Are you an 11% Democrat?

[tblue37]

8. I am super-liberal. I WISH we could have a Bernie Sanders type socialist in the WH, but I know

perfectly well (as does he) that Bernie could never get elected president. He plans to run only to shape the dialogue and to push the other candidates further left.

I think EW could possibly get elected, but I also think that we need her in the Senate, holding the money-jerks responsible and making big noise.

Our side (especially our voters, but our governors and legislative representatives, too) seems to think only the presidency matters, and that is one reason why even though we win the presidency, the Republicans are able to block progressive policies and appointments despite being the minority party.

We need strong progressive Dems in the House and Senate, not just in the WH. I think Hillary has a chance to be elected, and I also think that if we have strong progressive Dems in Congress, she could be forced leftward, just as she is being forced a bit leftward in her public pronouncements right now because it is clear that the American people are moving in that direction and getting fed up with the conservative policy preferences of so many of our Dem officials.

I want Bernie to run, to shape the conversation, but I also want him to stay in the House, where he fights the good fight and keeps the spotlight where it needs to be. I also like having EW in the Senate. Like Ted Kennedy, she can do great things there. Keep in mind that he didn't become the "lion of the Senate" until he stopped running for president and instead re-focused his attention on his legislative role.

Because Dems over-focus on the presidency and don't pay enough attention to local and state offices or to national legislative offices, we end up with too few strong candidates in the pipeline for our big national offices. The Republican Party knows that local city commissions and school boards, state legislatures, state boards of education, etc., are the offices that get candidates trained as effective politicians and that get them the sort of exposure that make them viable as national candidates in the long term.

Those local and state offices also allow candidates to network and to collect political debts from individuals and interest groups that they can then cash in as support when they run for bigger offices. And don't forget that they were able to gerrymander their dominance in the HOuse specifically because our side largely ignored the races for state legislatures.

Furthermore, it doesn't matter whom we nominate or elect if we don't back our candidate up with strong support in the House and Senate. Obama can't even get his nominees for the federal bench or for major appointed positions confirmed because of the Republicans in the Senate!

Besides the whole gerrymandering debacle, we also need to have state legislatures and governors in our column, because they can screw things up even if we do get stuff passed at the national level. Look at how the right wing governors and legislatures in Republican-controlled states screwed up the implementation of the ACA and prevented the expansion of Medicaid so that so many people who should be able to get subsidies have been excluded from coverage.