Here’s The NY Times Opinion Writers ‘Case For’ Each 2020 Democratic Candidate

The New York Times opinion columnists published a series of pieces making the case for each major Democratic candidate left in the primary for undecided voters who need some help.

Michelle Goldberg’s case for Sen. Elizabeth Warren begins with Ann Coulter’s anti-endorsement of Warren, that Sen. Bernie Sanders won’t get anything done, but Warren is the “freak” that will come every day with 17 plans. Calling Coulter a “vicious reactionary,” the writer acknowledged her comments cut to the heart of Warren’s promise.

Warren is described as having a “supernatural” ability to identify problems in American life before they happen, citing her calls in 2007 for a commission to protect consumers.

By 2011, she had led the charge on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “It’s no small thing for someone who had little direct government experience to single-handedly spearhead the creation of a new agency,” the piece said. “The CFPB has since provided $12.4 billion in relief to 31 million consumers.”

She argues that even with a Democratic president, nothing will get done unless the party takes the Senate and eliminates the filibuster, which Warren supports, and cites her understanding of executive power, how the wrong person in charge of an agency could hurt everyday Americans. Warren is further described as someone who doesn’t have the “albatross” of socialism around her neck like Sanders, and the best person to change the culture of corruption in government.

Jamelle Bouie takes on the electability argument head-on in his case for Sanders, arguing that the evidence says he can win.

Sanders can unite the party because he has the highest favorability, the piece says, citing strong numbers with moderate and conservative Democrats. He also beats President Donald Trump in most polls since 2019 and does better than most other candidates in the critical states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

Americans are often described as leaning conservative, but progressive ideas are popular with the public, and on socialism, everyone from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama have been described as socialists, so the attack has lost its punch, the piece says.

Sanders is described as the person that can unite the anti-Trump vote, and as a strength has “his forceful attacks on corruption and bigotry,” which “speak directly to the concerns about Trump’s character and personality that have alienated moderate suburban whites and helped give Democrats the House of Representatives.”

No one is more different from Sanders than Mike Bloomberg, and David Brooks argues, he’s also the antidote to Trump.

“The best case for Bloomberg is that we’ve already elected a reality TV star to the White House. We need somebody who can actually run things,” he writes.

Bloomberg can do the boring stuff like lead the government and staff the administration while turning “down the ideological temperature.”

Bloomberg is described as a successful mayor in the eyes of two-thirds of New Yorkers once he left office, who reformed a dysfunctional education system, increasing graduation rates, and test scores while decreasing the black-white achievement gap 23%.

Bloomberg got more New Yorkers hired as mayor and made the city healthier, Brooks writes, while acknowledging Stop and Frisk is a “blot” on his record. But when it comes to safety, he says “homicide rates dropped by 65 percent and shootings dropped by 55 percent. In Bloomberg’s final year there were only 335 murders in New York, comparable to the 1950s.”

Pete Buttigieg, another contender in the moderate lane, is given plaudits for outlasting more famous senators, effectively tying Sanders in Iowa, and his “knack for fashioning a message that resonates with Americans, delivering it clearly, avoiding unnecessary trouble and mobilizing support.”

His youth suggests hubris, Frank Bruni writes, but his success thus far reflects a “phenomenal work ethic, a stubborn optimism, extraordinary intelligence, and preternatural poise,” which he says are ideal for a president but his rivals do not possess in great measure.

Buttigieg has diagnosed what ails America, the piece argues, which is political fragmentation, partisan division, and fury. He signed up for military service and got into politics, not in Washington, but back home in South Bend, Indiana.

The piece cites Vice President Mike Pence’s “creed-driven homophobia,” and says Buttigieg’s answer — “Your problem is not with me. Your quarrel, sir, is with my creator,” — was pitch-perfect. Bruni says Buttigieg there showed he can transcend a single identity while embracing many identities, the very definition of America.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who has tussled with Buttigieg in debates over his experience, or lack thereof, is the best candidate because she has won over the swing voters needed to beat Trump, unlike her opponents, David Leonhardt writes.

Klobuchar “built her career on a middle-class image that avoids the leftism of Sanders or Warren and the elitism of Buttigieg or Bloomberg. As for Biden, Klobuchar looks sharper than he does — and she has a much more impressive electoral history,” he says.

While Trump only lost Minnesota by a razor-thin 1.5 points, Klobuchar has won there three times by more than 20%, winning suburbs that lean right and holding her own in rural areas.

Klobuchar, the piece argues, is the only one using the Democrats’ playbook from 2018, emphasizing kitchen table issues that favor Democrats, and doesn’t seek to remake the country by promising “utopian dreams.” Leonhardt also hits other candidates like Warren and Sanders for “unpopular positions on immigration, like border decriminalization.”

Yet, she is described as hardly a centrist, invoking Pence’s line that he’s “conservative but not angry about it.”

“Klobuchar is progressive without being angry about it,” he writes. “The combination can allow a politician to win the middle without being of that middle.”

But when it comes to moderates there is the candidate that the others are hoping to surpass: former Vice President Joe Biden, who Ross Douthat acknowledges is not the sexy choice (the past over the future, the same old ineffective establishment over a more decisive break,) but still is the best choice for the party to beat Trump.

Sanders’ ideological revolution is a gamble, the piece argues, while Biden is not, especially if you consider “a socialist promising the end of private health insurance,” as more political baggage than Biden’s campaign has shown.

The piece casts Warren, Sanders, and Bloomberg as making cases for election which risk losing key voter segments, while Biden won’t generate wild enthusiasm but provides the opportunity for the broadest level of support across the country.

“Biden is the only one who appears viable, the only not-Sanders candidate who still has a clear-enough path to the nomination,” he writes. “And with Super Tuesday upon us, for cautious Democrats there may be no alternative.”

Biden offers “a calmer presidency, where politics fades a bit from the daily headlines, where the average American is less bombarded by social-media swarms and cable-news freakouts, where gridlock and polarization persist but their stakes feel modestly reduced.”

It wouldn’t be good news for political columnists, Douthat writes, “but as a citizen it doesn’t sound that bad.”

Read the six pieces in full here, via The New York Times.