In this interview Monday on NPR’s “On Point,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) laid out his argument for a potential presidential bid, and Campaign for America’s Future’s Robert Borosage outlined the agenda that Democrats should adopt to rebuild its majority.
Sanders says in the interview that he is thinking about running, contingent on whether he can engage working people “in a grassroots political revolution” to address the institutional forces that dragged down the middle class in recent years. “If I think I can, I will run.”
Later in the program, Borosage pushes back against the idea that the focus of a Sanders candidacy would be a disaster for Democrats. The nature of today’s economy, and the economic struggles of the diverse voting population that supported President Obama in his two presidential elections, are fundamentally different from when Walter Mondale lost the presidency in a landslide in 1984. That “forces a different politics” that is about making the government “work for working people again” and taking on the captains of industry and Wall Street, Borosage said.
Borosage also explains how Hillary Clinton’s absence from the front lines of the economic policy debate when she was secretary of state “opens up the possibility of [her] laying out a bolder agenda” and “that would be enormously to her benefit.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has been showing Democratic candidates how to campaign with a progressive populist economic message, Borosage said, and he predicted that when Clinton finally announces whether she will run for the presidency, “she’s going to sound a lot more like Elizabeth Warren than she has in the past.”
