{"id":7786,"date":"2025-03-29T14:03:41","date_gmt":"2025-03-29T14:03:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/will-michael-bennet-shift-his-fight-against-trump-to-the-state-house\/"},"modified":"2025-03-29T14:03:41","modified_gmt":"2025-03-29T14:03:41","slug":"will-michael-bennet-shift-his-fight-against-trump-to-the-state-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/will-michael-bennet-shift-his-fight-against-trump-to-the-state-house\/","title":{"rendered":"Will Michael Bennet Shift his Fight Against Trump to the State House?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Michael Bennet seemed destined for a lifetime appointment to the Senate.<\/p>\n

He was tapped for a vacancy in 2009, the same moment Colorado was turning perpetually blue. The Democratic son of the former staff director of the Senate Budget Committee and grandson of another political hand, Bennet brought lineage, his own impressive resume and, most significant of all, a thoughtful, affable and moderate sensibility to a chamber that once rewarded all three qualities.<\/p>\n

Yet after accumulating 16 years, and well-positioned for another decade-plus of service having just turned 60, Bennet is poised to walk away from seniority, the Senate and Washington, the city where he was raised.<\/p>\n

He’s frustrated with Congress, yes, but also Joe Biden\u2019s selfishness, what Donald Trump has done to both parties and the corrosive impact of social media on politics, the media and even the once-presumed idea of shared facts.<\/p>\n

Bennet is almost certain to run for governor in his adopted state next year, according to multiple Democrats in Washington and Denver.<\/p>\n

In an hour-long interview this week, Bennet made little attempt to hide his intentions, telling me he\u2019ll reveal his plans in early April.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe central fight is whether or not we can create an economy where people feel like when they work hard they get ahead,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I think the answer to that over the next decade is as likely to come from the states as it is from Washington.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reminded about his father\u2019s staff tenure \u2014 stints with a pair of Cold War senators in addition to his committee post \u2014 the senator noted that Douglas Bennet Jr. also eventually left the Senate to run USAID and eventually NPR and Wesleyan University.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wish he were still alive, because I wish I could ask him his advice,\u201d Bennet said. \u201cAnd I think what he would tell me is, notwithstanding the fact that he worked here and he loved this place, he also moved on to do other things. And he might say, take what you’ve learned and find a place to be as effective as you can be.\u201d<\/p>\n

That Michael Farrand Bennet is no longer sure the Senate is a place to be effective is as harsh an indictment I can recall of what was once unironically called the world\u2019s greatest deliberative body.<\/p>\n

He’s not the only lawmaker headed for the exits. Already this year, before the first quarter even ended, Democratic Sens. Gary Peters, Tina Smith and Jeanne Shaheen announced they wouldn\u2019t run again.<\/p>\n

Some of this owes to simply hitting retirement age or dreading a prolonged life in the minority. But when taken together with all the lawmakers in both parties who\u2019ve walked away since Donald Trump\u2019s first election, it\u2019s undeniable that what was once a political pinnacle has become a place for some that\u2019s just not worth the hassle.<\/p>\n

After all, the Senate was usually what governors graduated to, even if they preferred their old jobs, not an office one left for the statehouse. Look no further than the trajectory of Bennet\u2019s colleague and former boss: Senator, and former governor, John Hickenlooper. War and peace, treaties and the Supreme Court, affairs of state, were determined in the nation\u2019s capital. Prisons, roads and schools were left to the states.<\/p>\n

What makes Bennet\u2019s frustrations so meaningful, and illuminating, however, is that they go far beyond the usual bill of particulars. Sure, he\u2019s exasperated with \u2014 and has even compiled research about! \u2014 the trend toward the consolidation of power and the diminution of the committee barons he met when he arrived in the Senate in the last years of the World War II generation.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe duties of the senators have been sucked up basically into the leadership of the Senate,\u201d he said, adding that \u201cthe decision-making among the four corners in the Congress has in some sense dispossessed the other actors.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bennet dodged questions about whether Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer should continue to lead the caucus, but was candid about the leadership void.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think we need a strategy, and I think we need a plan, and we need a message,\u201d he said, adding: \u201cAnd if current leadership can’t figure out how to do that, then the caucus will figure out how to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Is the current message entirely: Trump is bad?<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the current message is basically, yeah, Trump’s bad.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bennet\u2019s obvious misery of serving in Trump-era Washington is in some ways more notable than his unhappiness with Schumer. And this gets at something that isn\u2019t sufficiently appreciated. The departures, some voluntary and others less so, of anti-Trump Republicans have been well-documented.<\/p>\n

But Trump has also made Congress a lot less appealing for serious-minded Democrats who want to legislate and suddenly find most of their GOP counterparts are barely coping, living a lie or in thrall to a personality cult.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat has been a big change, that\u2019s a big difference,\u201d said Bennet, citing the departures of John McCain, Jeff Flake, Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker. \u201cThere are people here, but it’s also true across the country, for whom Trump’s approach to politics has become normalized.\u201d<\/p>\n

More to the point, he said:<\/i> \u201cI\u2019d be lying, if I said \u2014 It\u2019s tough when you got everybody on the other side voting for Pete Hegseth to be the secretary of defense.\u201d<\/p>\n

Put another way, there\u2019s simply not going to be a robust debate over, say, the refundability of the Child Tax Credit, a Bennet priority, when every day revolves around what Trump or his administration just said or did.<\/p>\n

He calls it \u201cshirts and skins,\u201d tribal politics, and he deplores the culture. But this is where I should note, clearly, what Bennet emphasized: that he\u2019s eager to remain in the fray.<\/p>\n

