, one of the chamber’s most progressive members, said in an interview. “He had to give it a shot.”The harmony reflects how far Mr. Biden and his party shifted to the left during the Trump administration. During the campaign, Republicans accused Mr. Biden of being a “Trojan horse” for liberal interests. But the administration hasn’t tried to smuggle in progressive proposals; it has simply rebranded them as its own.Elements of the Green New Deal, economic proposals and initiatives on racial equity and immigration are appearing in the executive orders and legislative plans the administration has issued.Even party moderates like Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia now believe that Democrats must adopt a more aggressive approach to passing their agenda than they used a dozen years ago, when they last held full control of the federal government and spent months negotiating with Republicans. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, second from left, Mr. Biden’s liberal opponent in the Democratic primary last year, has become an influential inside player in government.Credit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesLast week, by contrast, Democrats moved toward passing their expansive coronavirus relief package through reconciliation, a fast-track budgetary process that allows the party to muscle through parts of its agenda with a simple majority vote.Within the Democratic caucus, Mr. Biden’s team has avoided other pitfalls he witnessed during the Obama administration, when White House spokesmen dismissed activists as “the professional left” and banished intraparty critics from the administration’s circles of influence. Instead, Mr. Biden’s White House has welcomed many such critics to virtual meetings, and the chief of staff, Ron Klain, has encouraged progressive criticism on his Twitter feed.The New WashingtonLive UpdatesUpdated Feb. 9, 2021, 9:53 a.m. ETBiden will spend the day focused on the stimulus package and his push to increase the minimum wage to $15.Conservative media, the apparatus that fed Trump’s power, is facing a test, too.Trump’s trial is expected to be brief but may have lasting political repercussions.Melissa Byrne, a progressive activist, discovered as much when she wanted to prod Mr. Biden to focus on forgiving student loan debt. To complement her steady stream of tweets, Ms. Byrne bought full-page ads in The News Journal, a newspaper that was delivered to Mr. Biden’s Delaware house daily during the presidential transition.Ms. Byrne expected some bristling from Mr. Biden’s team over her public protests. Instead, her efforts were encouraged. Mr. Klain told her to keep up the pressure, inviting her to more Zoom meetings with the transition team.“We just kept being able to have people at the table,” she said. “That showed me that we could do cool things like sit-ins and banner drops, but we could also be warm and fuzzy.”The singular focus on the pandemic has enabled Mr. Biden to align the central promise of his campaign — a more effective government response — with the priorities of party officials in battleground states, who say that voters expect Mr. Biden to deliver a competent vaccine distribution along with direct economic relief. Already, there is widespread agreement within the party that Democrats will be judged in the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential contest by their handling of the twin crises.“Needles and checks — that’s got to be the focus,” said Thomas Nelson, the executive of Wisconsin’s Outagamie County. Mr. Nelson was a Sanders delegate in 2020 and is running in the 2022 election for the seat held by Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican. “People in my county, we need those checks.”Mr. Biden has also paid attention to other policy matters. He has signed about 45 executive orders, memorandums or proclamations enacting or at least initiating major shifts on issues including racial justice, immigration, climate change and transgender rights.While his inner circle is largely composed of long-serving aides, he has placed progressives in influential administrative posts. He has also avoided selecting figures reviled by the left, like former Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago — who was Mr. Obama’s chief of staff in 2009 — for high-profile positions.“None of the people we were afraid of got into this cabinet,” said Larry Cohen, the chairman of Our Revolution, the political group that formed out of the 2016 Sanders campaign. “It’s fine and well for Rahm Emanuel to be an ambassador someplace.”Mr. Biden has signed about 45 executive orders, memorandums or proclamations enacting or at least initiating major policy shifts on a wide array of issues.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesFor the first time in his decades in Washington, Mr. Sanders is an influential inside player in governance. He is chairman of the Senate Budget Committee and speaks frequently with administration officials including Mr. Klain. He has had a number of conversations with Mr. Biden, whom he considers a friend, and said his calls to the White House were returned “very shortly.”“He sees the progressive movement as a strong part of his coalition,” Mr. Sanders said of Mr. Biden. “He is reaching out to us and is adopting some of the ideas that we have put forth that make sense in terms of today’s crises.”There’s plenty of overlap between Mr. Biden’s agenda and his left flank and some of the praise stems from the new president’s taking steps he had already promised during his campaign, including rejoining the Paris climate accord.Republicans have complained that Mr. Biden is a moderate being led astray by liberals in Congress and the White House. But as Democratic ideology shifted during his decades in Washington, Mr. Biden always recalibrated his positions to remain at the middle of his party. After four years of the Trump administration, that center has shifted decidedly to the left.While Mr. Biden took pains to separate himself from the progressive left during the campaign — “I beat the socialist,” Mr. Biden was fond of saying after he bested Mr. Sanders — he forged a rapprochement last summer when his campaign agreed to policy task forces with members appointed by Mr. Sanders. For his part, Mr. Biden has reinterpreted his campaign promise to bring the country together into the loosest definition of the term. His aides have begun portraying it as finding broad support for their plans among voters — regardless of whether they garner the votes of any congressional Republicans.