Re: 2nd Term Part VIII - The Thin Red Line
Mind you I'm no fan of the guy, but you're pooh poohing his chances by putting him in the same category as O'Malley and Warner. I'm discounting a Biden bid for right now due to his age (73) at the time of the election. Thinking dispassionately for a second, Cuomo has 1) name recognition, 2) the ability to raise big bucks from his Wall St pals, 3) some bipartisan creds since he inexplicably went along with the GOP running the state Senate even though they're in the minority over there (long story) and 4) I believe was the driving force in NY being the first state to legalize gay marriage legislatively.
Beyond that, he pretty much locks down places like PA that Republicans always slobber over even though they haven't won the state since 1988. He can also reach out to the other Rust Belt states such as Ohio. Really, that's all he needs provided Hispanic heavy states of NV and NM stay home. Provided he can avoid a scandal (a big IF as he seems a little oily) I don't see the O'Malley's or Schweitzer's of the world keeping up with him.
So, no Hillary + no Biden = Cuomo IMHO. Not saying I like that, but he'd be tough to stop for the nomination.
OK, I understand your argument, anyway. I could nit pick but the primaries are so far in the future let's just see what happens between now and the announcements in the early part of '15.
Here is a fairly comprehensive (including the Comments) discussion of a bone of contention that occasionally surfaces between us: TINA vs Leftward Ho! I personally think too much is made of it and it is really a matter of emphasis: some are playing offense and want to move the Dems towards more just policies, some are playing defense and want to ensure we don't make the perfect the enemy of the good. I think we both get that.
This is an interesting time to be a liberal because, for the first time in my political lifetime anyway, the current is going our way. That can change, and even if it doesn't it can still be blown, but we might want to look at the right's successes and mistakes during their period of dominance from 1978 - 2005. There was a similar split, between the "realist" wing who backed compromise policies, and the "idealist" wing who figured hey, the people have given us power, so let's USE it. The rhetorical differences between these groups were not that big and in any case were purely pragmatic: you give the stem winder to the spear carriers and the "adults in the room" spiel to the general staff. But the policies advocated by each wing were very different.
Judged in terms of getting their agenda through, the right actually did a very effective job during most of that period. They weren't able to drive us back to the Stone Age, but they got pretty far back into the Iron Age. The two things they simply could not do were dismantle Social Security and Medicare, because those institutions obviously and directly benefitted a group (the middle class) who were too powerful to roll over. This suggests that a comparable record of success for us will be, between now and say 2030, continuing to expand health care towards universality and single payer, but not being able to do much to curtail corporate welfare or the warfare state (the latter of which, truth be told, also serves as an enormous jobs program and is a bipartisan monstrosity).
But just as the right was able to open up enormous deficits by slashing top bracket taxes we should be able to close the deficits down by restoring a sane tax structure, and just as the right was able to attach all sorts of onerous social engineering exceptions and pressures into domestic policy to push their social agenda, we should be able to clean that out and restore some degree of equal protection under the law. That will follow naturally from Court composition as long as there is a decent winning streak. (The right was able to lurch the court system -- not just the Supremes but the whole federal structure -- to the far right by holding the Oval Office just 70% of the time between 1968 and 2006; the Dems will equal that record between 1992 and 2030 if they win 3 of the next 4 elections, which given EV and demographic realities looks quite doable, even when the GOP breaks out of its bitter-old-rural-white-male nosedive sometime within the next decade).