He wants to confront Trumpism, he said. And, for a 60-year-old, he is unusually conscious of his own mortality, a trait he may have because of his father\u2019s passing at 79, his mother\u2019s youthful escape from the Holocaust and his own treatment for prostate cancer.<\/p>\n

I had suggested to Bennet that his own potential early exit from the Senate along with his brother James\u2019s unhappy departure\u00a0from the New York Times<\/a> both had a tragic quality. Here were enormously talented siblings who would\u2019ve flourished in an earlier, more consensus-oriented era.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don’t feel like I was born too late,\u201d the senator said, after citing all the policy goals he\u2019s still eager to enact on the economy, healthcare, education and sustaining the American dream. \u201cI think that my expectations about where we would be and the progress that we have made turn out not to have\u00a0<\/i>been fulfilled. And I am becoming incredibly impatient with the notion that I could die before seeing this to-do list addressed.\u201d<\/p>\n

That impatience has intensified since Trump\u2019s second election, an event that I told Bennet seemed to jar him. \u201cIt definitely did,\u201d he acknowledged, \u201cit definitely did.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which triggers his deep discontent with his own party.<\/p>\n

Bennet has long been frustrated with Washington \u2014 he wrote a 2019 book lacerating \u201cthe pathological culture of the capital\u201d \u2014 but Trump\u2019s return seemed to mark a personal pivot point.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can’t say that I was surprised, but I find it shocking that the Democratic Party lost to Donald Trump twice, once after he took away a woman\u2019s right to choose, you know, and with all of the convictions and everything else,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd you know what? I hate to say this, there are many things that I blame Donald Trump for but getting elected is not one of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

For that he blames Biden. Bennet himself barely left a mark when he ran for president in 2020 and he acknowledged Biden may have been the only Democrat who could have defeated Trump that year.<\/p>\n

However, the Coloradoan was one of the first Senate Democrats to say publicly what was obvious to all of them: that Biden couldn\u2019t win the election after his disastrous debate. And Bennet was one of the loudest critics of Biden\u2019s decision to pardon his son, Hunter, on the way out of office.<\/p>\n

His irritation doesn\u2019t seem to have receded.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I would say to the American people who are frustrated that the Democratic Party has not fought hard enough to provide a compelling alternative to Donald Trump, a big piece of that was the decision that Joe Biden made to run for re-election,\u201d said Bennet.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Democratic Party,\u201d he continued, \u201cdidn’t show up as a fighting force during the Biden administration.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Bennet conceded that, no, he never privately urged Biden or the former president\u2019s top aides to not run again in the first place. \u201cI wish I had,\u201d he said. \u201cI wish we all had.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recalling a caucus meeting after the now-infamous debate, Bennet recounted telling his colleagues that \u201cif we elect Donald Trump president, we will be the first generation of Americans to leave less opportunity, not more, for the people coming after us.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what plainly eats at Bennet. It\u2019s not just Biden\u2019s vanity, and the failure of the rest of the party to intervene well before last summer, but the deeper failures of Democrats and the potential implications of those failures.<\/p>\n

Though much closer to the center than his party\u2019s progressives, Bennet reflects the widened policy aperture of this moment and pans Democrats\u2019 timidity from both the left and the right.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I think about this last election, was it important for us to make sure that we were extending the Obamacare tax credits for health care?\u201d he asks. \u201cOf course it was. But shouldn’t we be standing for universal health care in this country? Shouldn’t we be standing for universal mental health care, especially for our kids who have been so incredibly affected by Covid and by social media?\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet on education, an area of personal expertise dating to his time running Denver\u2019s public schools, Bennet said his party needs to be bolder.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have to recognize that our system of public education has to be dragged from the 19th century to the 21st century, what are our ideas for that?\u201d he said, all but rolling his eyes as he recalled that much of what Democrats say about the topic begins and ends with \u201cforgiving student loan debt.\u201d<\/p>\n

And it wasn\u2019t just 2024.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Democratic Party failed to make a compelling case in really a generation worth of elections,\u201d Bennet argued.<\/p>\n

He recognizes, however, that the great challenges of the present are less tactical than structural.<\/p>\n

He’s no nostalgist \u2014 \u201cI don\u2019t mourn the analog world,\u201d Bennet said \u2014 but he said \u201cour tribal instincts have been concretized by the medium of the internet.\u201d And it\u2019s digital technology that must resolve that problem so that Americans can \u201chave a shared understanding of the facts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps because of his brother \u2014 who was hounded out of his job as the Times\u2019 editorial page editor by liberals angered over an op-ed written by conservative Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton \u2014 or perhaps just because he\u2019s a reader, Bennet returned repeatedly to what social media and its attendant algorithms had done to sow division and make folly of the Moynihan maxim<\/a> that people are entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have had many reactionary periods in American history,\u201d he said. \u201cThose have always been followed by a progressive period. Always, always. The only difference right now, between our lives and those lives, is we destroyed our journalism in America.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201dold political order has collapsed,\u201d said Bennet and \u201cthe journalistic order has collapsed with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

But what remains, he emphasized, is his appetite for building what comes next.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhatever I do is not going to signify a retreat from anything,\u201d Bennet said. \u201cWhat I’m trying to figure out is where the fight can best be joined.\u201d<\/p>\n

Denver\u2019s golden dome awaits.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Bennet seemed destined for a lifetime appointment to the Senate. He was tapped for a vacancy in 2009, the same moment Colorado was turning perpetually blue. The Democratic son of the former staff director of the Senate Budget Committee and grandson of another political hand, Bennet brought lineage, his own impressive resume and, most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7786\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}