“If you pass a piece of legislation that breaks down on party lines, but it gets passed, it doesn’t mean there wasn’t unity,” Mr. Biden said recently. “It just means it wasn’t bipartisan.”Still, reconciliation is subject to strict limits, so fights over what policies should be pursued and how to overcome Republican opposition are likely to be unavoidable.Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer held a news conference at the Capitol last week calling for student loan forgiveness.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesBattle lines are already being drawn over whether to eliminate the filibuster, which would allow the party to pass measures with a simple majority. Mr. Biden and moderate Democrats remain committed to keeping the tactic, a decision liberals say could block a robust policy portfolio.“Everyone is trying to make the argument that their priority can move through reconciliation,” said Adam Jentleson, a former Senate aide who recently founded a new organization to help progressive groups push their agenda in Washington. “As people start to see that their thing is not going to get done that way, there will be more pressure.”Mr. Biden’s honeymoon may be short on other issues as well. Advocates working near the Mexican border would like to see Mr. Biden flex his executive power to stop all deportations, going further than his promised 100-day moratorium, which was blocked in court.“The feeling is really, ‘Why did we come up with all this work to come up with this plan only for you to come up with an executive order to say you’re still reviewing it?’” said Erika Pinheiro, the policy and litigation director at Al Otro Lado, a legal aid service for migrants and deportees.Not everyone is quite as impatient. Ms. Byrne, the activist, said Mr. Biden’s executive order extending a pause on federal student loan payments until September served as a sufficient first step.“As long as they keep doing good stuff, we will be happy,” Ms. Byrne said. “You give them a moment to operate in good faith, and you keep the cycle going.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      The First Post-Reagan Presidency

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      Credit…Timo LenzenSkip to contentSkip to site indexOpinionThe First Post-Reagan PresidencySo far, Joe Biden has been surprisingly progressive.Credit…Timo LenzenSupported byContinue reading the main storyOpinion ColumnistJan. 28, 2021, 8:50 p.m. ETDuring Donald Trump’s presidency, I sometimes took comfort in the Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek’s concept of “political time.”In Skowronek’s formulation, presidential history moves in 40- to 60-year cycles, or “regimes.” Each is inaugurated by transformative, “reconstructive” leaders who define the boundaries of political possibility for their successors.Franklin Delano Roosevelt was such a figure. For decades following his presidency, Republicans and Democrats alike accepted many of the basic assumptions of the New Deal. Ronald Reagan was another. After him, even Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama feared deficit spending, inflation and anything that smacked of “big government.”I found Skowronek’s schema reassuring because of where Trump seemed to fit into it. Skowronek thought Trump was a “late regime affiliate” — a category that includes Jimmy Carter and Herbert Hoover. Such figures, he’s written, are outsiders from the party of a dominant but decrepit regime.They use the “internal disarray and festering weakness of the establishment” to “seize the initiative.” Promising to save a faltering political order, they end up imploding and bringing the old regime down with them. No such leader, he wrote, has ever been re-elected.During Trump’s reign, Skowronek’s ideas gained some popular currency, offering a way to make sense of a presidency that seemed anomalous and bizarre. “We are still in the middle of Trump’s rendition of the type,” he wrote in an updated edition of his book “Presidential Leadership in Political Time,” “but we have seen this movie before, and it has always ended the same way.”Skowronek doesn’t present his theory as a skeleton key to history. It’s a way of understanding historical dynamics, not predicting the future. Still, if Trump represented the last gasps of Reaganism instead of the birth of something new, then after him, Skowronek suggests, a fresh regime could begin.When Joe Biden became the Democratic nominee, it seemed that the coming of a new era had been delayed. Reconstructive leaders, in Skowronek’s formulation, repudiate the doctrines of an establishment that no longer has answers for the existential challenges the country faces. Biden, Skowronek told me, is “a guy who’s made his way up through establishment Democratic politics.” Nothing about him seemed trailblazing.Yet as Biden’s administration begins, there are signs that a new politics is coalescing. When, in his inauguration speech, Biden touted “unity,” he framed it as a national rejection of the dark forces unleashed by his discredited predecessor, not stale Gang of Eight bipartisanship. He takes power at a time when what was once conventional wisdom about deficits, inflation and the proper size of government has fallen apart. That means Biden, who has been in national office since before Reagan’s presidency, has the potential to be our first truly post-Reagan president.“Biden has a huge opportunity to finally get our nation past the Reagan narrative that has still lingered,” said Representative Ro Khanna, who was a national co-chair of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. “And the opportunity is to show that government, by getting the shots in every person’s arm of the vaccines, and building infrastructure, and helping working families, is going to be a force for good.” More

