Thursday Open Thread [5.14.15]

Jacob Swenson-Lengyel at In These Times on why Radicals like Bernie Sanders should run as Democrats, not Independents:

Senator Bernie Sanders, the socialist from Vermont, is running for president. Even more ambitiously, he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that he wants to lead “a political revolution in this country.” And he’s doing it as a Democrat.

In the wake of his announcement, some on the pragmatic left rushed to make the socialist safe for mass consumption. “Bernie Sanders is not Bukharin or Trotsky,” Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi assured readers, while Thor Benson took to the New Republic to demand the media stop calling Sanders a socialist (he’s a democratic socialist). The Huffington Post’s Jonathan Cohn went even further. Sanders “isn’t actually that far to the left,” Cohn said, and ultimately, “the label doesn’t mean a whole lot anyway.”

While the pragmatists were busy rounding off Sanders politically sharper edges, some on the radical left dismissed Sanders as a sellout. Ashley Smith wrote in Jacobin that by running for president as a Democrat, Sanders “is acting as the opposite of an ‘alternative.’ ” Smith went on to say that the Democratic Party has “co-opted and changed Sanders,” approvingly quoting David Swanson’s call for leftists to “put our resources into uncorrupted, principled, policy-driven, nonviolent, creative activism” instead of the Sanders campaign.

The debate is about more than Sanders alone. While it’s clear that we live in the midst of a populist moment, many of the pragmatists continue catering to the center—ready to woo independents and endorse whoever sports a “D” behind their name. And many on the radical left, as always, disavow the idea that a political revolution can be waged from within the Democratic Party. Instead, they claim that only a third party candidate could offer a pure, uncorrupted assault on big money politics.

It is all about the Overton Window. If Sanders and Warren are now mainstream Democrats (which they are since Hillary Clinton is adopting their message), that moves the whole party to the left. It is a good thing. And no, Bernie Sanders is not a sell out. He is finally being smart about it. We live in a two party system, like it or not. A third party does not have room to maneuver unless one of the two main parties actually dies.

Andrew J. Bacevich at the Los Angeles Times likes that President Obama has ticked off both the Israelis and the Saudis. So do I.

In his second term, President Obama has demonstrated a real knack for ticking off putative American friends. First, he annoyed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who registered his complaint by promptly taking it to Capitol Hill. Now (apparently) he has irked Saudi Arabia’s King Salman, who signaled his unhappiness by skipping this week’s summit with gulf allies at Camp David.

The rocky turn in U.S. relations with two long-standing strategic partners has caused much hand-wringing. But is it really such a bad thing? Or does it hint at a long-overdue policy shift that will align U.S. commitments to these countries with actual American interests? […]

As others have noted, the nuclear negotiations are not really about nukes. The real aim of the talks is to end Iran’s diplomatic isolation, which dates to the Carter-era hostage crisis. Yet bringing Iran in from the cold will alter the strategic landscape in ways that Israel and Saudi Arabia find discomfiting. A completed deal will instantly transform Iran from a pariah into a major regional power. For existing regional powers, the result can mean only one thing: reduced room to maneuver. […]

Diplomacy is transactional. Successful diplomacy means striking the right balance between give and get. However belatedly, the Obama administration recognizes that when it comes to Israel and Saudi Arabia, the United States has done too much giving and too little getting while paying too high a price. Obama aims to fix that.

Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (D) slammed House Republicans who voted to cut funding for Amtrak a few hours after a deadly train accident in Philadelphia, TPM reports. Said Rendell: “Here, less than 12 hours after seven people died, these SOBs, and that’s all I can call them, these SOBs didn’t even have the decency to table the vote.”

NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–REPUBLICAN PRIMARY–PPP: Walker 18, Rubio 13, Carson 12, Huckabee 12, Bush 11, Cruz 9, Paul 9, Christie 5, Perry 2
NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY–PPP: Clinton 63, Sanders 13, Webb 6, Chaffee 5, O’Malley 2