Source:PoliticusUSA

MoveOn.org is trying to draft Sen. Elizabeth Warren to run for president in 2016, but Sen. Warren has already rejected their efforts and made it clear that she won’t be running against Hillary Clinton.

Via a press release, MoveOn announced their member vote to draft Warren, For the first time in its 16-year history, the 8-million-member group is holding a nationwide membership vote on a presidential draft campaign.

If the vote succeeds, the group will focus on persuading the Massachusetts senator, who has become known as a tireless, passionate advocate for middle-class and working families, to seek the presidency.

Voting is open to MoveOn’s full membership across the country until 10 a.m. Eastern time Wednesday morning. The result will be announced at 11 a.m. Eastern.

 

The campaign, if ratified by MoveOn’s members, will include:

– offices and staff in early primary and caucus states like Iowa and New Hampshire,

– the assembly of a national volunteer army ready to go to work if Sen. Warren enters the race,

– recruiting small-dollar donors who pledge their support,

– and ads and media products that call attention to how Sen. Warren has stood up and fought for the middle class and her powerful vision for our country’s future.

The organization will invest at least $1 million in the first phase of the launch.

Warren’s press secretary put an end to dream of drafting the senator in 2016 by saying for the billionth time, “As Senator Warren has said many times, she is not running for president.”

Sen. Warren is not running because she supports Hillary Clinton in 2016. Warren has shown herself to be a tireless campaigner for Democratic candidates and a loyal party member. She seems like anything, but the go it alone type who would break with her party to launch and outsider bid for president.

There is a candidate that would be perfect for the left that groups like MoveOn continue to ignore. Sen. Bernie Sanders is serious about challenging Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, and he would welcome a million dollar investment in a primary campaign organization.

Whether progressives want to believe it or not, Elizabeth Warren is not running. She has made zero moves towards a bid for the presidency. If groups like MoveOn were smart, they would be lining up behind Sanders and stop wasting their time chasing the fantasy of Elizabeth Warren in 2016.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has spent months fishing for a strategist to guide his potential 2016 presidential campaign. On Monday, he hooked a big one: Tad Devine, one of the Democratic Party’s leading consultants and a former high-level campaign aide to Al Gore, John Kerry, and Michael Dukakis.

“If he runs, I’m going to help him,” Devine said in an interview. “He is not only a longtime client but a friend. I believe he could deliver an enormously powerful message that the country is waiting to hear right now and do it in a way that succeeds.”

Devine and Sanders, who first worked together on Sanders’s campaigns in the 1990s, have been huddling in recent weeks, mapping out how the brusque progressive senator could navigate a primary and present a formidable challenge to Hillary Rodham Clinton, the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Devine previously served as a senior adviser to the Kerry-Edwards campaign in 2004 and the Gore-Lieberman campaign in 2000. In 1992, he was campaign manager for then-Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey’s presidential bid.

Both men acknowledged in interviews that Sanders would face an uphill challenge and skepticism from the political class. But they are adamant that there is room in the emerging Democratic field for an independent-minded contender who can speak forcefully about the growing divide between the rich and the poor.

Sanders, a Brooklyn native and a self-described socialist, is the longest-serving independent in congressional history. Before winning election to the Senate in 2006, he served in the House and as mayor of Burlington.

“In terms of fundraising, there would be real interest in him at the grassroots level,” Devine said. “He knows how to do the organizing that’s required. As a mass media person, I also think he would be a great television candidate. He can connect on that level.”

Sanders, 73, has seen his profile rise since 2010, when he delivered a marathon filibuster on economic policy. That speech turned into a book, and Sanders has since appeared frequently on MSNBC prime-time and HBO.

Over breakfast on Saturday in Los Angeles, Sanders said that he would center a possible campaign on the “collapse of the middle class” and “income and wealth inequality,” which he calls a “huge issue from a moral sense and a political sense.”

Sanders predicted a focus on those issues could animate some small-dollar Democratic donors and keep his campaign afloat and enable him to create

“movement” behind him. “People are angry and frustrated and they want someone to speak to them,” he said. “Democrats cannot run away from the simple reality that you have a billionaire class in America that is enormously greedy.”

Sanders said he will return to Iowa in December to meet with activists. “I’ve been there, I think, three times and we’ve already drawn large turnouts,” he said. “We work with grassroots progressives organizations and they bring out a lot of working-class and middle-class people. On the last visit to Des Moines, we couldn’t get any more people in the church. There were about 450 people there.”

Sanders said again that he is inclined to run in the Democratic primary but has yet to make a final decision on campaign matters. Devine, in his interview, said running within the party “means you have an infrastructure and you don’t need to be on the outside, being a Ralph Nader-type candidate.”

Sanders is one of several Democrats eyeing a primary campaign against Clinton. Others include former Virginia senator Jim Webb and Gov. Martin O’Malley (D-Md.). Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has been courted by prominent liberals to enter the race, but she has resisted those entreaties and does not appear to be gearing up for a national run.

[Robert Costa is a national political reporter at The Washington Post]

by A. Shaw

“What I think really happened is about 64 percent of the American people rejected the two-party system,” Bernie Sanders, US senator and possible presidential candidate, said recently on Comedy Central’s “Colbert Report.”

http://www.politicususa.com/2014/11/26/bernie-sanders-calls-congresss-plan-massive-tax-cut-corporations-crazy.html

Sen. Bernie Sanders called Congress’s $440 billion plan to cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations crazy, and urged President Obama to veto the bill.

The White House announced yesterday that President Obama would veto a tax plan being negotiated by House Republicans and Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) that would make permanent hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations.

In a statement Sen. Bernie Sanders called the tax cut plan crazy, “This tax cut agreement does exactly the wrong things. At a time of massive wealth and income inequality, it extends huge tax cuts to the rich and large corporations while threatening programs that help low-income children. At a time when we need to reverse climate change and aggressively move to sustainable energy, this agreement fails to eliminate tax benefits for the fossil fuel industry but phases out tax credits for wind and solar. This is pretty crazy stuff. I strongly support the president’s decision to veto it.”

The tax cut plan that Reid and the Republicans have cooked up is heavily tilted towards the wealthy and corporations. Liberals in the Senate are opposed to the proposal, and there is considerable doubt that the plan could garner the votes that would be necessary to override a presidential veto.

Sen. Sanders told it like it is. The last thing this economy needs is more tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. It isn’t a coincidence that the economy has gone on a nearly unprecedented growth after taxes were raised on the wealthy.