Three top Democrats and possible presidential contenders in 2020 will speak to some of the nation’s pedagogues this weekend.
Hillary Clinton will join socialist Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, whom she defeated in the 2016 Democratic primaries, and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to chew the rag at this weekend’s biennial confabulation of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).
According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the teachers’ union is quite upset about the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision that blocks unions from extracting money from non-members to help pay for collective bargaining. The decision is a severe blow to the treasure chest of the radical Left, which needs forced union dues and fees collected from nonmembers to push its anti-American agenda.
“We are at this solemn and scary inflection point in our country where there are really troubling trends and amazing activism at the same time,” AFT President Randi Weingarten told the newspaper.
The three leftists, Weingarten hopes, will help inspire the troops, along with a rally and march, she told the newspaper: “My hope is that the members walk out of the convention seeing themselves in the union, feeling a renewed spirit for the fight.”
The convention is something of a casting call for the 2020 presidential election.
As The New American reported last week, some have speculated Clinton is preparing for another run. She is raising a ton of money for an outfit called “Onward Together,” which appears to be the organizational staging ground for a third run for the White House. Clinton’s group is raining money on a variety of leftist satellites, with special attention on those pushing for open borders.
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Sanders, too, is considering a run, ABC reported in May. “The question is who can beat Trump in 2020, how we can put together the type of coalition from the folks who have taken it over and I think that is what the senator is weighing,” said Jeff Weaver, the elderly socialist’s campaign chief.
Promoting his book about the campaign, Weaver didn’t discuss Warren, but did say his man would have had a better chance than Clinton of defeating The Donald in 2016.
“To the extent our campaign bears any responsibility for Trump’s victory it is that we did not defeat Hillary Clinton,” he writes in the book.
“The polling was consistent that Bernie Sanders was the stronger candidate against virtually every Republican candidate and certainly against Trump,” Weaver told ABC News.
“As an empirical matter,” he added, “She did not win and so Bernie Sanders’s chances of winning empirically were as good as hers or better.”
That leaves Warren, the leftist whose unproven claims of Native American ancestry have invited no small measure of ridicule.
According to The Hill, the question is whether Warren is the best candidate to run against Trump: “It’s a question many Democrats are pondering as Warren — one of the leading contenders for her party’s presidential nomination, if she chooses to run in 2020 — goes back and forth with the president over immigration and other issues.”
Democrat insiders, The Hill’s Amie Parnes reported, worry that Warren would lose to Trump in the same states Clinton lost.
“I just can’t see a blue-collar, Rust Belt guy voting for her,” said one Democratic strategist who has worked on presidential campaigns. “I think the party needs to be realistic about that.”
Some Democrats almost certainly remain shellshocked from the last election after Trump’s surprise win. He became the first Republican to win the states of Pennsylvania and Michigan in a presidential election since 1988 and the first Republican to win Wisconsin since President Reagan in 1984.
If Democrats don’t retake those states in 2020, their chances of winning the Electoral College will fall.
Maybe, but last month Parnes reported that Clinton supporters would back Warren.
Parnes spoke to Clinton partisan Seth Bringman, a spokesman for the Ready for Hillary super PAC: “If Elizabeth Warren decides to run for president, she will find support both from Hillary diehards who still want to elect a qualified woman as president and from Hillary skeptics who want an unflinching champion against corporate greed as the party’s standard-bearer.”
Yet another Clinton supporter told Parnes that Warren has two significant advantages over Sanders: Warren supported Clinton, although that support came late, and she’s a registered Democrat. Sanders isn’t.
Yet Warren’s anti-corporate rhetoric might alienate centrists, Parnes observed, and a black candidate such as Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), should she decide to run, could take at least a share of the black vote.
One question is whether Warren can overcome the controversy about her claims to Native American ancestry, which inspired detractors to invent a variety of names for her, such as Lieawatha, Hiataxa, and Chief Spreading Bull.
President Trump has openly ridiculed her for it, calling her “Pocahontas” and offering $1 million to her favorite charity if she tests her DNA. Warren has refused.
Photos: AP Images
