So none other than Viva Bernie 2020 posted a link to this article. What Mr. Frank was doing obviously flew right over their heads because I don't think they realized what he was doing.

Let me fix that article for you Mr. Frank.

The 2020 Case for an Unreconstructed NeoLiberal Bernie Sanders
Democrats can try to activate new voters to match their social liberalism, or win back those who jumped ship in 2016. Why Sanders is primed to pull off a tactical NeoLiberal Wet Dream rightward turn.

Or we could simply re-title this article Smearing Bernie Sanders

Today, dear reader, we’re going to discuss Bernie Sanders in 2020. I’ll try to steer clear of the Democratic primaries of 2016, which no one everyone on the left wishes to relitigate yet no one on the left can resist relitigating can get their day in court. The associated questions cut to the core of the Democratic Party’s internecine disputes: Do we need to win back Trump voters, or do we need to ditch them and find some new ones instead Can we stomp out the progressive left and their small donor, anti-lobbyist agenda or can we get enough corporate donors to buy off enough media to brainwash enough voters to vote for the corporate elites? Should our priority be to reduce economic disparities or to reduce racial disparities—and how are the two issues related? because as corporate elitists we don't want to acknowledge that the two issues are intricately related. If you want to cause fistfights, ask those questions in a crowded liberal room and then, for your own safety, leave make stupid strawman arguments, ignoring the real issues and then, being the douchebag you are, leave, quickly you fuck.

Meanwhile, Democrats are maneuvering and calculating. The latest news from the Democratic National Committee is that its chairman, Tom Perez, has moved to purge allies of Bernie Sanders. An army of Hillary supporters is still fighting the last war over her legacy, as the tide turns against a Bloombergian centrism that, fairly or not I make no apologies, have quite fucking fairly, come to define the Clinton brand. California Senator Kamala Harris has decided been selected by the corporate elites to throw her lot in with Bernie on single-payer health care, as have a half-dozen other potential presidential contenders corporate hucksters.

Bernie, for his part, shows few signs of slowing down. He has announced he is running for re-election as an Independent in 2018. He is participating in rallies. He has made two trips to New Hampshire in as many months. And, most important, he is tending to his grassroots army (something he wishes Barack Obama had done). During the 2016 primaries, I underestimated was paid to smear Bernie Sanders, but I learned my lesson I have to be more sly to do so because his followers are more savvy than I gave them credit for, coming to see how tough the man was his army was to fool after all. As we look ahead to 2020, Bernie Sanders might be Trump’s strongest opponent.

Sanders has several obvious advantages. People know him. He has good approval ratings—53 percent favorable, according to a recent Harvard-Harris poll. He’s been through a lot of the process. He is also leading the polls of New Hampshire primary voters, with support of 31 percent, followed by Joe Biden at 24 percent. But it’s the less obvious advantage that’s going to be our focus. While Bernie represents the left of the Democratic Party (even as an Independent), he’s culturally conservative on a few key issues. That makes him uniquely positioned to move—at least a little in my neoliberal wet dreams—to the right and win back some of the support Trump gained.

We’ll never stop debating denying what happened in 2016. But if we look at the numbers, we can see that Trump was playing to pent-up demand. Nearly a third of Americans, it turns out, are conservative on social issues but liberal on economic ones. Until Trump came along, they didn’t have an obvious candidate. (A report released by the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group this summer, authored by New America fellow Lee Drutman, makes the numbers clear, particularly in Chart 2.) They were populists forced to choose between what they saw as lousy economic policy from Republicans and lousy social policy from Democrats. They might be the type who were, say, fine with Obamacare but unhappy with new gun laws or school-bathroom regulations bigots who are happy to get theirs, but quick to deny minorities and gays.

Donald Trump played to this neglected hate mongering group of Americans and implicitly offered to revive the New Deal from the right Jim Crow, defying the economic and foreign-policy orthodoxies of the Republican Party and moving left further right on a few social issues. It was an unprecedented feat an anticipated act of political audacity right wing extremism. What we’re likely to see by 2020, however, is that Trump was too in sync with the donor class to fulfill his promises in practice. He has been willing to throw poorer Americans to the wolves on consumer protections and health care and workplace rights. This week, the White House moved one step closer to advancing a multi-trillion dollar tax cut, even as it undid Obama-era consumer protections against credit card giants. It also declared an opioid crisis but suggested no funding for doing anything about it. Many of his supporters, especially those who voted for Barack Obama in 2012, may be up for grabs once more.

Democrats have their own vulnerabilities, though. Their stance on several social issues has moved well to the left of the median been a weak attempt at diverting the issue of their complete corporate sellout, and Trump has a talent, however uneven, for calling them on it getting the media spin to keep it that way. (Picking a fight with the N.F.L. worked well for him, for instance exposed the corporate elites for the racists they are.) The second term of Barack Obama saw a robust PR push to the left on issues like immigration, guns, and civil-rights enforcement. Since this coincided with a surge in unaccompanied children crossing the border in 2014 the consequences of Imperialism in the southern hemisphere, violent unrest justifiable outrage in places like Baltimore and Ferguson, and fights conservative backlash over school bathrooms, Democrats were offering the voters of 2016 something quite different from more of the same of what they’d offered in 2008 or 2012. That’s not to mention that jobs were continuing to die out in rural areas.