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      Bernie Sanders, internet te ama

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential InaugurationHighlightsPhotos From the DayBiden’s SpeechWho Attended?Biden’s Long RoadAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBernie Sanders, internet te amaEl senador por Vermont en una conferencia de prensa en México, en la nave espacial de “Star Trek”, en un fresco de Leonardo da Vinci. Sanders es, una vez más, la estrella de un meme.El senador por Vermont, Bernie Sanders, viendo cómodamente los actos de investidura el miércoles.Credit…Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMike Ives y 21 de enero de 2021 a las 12:14 ETRead in EnglishEl senador Bernie Sanders por Vermont es un ferviente defensor de los salarios justos y un excandidato presidencial que perdió la nominación demócrata frente al ahora presidente Joe Biden. Y gracias a sus prácticas elecciones de vestimenta también es ahora el centro de una aparentemente interminable avalancha de fotos alteradas que dominaron algunos rincones de internet en las horas posteriores a la investidura socialmente distanciada de Biden el miércoles.En medio de los trajes oscuros y los abrigos brillantes que salpicaban la escalinata del Capitolio, Sanders fue fotografiado sentado con una mascarilla, con las piernas cruzadas y envuelto en un voluminoso abrigo y guantes contra el gélido clima de Washington, D. C. Poco después, la imagen, tomada por el fotógrafo Brendan Smialowski para Getty Images, comenzó a circular por las redes sociales insertada en una amplia gama de fotografías y escenas de películas y obras de arte.“This could’ve been an email” pic.twitter.com/kn68z6eDhY— Ashley K. (@AshleyKSmalls) January 20, 2021
      En un día en el que todo giraba en torno a Biden, resultaba en cierto modo apropiado que Sanders, cuyo mayor apoyo político en la carrera presidencial procedía de los votantes jóvenes, fuera sin embargo el protagonista del mayor meme del día al no hacer otra cosa que sentarse y cruzar los brazos. En las elecciones primarias, Sanders disfrutó de un número de seguidores en línea significativamente mayor que Biden, especialmente entre aquellos que suelen comunicarse a través de memes.Aunque otros memes protagonizados por Sanders se utilizaron a menudo para decir algo —llevaba lo que parece ser el mismo abrigo en un video de recaudación de fondos de 2019 en el que está “una vez más pidiendo tu apoyo financiero”, una línea que ha sido reutilizada en una larga serie de maneras— no había un significado tan profundo en el meme más reciente. En lugar de utilizar su imagen para exponer una idea, simplemente se le ha colocado en nuevos contextos, con su pose, su atuendo y su expresión como chiste.Aunque el día pertenecía a Biden, el meme sirvió como un divertido espectáculo, un poco de diversión y frivolidad después de cuatro años en los que la política presidencial trajo a los seguidores de Sanders pocas razones para estar de buen humor.No fue el único meme inspirado en el día de la toma de posesión: otros se refirieron al atuendo de la exprimera dama Michelle Obama y a Lady Gaga, quien cantó el himno nacional vestida no muy diferente a un personaje de Los juegos del hambre. Pero incluso con Janet Yellen, la candidata de Biden a secretaria del Tesoro, igual de abrigada que el senador, era Sanders, el presidente entrante de la Comisión de Presupuestos del Senado, quien parecía el favorito.Las primeras publicaciones sobre él comenzaron con simples reseñas de su atuendo práctico y relativamente poco glamuroso. Algunos veían a sus tíos y padres en su elección de poner el estar abrigado por encima del estilo.Luego llegaron los memes, en los que los usuarios de las redes sociales tomaron la imagen original de Sanders y encontraron nuevos escenarios para él y su abrigo. Lo insertaron en la historia. Lo sentó en la bolera con The dude. Disfrutó del sol en una playa estatal cerrada en Nueva Jersey con el exgobernador de ese estado, Chris Christie.Otros llevaron la imagen de Sanders al cine, mostrándolo en el puente de la nave Enterprise en Star Trek y como miembro de los Avengers.El National Bobblehead Hall of Fame sacó provecho al vender su propia versión de la pose. Nick Sawhney, un ingeniero de software de Nueva York, creó una herramienta que permite insertar a Sanders en cualquier dirección de Google Maps street view.Algunos mensajes eran políticos. Otros “posiblemente blasfemos”.El avatar del senador parecía ocupado. Visitó un museo y se sentó en el Trono de Hierro de Juego de tronos. Se dejó caer en un partido de curling y se coló en un cuadro de Leonardo da Vinci.Hizo un cameo en Mario Kart, una conferencia de prensa en México y un viaje a la superficie de la luna. Hizo un recorrido por la ciudad de Nueva York.BuzzFeed News informó de que Sanders obtuvo sus guantes de Jen Ellis, una maestra de segundo grado en Essex Junction, Vermont. Ella dijo que le envió un par después de que él perdió la candidatura presidencial demócrata en 2016.Ellis tuiteó que los guantes estaban hechos de lana reutilizada y forradas con felpa.En una entrevista con la CBS, Sanders se rio de la atención.“En Vermont, nos vestimos, sabemos algo sobre el frío”, le dijo a Gayle King. “Y no nos preocupa tanto la buena moda. Solo queremos mantenernos calientes. Y eso es lo que he hecho hoy”.“Misión cumplida”, dijo King.Yonette Joseph colaboró con reportería.Daniel Victor es un reportero radicado en Londres que cubre una amplia variedad de historias con un enfoque en las últimas noticias. En 2012 dejó ProPublica y se integró al Times. @bydanielvictorAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More