FWIW Bernie Sanders's private warning to Biden about the 2024 campaign (WP)

[dalton99a]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/03/06/bernie-sanders-joe-biden-2024/

https://archive.ph/gSsQ2

Bernie Sanders’s private warning to Biden about the 2024 campaign
The Vermont senator and onetime presidential hopeful has urged the White House to articulate a clearer contrast with the GOP
By Jeff Stein
March 6, 2024 at 12:00 p.m. EST

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How the administration handles the economy will emerge in the president’s State of the Union address to Congress on Thursday, as Biden’s 2024 election message against likely GOP nominee Donald Trump comes into fuller view.

Sanders confirmed his pitch to Biden and White House officials in an interview with The Washington Post. Biden tried approving an ambitious set of new social programs early in his term — including an expansion of Medicare benefits, a top Sanders priority — but was ultimately defeated by opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and congressional Republicans, and how much he’ll talk about those proposals in the campaign this year is unclear.

“The bubble is extraordinary: Democrats seem to think — many of them — that, only if we can explain all that we have accomplished, people will come on board. But that ignores the pain ordinary people are now experiencing,” Sanders said. “He has got to lay out a progressive agenda that speaks to the needs of working people, and promise if he has a Democratic majority in the House and Senate that he will implement that in the first few months of his term.”

Sanders made clear he is offering his advice as an ally who wants to see the president succeed. Unlike Sanders’s relationship with some other Democrats, the two octogenarians enjoy a mutual respect formed during their time together in the Senate, and Sanders has backed the White House — supporting all of the president’s legislative compromises, for instance — even amid pressure from others on the left.

The White House has telegraphed that Biden will embrace aggressive policy proposals — taxing the wealthy, for instance, and reining in prescription drug prices for seniors — in his State of the Union on Thursday.

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