It’s Warren, Sanders and/or Buttigieg For Me

I’ve been listening to the Democratic debates and winnowing down the candidates to figure out which of them I’m most enthusiastic about voting for.

 

My finalist list includes Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg.

 

I appreciate all of the other running DEMs well enough to vote for any of them (let’s face it, this time I’d vote for any Dem over Trump… the man and his minions are scourges!), but I just don’t think any of the other candidates align with my progressive politics as well as these three do. Too many of the others are indentured (bought and paid for) corporate DEMS who have lost touch with the challenges facing struggling Americans, or are so unknown and so far down the list of recognizable names that they appear doomed from the start to make enough headway to become a standard bearer.

 

The interesting thing about my finalists is that all three candidates share common progressive goals. Buttigieg’s 2000 Winning Essay was on Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders  said he wouldn’t have run in 2015 if Elizabeth Warren had because there would already be someone in the race whose policies and passions reflected his own. And Elizabeth Warren has evolved so much over the past several years that I now see her as Presidential. (I didn’t earlier.) I’ve read her autobiography and ordered her latest title, This Fight is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America’s Middle Class. 

 

I think it would be a measure of our resilience and persistence to elect as the first woman President a woman with impeccable progressive credentials. She is a spitfire, unafraid of saying what needs to be said about the way greedy rich people and corporations have run roughshod over the rest of us for decades. We seem to be entering a new Gilded Age where the rich do just fine and the rest of us struggle mightily just to survive.

 

I think it would be a measure of our ability to accept ALL Americans as worthy of equal rights and treatment to have a professed, happily-married gay man (and war veteran) as our leader and Commander in Chief. Buttigieg is a well-read, well-spoken, multilingual marvel. He has a real brain in his head.  He can command respect in the same way President Obama did because he’s obviously level-headed, smart and beautifully educated.

 

I think it would be a measure of our eternal gratitude to elect Bernie Sanders to the highest office in the land since he has never altered his goal in all his years of public service: to make America work for all of us, not just the rich and powerful. The man is a marvel, as close to a unicorn in D.C. as it’s possible to get and still be a real flesh-and-blood being. It is the same policies that he has been espousing and pursuing for decades that the younger Warren and Buttigieg have adopted and embraced as political goals. These three aren’t rivals. They’re more like the Three Musketeers or the Trinity: on the same page in nearly every way.

 

Yes, I’ve heard the naysayers in the various camps nitpicking the other candidates. But I haven’t heard these three nitpicking each other.  Each of them has behaved respectfully toward the others. And why shouldn’t they? And why shouldn’t we?  Whichever of them prevails will probably get our votes unless we’re willing to cut off our noses to spite our faces again and watch Trump and his minions continue to rape and pillage without consequence, filling the Supreme Court and other courts with their ideological clones.

 

No, we need to stand united against what has become of our government. We need to say enough is enough and mean it this time. We need to get rid of Citizens United and money in politics so our so-called representatives will elect to represent US again.

 

The soul of our nation is at stake this time.

 

Our house is on fire. This is no time to be fighting over which hose to use to put out the flames.