Plum Line: Hickenlooper's entry reveals how moderates fatally misunderstand today's GOP

The race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination got another entrant today, which makes 12 major candidates, with more to come. John Hickenlooper, the former governor of Colorado, announced today that he’ll be running, and while in a different year he might have been a strong contender — reasonably successful and well-liked governor, middle-aged white guy — he has a bit of a timing problem.

It isn’t just that Hickenlooper isn’t nationally known and may be more moderate than what Democratic primary voters are looking for right now. It goes to what sort of president he says he’d be. To hear him talk, it’s as though he parachuted in from a few decades ago and has no idea how politics works in 2019 or what sorts of impediments the next Democratic president is going to face. Let’s look at the way he summed up his candidacy in an interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos this morning:

“I’m running for president because I believe that not only can I beat Donald Trump but that I am the person that can bring people together on the other side and actually get stuff done.”

Hickenlooper talked about the importance of going out and listening to people, about how when he was mayor of Denver and ran for governor he connected with voters all over the state whose concerns weren’t partisan. Which is surely true, but unfortunately it shows that while being out in the “real” America (i.e. not Washington) can help you understand how policy decisions affect people’s lives, it can also obscure the real challenges of federal policymaking the next president will face.

...Here’s the problem for a Democratic president: Today’s Republican Party isn’t just committed to a particular set of policy preferences, it’s also committed to a style of politics in which 1) any compromise with Democrats on a controversial issue is an unconscionable betrayal, and 2) literally any tactics, no matter how morally reprehensible, are justified in the pursuit of their goals.

More at https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/03/04/john-hickenloopers-entry-reveals-how-moderates-fatally-misunderstand-todays-gop/?utm_term=.6b39623de3c3