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By Mark Gruenberg
DETROIT—So-called Democratic Party “moderates,” including John Delaney, John Hickenlooper and Paul Ryan, tried to knock off Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in the July 31 candidates’ debate in Detroit. They failed.
Led by former Maryland Rep. Delaney, the former Colorado Gov. Hickenlooper and current Ohio Rep. Ryan, the trailing hopefuls among the ten on stage in Detroit, repeatedly declared that Vermont independent Sanders and Massachusetts Democrat Warren were too “liberal” i.e. progressive, to beat right-wing GOP President Donald Trump next year.
“We can go down the road Sanders and Warren want to take us – the Green New Deal and Medicare For All – and Donald Trump will win the White House. My platform is about real solutions, not impossible promises,” Delaney declared.
“Not one of the 40 new Democrats” in the U.S. House “share the policies of the frontrunners,” said Hickenlooper, gesturing at the two senators. “I created the #1 state economy in the country” in Colorado ‘and without massive government expenditures.”
Hickenlooper’s statement was wrong, as the most-progressive of the 63 new Democrats share the two senators’ ideas, but nobody called him on it. Instead, the two senators went on the offense.
Warren shot back that Democrats will beat Trump only if they’re the party of big ideas, and detailed many of them, including repealing the Trump tax cut and diverting that saved money to pre-K education, paying child care workers a living wage and forgiving college student debt.
And Sanders kept campaigning for his biggest issue, Medicare For All, even after... Read More »
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