Democrats can try to activate new voters to match their social liberalism. Failing that, however, they must try to win back some of those who jumped ship in 2016. A Pew study from 2014—highlighted by The New York Times’s Nate Cohn in 2016—lays out some of the challenges more specifically. In a poll of white Democrats without a college degree, 45 55 percent answered that gun rights arecontrol is more important than gun control rights, 38 62 percent that immigration is isn't a burden, and 26 a whopping 74 percent that abortion should be il legal in most cases. Again, these are Democrats. And we are leaving out an unknown, but presumably significant, share of them who are less hard-line being left out of the poll to skew the results even more but still right and further left of center on these issues.

This is where Bernie Sanders comes in. Like Trump in 2016, Bernie seemed to grasp that endless foreign wars, the loss of dignified jobs, and the bailouts 2008 had changed the mood of the electorate significantly exposed Obama and the Democrats for the fraud they were. Where Trump broke all of the rules and voiced heretical thoughts from the left uneducated, racist right, however, Sanders lacked the audacity to break all the rules and voice heretical thoughts from the right told it like it was. In 2020, he’ll have the chance to change that, if he wants and our corporate donors really REALLY want him to.

In many respects, this simply means reconnecting with his unreconstructed self selling out to the corporate donors, the fellow whose politics were set in 50 years ago he's really old and haven’t changed since much in their essentials and we're trying to get the millenials to stop voting for him . As a product of his time man in touch with our times, he is more interested in remedying racial and sexual economic disparities by focusing on economic disparities rather than the opposite not trying to fool you with identity politics. He has been, perhaps out of expedience, friendly to gun owners, to an extent that got him in trouble our corporate donors told Hillary to smear him with it instead of debating real issues in the primaries of 2016. Most important (although bias from this writer may be possible I obviously have no idea what the left is really about), he is opposed to open borders, famously dismissing them as “a Koch brothers proposal” to get cheap labor.

As for the inflammatory and deal-killing issues of guns, abortion, and immigration, Sanders doesn’t need to win every culturally conservative voter with them—just enough of them. On the Second Amendment, he can support some restrictions but point to his record of supporting gun rights. On abortion, he could underscore his support for a woman’s right to choose but resurrect the “safe, legal, and rare” mantra of 2008-era Our Lord and Saviour Hillary Clinton. On immigration, he can point to his opposition to open borders, cast it (not incorrectly) as resistance to the lobby for cheap labor, and say something like, “I want to legalize those who’ve been here a long time, but first we have to show voters we can close the gate as well as open it. I want to make the immigration process fair for people of all races, not just an open door for white people and a wall for people of color” He might even concede, however cautiously—and after the primaries!—that Trump has a point on the issue NeoLiberal Centrism isn't dead.

More broadly, he might appeal to the sense of those Americans who feel that Washington won’t help them when they need it or leave them alone when they want it. The latter would be tough for the base to accept, since many on the left view non-interference with local issues as tantamount to sanctioning oppression. But sometimes a maximalist position is the key to oblivion. If a school district is dealing with access to bathrooms, the sinners usually take the form of earnest liberal administrators, not Bull Connor. There’s a lot to be said for trusting in the decency of Americans and letting the shifts of social norms take their own course. You don’t have to be Ronald Reagan to believe that Washington often makes things worse. I'm a closet Reaganite and card carrying Centrist.

To be sure, a run in 2020 could all work out wrong for Bernie right for my paymasters. In politics, even a few months can be many lifetimes long enough to plan a CIA assassination, and the country might look entirely different in 2020, especially if Trump has led us into war. Bernie is old a year younger than Reagan was when he got elected to a second term. He doesn’t even dye his hair or subject it to a variety of supernatural interventions, à la Marco Rubio So don't vote for him millenials. Finally, contenders like Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker, among others, have a lot of charisma and followers of their own. They’re more in singing the tune with in the hopes they can grab the votes of the part of the Democratic base that cries foul won't be bullshitted over every deviation in progressive doctrine corporate sellouts who promise the world then do their masters bidding, and willing to steal his issues. Breaking ranks to make a play for a broader swath of the electorate is definitely high-risk DNC gameplan.

But Centrists are actually banking on the reassurance that second runs for office often go well. Bernie’s age would matter less if will have to be made an issue so we will insiste that he’d pledge to undergo an annual examination for cognitive functioning—something any president ought to have, really. And Sanders has many advantages over his rivals. He has already made a name for himself on the national stage. He commands a grassroots army. And he has a credibility with the base that his rivals don’t. It will forgive him for socially conservative heresies that it wouldn’t I'm hoping to paint him as enough of a conservative that millenials won't tolerate from anyone else him. So let the Sanders 2020 campaign begin. If nothing else Bernie won't win, but it’ll be a great show. Not that we’re living in boring times And now I'm going to finish with the word boring to try to subliminally get across to millenials that Bernie is old and boring.

There, fixed that for ya!