In an interview with MSNBC, former Gov. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) refused to call himself a capitalist saying: “I don’t look at myself with a label.”
He added: “All these labels have gotten to the point where they divide us from each other.”

This is where Biden comes in. Even if he is not the ultimate winner, he has the stature, the money, the name ID and the popularity to seize the party by the scruff of the neck and pull it back from the brink. He can say, “You know Bernie never accomplished a damn thing in the Senate” or "the Green New Deal that Warren supports has about 10 votes in the Senate” or “We figured out how to provide tens of millions of people with health-care coverage; Medicare-for-all proponents haven’t covered a single person.”

Biden has the reputation for being the eccentric uncle in the room, but in this case, he must play the role of the wise patriarch, there to remind Democrats that they win when they stick to the center-left candidates and that they achieve progressive aims when they win elections. If they pick scary socialists or rank novices incapable of governing (such as Trump!), they will never achieve aims such as checking climate change, expanding health-care coverage, reducing income inequality and keeping the United States safe and respected.

Frankly, that’s a message that many, if not most, Democrats already understand. However, they need someone with credibility to say it. Maybe there is someone else in the race or available to run who could do the same, but I’ve not spotted such a person. That’s the rationale for Biden to run.

Finally, those independents and disaffected ex-Republicans whose midterm votes flipped the House to Democratic control have a very big stake in this. If the Republicans, as I suspect, are unable to rid themselves of Trump, the country will need one major party that hasn’t lost its marbles, one capable of winning and governing. If Trump is the GOP nominee, voters regardless of past affiliation who fear for the country’s future need to work strenuously for a competent and electable Democratic nominee. Otherwise, we’re in deep trouble.

In case this isn’t obvious, current economic conditions – healthy growth, very low unemployment – suggest the deficit should be shrinking, not growing. Indeed, when Donald Trump spent months leading up to Election Day bragging that he knew how to eliminate – not just reduce, but eliminate – the nation’s budget deficit “easily” and “quickly,” these are precisely the conditions he was referring to.

But the Republican tax cuts make that impossible – because they don’t pay for themselves.

This clearly isn’t what the president and his party want to hear. At the heart of contemporary GOP orthodoxy is the idea that tax breaks for the wealthy fuels growth, which leads to good jobs, which leads to more taxpayers, which leads to increased tax revenue, which leads to shrinking deficits.

Even Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), ostensibly her party’s most moderate federal lawmaker, defended her support for the regressive Republican tax plan in late 2017 by insisting, more than once, that tax breaks would pay for themselves.

Any chance Collins and her colleagues will look at the ballooning budget deficit and acknowledge they were wrong?

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) won’t run for president after all, he announced Thursday.

“Being president isn’t something I have dreamed of my whole life or even for years,” Brown said in a statement. “My goal for our tour is to make the dignity of work the centerpiece of the Democrats’ 2020 campaign because I believe that’s the way to beat Donald Trump.”