And Another Never Trump Conservative Falls for Sherrod Brown
Published at 09:22 on 12 January 2019
This time it’s Jennifer Rubin, who after spending columns hoping for the Democrats to avoid the temptation of populism and nominate a candidate from the right of their party, suddenly concludes that the candidate they need is… a progressive populist!
This doesn’t make logical sense, of course, but guess what? Logic and facts are not what win elections. (If they were, Trump would have been eliminated early in the primaries.) Ideally, they should be, but “what should be” and “what actually is” are two different things. To be successful, a candidate needs to triumph in the political process that actually exists, not in some alternate theoretical process that might hypothetically exist.
As I’ve said before, Brown appears to be a uniquely skilled messenger. So far as I can tell, he’s probably the leftmost viable candidate the Democrats have.
Is he ideal? Of course not! No establishment politician is. But overall a Brown presidency would be a vast improvement on what we currently have, and offers at least the hope of catalyzing movements from below that would push for more sweeping and needed change.