Opinion: Michael Bennet knows what’s wrong with America
Sen. Michael F. Bennet in Boulder, Colo., in October. By Jennifer Rubin Jennifer Rubin Opinion writer covering politics and policy, foreign and domestic Email Bio Follow Opinion writer May 26 at 12:00 PM The mild-mannered, wonkish Sen. Michael F. Bennet can get really steamed. His anger these days often is directed at the Republican Party, which he doesn’t hesitate to say has become “demented.
To accomplish this, Bennet said, “we have to end political gerrymandering in this country. We have to end it. And [Americans] have to understand what it has cost them to have politicians who get to choose their voters instead of voters getting to choose politicians.” He argued that the ethos in Washington has to change, and that voters look at politicians and think they “have perfected the act of doing nothing and blaming the other side.
Bennet doesn’t lack for solutions to economic stagnation and immobility, but he cautioned that, “It is not one thing — it’s a million things.” On his list are anti-trust enforcement, infrastructure spending, reviving unions, redoing the tax code, transitioning to a digital economy, improving worker training and leading a coalition of nations to push back on China’s mercantilism and effort to create surveillance states. “We’re doing none of that [now],” he said.
That experience convinced him that what passes for business-as-usual inside the Beltway would never be tolerated in local or state government. He likes to quote Mayor John Hamilton of Bloomington, Ind., who wrote a Post op-ed in opposition to the 2017 Republican tax cuts, “If I asked the city council to approve tripling our local debt to give hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to a few hundred of our most prosperous residents, they would ask me what I was smoking.
On foreign policy, Bennet observed that while China’s economy has been expanding at a furious rate, it has been expanding its influence around the world with it’s Belt and Road Initiative. “They are supporting a surveillance state.” Our best option, he said, is for us to “forge strong alliances with people all over the world” and to offer an alternative to China’s mercantilist trade practices and China’s surveillance state model.
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