"The Question All Democrats Must Ask Themselves"

(This caricature of the Democratic donkey is by DonkeyHotey.)

Sometimes it seems that the news media is trying to divide the Democratic Party. They seem determined to make the nomination race of the party a fight between progressives and moderates. I think that's nonsense.

While the candidates don't all agree on every issue, the truth is that all of the candidates support many progressive values. No matter who is nominated, the next president will sign bills that help the working and middle classes over the rich (who are the only people Republicans help).

I urge all Democrats and Independents to vote for the candidate of their choice. But once you do that, ask yourself a question. What is most important -- your ideology or getting Donald Trump out of the White House? Smart voters will choose the latter.

Consider this op-ed by David Leonhardt in The New York Times -- a part of which I post below:

Moderates worry that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren aren’t just wrong on big issues, but too left wing to get elected. Progressives worry that Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar and Michael Bloomberg are uninspiring centrists who resemble recent presidential losers and wouldn’t solve America’s problems even if they won.

My message to panicking Democrats is: Take a deep breath, and don’t make your job harder. Neither side of the party can ensure that its preferred candidate will win the nomination. But both can help avoid the outcome they fear most — Trump’s re-election.

The current moment, when everybody is wearing a veil of ignorance about the nomination, is a good time for Democrats to ask themselves a question: If the primaries don’t turn out as you hope, will you still do everything in your power to deny Trump a second term?

Or will you instead exaggerate your differences with the nominee — say, complain about Sanders or Warren as a Trump-style radical; or buy into the caricature of Buttigieg as a corporate tool; or retweet, with outrage added, the least enlightened things Biden or Bloomberg has ever said?

Yes, the candidates have their differences. But they have much bigger similarities. If elected, every single Democratic presidential candidate would act to slow climate change, raise taxes on the rich, reduce gun deaths, expand voting rights, lower health care and education costs, protect abortion access, enforce civil-rights laws, appoint progressive judges, rebuild overseas alliances and stop treating the Justice Department as a personal enforcer. The moderates are running to the left of Barack Obama, and the progressives would be constrained by Congress.

The alternative, of course, is truly radical. Many Democrats know all this, yet they still get so caught up in the passions of the primary campaign that they risk helping Trump.

Whether progressives and moderates can find common ground is likely to be a defining political question not just of 2020 but of this decade. As E.J. Dionne asks in the first sentence of “Code Red,” his new book, “Will progressives and moderates feud while America burns?”