The Democrat Who Wants to Stop the Rage
POLK CITY, Iowa—Sitting under a framed ticket from an old Obama town-hall meeting, down in the basement of a farmhouse surrounded by snowy fields of corn and soybeans, I tell Michael Bennet that an Iowa Democrat who’d come to hear him speak compared him to pea soup. Good pea soup, hearty. But still pea soup, in a 2020 primary field that has sizzling fajitas and cake on the table.
Some politicians might have been insulted. Bennet smiles. “There’s something to that,” he says.
The Colorado senator was here on the last stop of his tour through the northeast part of the state, feeling good about what he heard and what he saw. What began two months ago as a vague notion about running for president had become a long and deliberate thought process. And now, after two and a half days on the ground, he was closer to getting in the race than when he landed.
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Bennet’s not interested in an argument about progressives versus moderates, though he warns that Democrats shouldn’t make it easy for Donald Trump to write them off as socialists (he jumped up and applauded when the president said “America will never be a socialist country” in his State of the Union address, realizing only later that Bernie Sanders was right behind him, scowling in his seat). To Bennet,
