Stop me before I vote Libertarian again

by Tom Sullivan

With under a month to go before the Iowa caucuses, polling shows Sen. Bernie Sanders and Mayor Pete Buttigieg tied with former Vice President Joe Biden. Sanders tops Biden as the first choice among likely Democratic voters in Iowa and New Hampshire. Polled on voters’ enthusiasm for their favorites, Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren top the list. Biden comes in fourth behind Buttigieg.

Sheila Blair is worried.

Blair was chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation from 2006 to 2011, appointed by George W. Bush. She sits on the boards of several domestic and international financial firms, says her Washington Post bio. She was advisor to then-Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole from 1981 to 1988 and a founding board member of the Volcker Alliance.

Please, oh please, Democrats, she writes (not in those words, exactly), won’t you give people like me a presidential candidate who is less, um, Bernie Sanders?

Donald Trump had zero experience before taking office, she complains, part of a 40-year “downward spiral” in the qualifications of presidential candidates. His presidency is the result of “negative voting” by Americans wanting to punish the professionals and turned off by “highly pedigreed” Hillary Clinton’s “perceived elitism and disinterest in the working class.”

Blair derates Buttigieg for his youth, inexperience, and support among “moneyed interests who profit from the current system,” writing:

I am a Republican who has never voted for a Democrat in a presidential election. But I share Democrats’ concern that our system is rigged to favor the wealthy and powerful over working families. I am tired of a loophole-ridden tax code that advantages investors over workers. I am tired of spending trillions in taxpayer money on health care and education only to see private profiteering of those programs as consumer costs continue to escalate. I regret to admit that I also voted negative in 2016, casting a protest vote for the Libertarian Party ticket because I didn’t think Clinton or Trump was really committed to change. I would prefer not to do so again.

So, please, not Buttigieg, Blair pleads. Wouldn’t Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren be preferable? Give us someone with more age and experience, just not Hillary Clinton’s age and experience. Someone with a true interest in the working class, just not too much interest.

With Bernie Sanders positioned stubbornly at the top of the polls in Iowa, in New Hampshire, and unnamed in 750 words, somehow I don’t think it’s Buttigieg that Blair is really worried about.

Reporting by the Daily Beast adds to those worries:

“For everybody else in the field, it’s a problem if Sanders wins the first two,” Jeff Link, a longtime Democratic pollster in Iowa, told The Daily Beast. “He’s going to have a head of steam going into Nevada and South Carolina and Super Tuesday.”

[…]

“No one is really showing their volunteer armies yet,” Sean Bagniewski, chairman of the Polk County Democrats in Des Moines, said. “It might shock the hell out of us.”

Sanders has a “massive volunteer base of grassroots supporters” and has learned from his 2016 mistakes. “If Bernie wins those first two states, I think the establishment will have a collective freakout the likes of which we have never seen before,” Rebecca Katz, a progressive Democratic strategist, told Daily Beast.

For Blair, there’s always Lincoln Chafee. Reason magazine predicts Chafee is “the first in an eventual wave of former Republicans seeking the Libertarian presidential nod.”