Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado is quietly and seriously thinking about a run for president.

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And another to welcome to the primaries





The Democrat Who Wants to Stop the Rage



Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado is quietly and seriously thinking about a run for president.


https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/03/senator-michael-bennet-weighing-run-president/583993/
Edward-Isaac Dovere



10:14 AM ET
Ed Andrieski / Associated Press

POLK CITY, Iowa—Sitting under a framed ticket from an old Obama town hall meeting, down in the basement of a farmhouse surrounded by snowy fields of corn and soybeans, I tell Michael Bennet that an Iowa Democrat who’d come to hear him speak compared him to pea soup. Good pea soup, hearty. But still pea soup, in a 2020 primary field that has sizzling fajitas and cake on the table.


Some politicians might have been be insulted. Bennet smiles. “There’s something to that,” he says.

The Colorado senator was here on the last stop of his tour through the northwest part of the state, feeling good about what he heard, and what he saw. What began two months ago as a vague notion about running for president had become a long and deliberate thought process. And now, after two and a half days on the ground, he was closer to getting in the race than when he landed.

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Bennet’s not interested in an argument about progressives versus moderates, though he warns that Democrats shouldn’t make it easy for Donald Trump to write them off as socialists (he jumped up and applauded when the president said “America will never be a socialist country” in his State of the Union address, realizing only later that Bernie Sanders was right behind him, scowling in his seat). To Bennet, the presidential race should be about taking stock of what’s become of politics in the last 10 or 15 years and thinking about how to actually move forward, in a way that won’t just destroy the country even more.


People are tired of the rage Olympics, he believes, and they know in their guts it’s not working. He thinks they want something else.“If you promise people that you are going to give everybody in America Medicare, that you are not going to have to raise taxes, that you’re not going to have to cut healthcare massively, that 180 million people, 80 percent of whom like their insurance are going to be willing to give it up, 20 million…” Bennet says, trailing off. “It is possible to write policy proposals that have no basis in reality, and you might as well call them candy. That’s what people want, as the song said, but I think that’s not where people are, I don’t think people believe that stuff. I think they want to see a serious approach to politics and a serious approach to policy.”

The noisiest voices in the party want Medicare for All and a Green New Deal. They want to answer Mitch McConnell’s Merrick Garland blockade by packing the Supreme Court and getting rid of the filibuster entirely. Learn the lessons of dealing with Republicans in modern politics, they say. Stop showing up to gun fights waving copies of Robert’s Rules of Order. It’s the way, they say, to ensure Democrats keep losing even when they win............................