Guardian is doing what any responsible, fair, non-corporate-owned media entity should do. Injecting a bit of Bernie into election thought, instead of the laughable Nikki Haley fluf package now afloat, too universally. It is as if mass-media "journalists" as a pack are taking orders from wealthy idiots like the Murdochs. Keep feeding out bold faced denial of the obvious, as if a lingering smell of meadow dressing left as the herd moves along can be sold as, "Smells like roses to me."

 In the Wiemar Republic many - despite the lesson of the failed beerhall putsch - believed the money behind Hitler would be in control of Hitler, if elected. The money surely thought so. And that business-as-usual would assure all would be content. This begins the post because many feel that American democratic inertia would survive a Trump four-more. Crabgrass holds that belief. However, Crabgrass admits it could be a mistaken belief. The potential of a Trump four-more carries an existential threat load. So, either way, don't insult me by trying to fob off that Nikki stuff. That said -

Guardian- an ocean away - has the chutzpah to publish:

Sanders warns Biden: address working-class fears or risk losing to demagogue

Warning comes at a critical time as Republicans in Iowa will gather for caucuses that mark official start of 2024 presidential election

Ed Pilkington in Burlington, Vermont@edpilkington

Sat 13 Jan 2024 05.00 EST

 

In an interview with the Guardian from his home base in Burlington, Vermont, Sanders urged the Democratic president to inject more urgency into his bid for re-election. He said that unless the president was more direct in recognising the many crises faced by working-class families his Republican rival would win.

“We’ve got to see the White House move more aggressively on healthcare, on housing, on tax reform, on the high cost of prescription drugs,” Sanders said. “If we can get the president to move in that direction, he will win; if not, he’s going to lose.”

The US senator from Vermont added that he was in contact with the White House pressing that point. “We hope to make clear to the president and his team that they are not going to win this election unless they come up with a progressive agenda that speaks to the needs of the working class of this country.”

[...] Recent polls have shown Trump not only doing well in key battleground states but gaining traction with demographic groups who proved vital to Biden’s 2020 victory, including Hispanic and young voters.

In his Guardian interview, Sanders cast the threat of a second Trump presidency in existential terms. “It will be the end of democracy, functional democracy,” he said.

He predicted that over a further four years, Trump would shift the electoral goalposts so that “many people who would vote against Trump are unable to do so. He will make it harder for young people, people of colour, to participate in the political process.”

It is in that dystopian context that Sanders criticises the president’s re-election team for failing to bang the drum hard enough. “They’re not their own best advertisers, they don’t do a particularly good job in explaining what Biden has accomplished,” he said.

Sanders praised Biden for the $1.9tn Covid rescue plan which he said helped avoid economic collapse during the pandemic, and for the Inflation Reduction Act which pumped money into transforming US energy away from fossil fuels. He was also effusive about Biden’s historic decision to join a United Auto Workers (UAW) picket line during the union’s strike with the three biggest carmakers, which he said made him “the strongest pro-union president that we have had, certainly, since FDR [Franklin D Roosevelt]”.

But Sanders urged the White House to resist sitting back on its laurels. “The president has got to do something that’s very, very hard,” Sanders said.

“He should be proud of his accomplishments, but he’s also got to say that he understands that there is a housing crisis, that people can’t afford healthcare or prescription drugs or childcare – that he’s trying, but he hasn’t yet succeeded.”

Biden could find a historical template for such messaging, Sanders suggested, in Roosevelt’s 1936 re-election campaign. By then, the Democratic president had been in office for almost four years and had implemented the first two of his groundbreaking New Deal programmes.

“Roosevelt didn’t go around saying, ‘Look at all I’ve done’,” Sanders explained. “He said: ‘I see a nation that is ill-clad, ill-housed. We made some progress, but I know there are enormous problems.”

Go Bernie! Shake the FDR ghost at the Biden people. It might wake them up to liven up things where Dean Phillips in his unlikely thing is more atop a need to be more than The Anti-Trump, while the Beast rages. (Last cycle, memory of Trump in office being immediate, all it took was I'm-not-Trump.)

Will indifferently being not=Trump fly today? Will the Biden campaign awaken? There is sufficient time, and multiple juries will be intervening news, anticipated now as unfavorable to Trump with all but a cadre of MAGA misled minions seeing and thinking.

However - Will we see a successful Trump revenge show, like a professional wrestler who lost his champion's belt in a prior rigged bout, wanting to regain it and "get revenge," as he bloviates when presented a microphone.  

That is the Trump manner and WWE has adherents. 

It entertains, "I'll slam him into the turnbuckles, and you'll love it. I'll make him hurt!"

Nonetheless, Biden quietly being "the only option" might prove better than raging back against an obvious trainwreck? 

The Founders anticipated a Republic where only landed gentlemen voted.

If only landed gentlemen voted, Trump and Biden each would be quietly offering, "Let's reason together. We can reach a deal." Which is how the donor class gets treated. It's The American Way.