DES MOINES, Iowa — When I was walking into a Sen. Amy Klobuchar event on Saturday night, I was greeted by a volunteer who handed me an American flag. Once inside the Franklin Jr. High School gym, I spoke to a Klobuchar precinct captain who dismissed Sen. Bernie Sanders as “a Marxist.” After days of attending events touting the coming socialist revolution, I finally felt like I had landed back on planet Earth.
When you’re a conservative covering the Democratic caucuses, you know that you’re going to disagree with pretty much all of the policy proposals that you hear. But it matters who Democrats nominate. Some conservatives may be rooting for Sanders tonight, hoping that, at the minimum, it wreaks havoc among Democrats, or at best forces them to nominate a candidate who would be easy for President Trump to beat.
However, in a two-party system in a highly polarized political era, any major party nominee is going to start out with a decent shot of becoming president. That’s especially true in 2020, when there’s an incumbent president who has consistently polled in the mid-40s.
As the Washington Examiner argued in a recent editorial, rooting for Sanders to be the nominee because of the assumption he would be easy to beat is risky, because as the Democratic nominee, he’d be one step closer to being president. Just ask the liberals who were openly rooting for Trump to be the GOP nominee in 2016 because he would be so easy to beat.
A better approach is to root for the candidates in both parties who you think would make the best (or least bad) president, because there’s a decent chance one of them will get elected. Having followed the Democratic candidates through the campaign, watched all their debates, and seen the five top Iowa contenders in person over the past few days, it’s become clear to me that Klobuchar is the best option.
Were Klobuchar to be elected president, I’d probably oppose nearly every one of her policy proposals, regulatory decisions, and judicial appointments. And as a commentary writer, I’d criticize those actions on a daily basis. But I wouldn’t wake up the morning after Election Day feeling like my country has fundamentally changed to something unrecognizable.
In the runup to the 2020 election cycle, and throughout her campaign, Klobuchar has distinguished herself as being one of the few responsible adults in the room. Though she voted against confirming Justice Brett Kavanaugh, she was the only Democratic Senator running who behaved in a reasonable manner during confirmation hearings by asking him pertinent questions. It was in stark contrast to the embarrassing behavior of Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, who were more concerned with creating viral moments to boost their presidential ambitions than doing their job of vetting a Supreme Court nominee.
In the debates, she has resisted the temptation to pander to the extreme Left. She has consistently pushed back against the grandiose promises of the socialist Sanders and the implausible claims of Elizabeth Warren that it’s possible to achieve the same socialist goals without increasing taxes on the middle class. If Klobuchar were able to win the nomination campaigning as a pragmatic liberal, it makes me more confident that if elected, she wouldn’t allow herself to be captured by radicals.
Though there is little chance Sanders or Warren would actually be able to pass their far-reaching proposals, their authoritarian impulses provide great reason to fear that they’d try to implement their agenda through executive action.
Given that presidential power is its greatest in the realm of foreign policy, I would be fearful of Sanders, who honeymooned in the Soviet Union and backed anti-American communist Sandinistas in the 1980s, being commander in chief. At a time of rising anti-Semitism, I am disgusted that Sanders has decided not only to excuse anti-Semitism on the Left but to promote as surrogates bigots including Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, and activist Linda Sarsour.
Other leading Democratic candidates, such as Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, have, like Klobuchar, tried to appeal to voters who view Warren and Sanders as too extreme. But Biden is too old and Buttigieg is too young.
Biden’s low energy level, and difficulty articulating his thoughts, has been apparent on the debate stage and was even more apparent when I saw him on the campaign trail. He’s not in the same shape he was even at the end of the Obama administration, and if his mental and physical decline continues at the current pace, I’m concerned about what would happen to him over the course of a four-year presidential term — at the end of which he’d be 82.
For a novice on national politics, Buttigieg has shown himself to be nimble on the debate stage against much more seasoned competitors. He could have a bright future in politics, but he also comes across as naive and leaves serious doubts that he’s ready to make the leap from being mayor of a city whose population isn’t even in the top 200 in the United States, all the way up to the White House.
So that ultimately leaves Klobuchar as the candidate who is least worrisome from a conservative perspective.
