Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), a 2020 presidential hopeful, said on Sunday that his dismissal of socialism as a solution for America is not out of the mainstream for the Democratic Party.
“I don’t think I’m out of step,” Bennet told ABC’s “This Week.” “I think we have 230 years of being the longest-lived democracy on the planet. That’s something we need to preserve.”
{mosads}Bennett made the comments in response to a viral moment in which his fellow Democratic presidential candidate, former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, was booed at the California Democratic Convention over the weekend for saying a candidate espousing socialism could not defeat President Trump in 2020.
Quipping that Hickenlooper’s primary error was “denounc[ing] socialism in San Francisco,” Bennet conceded that “we have had 40 years of no economic mobility in the United States … 90 percent of the American people have not shared in the economic growth over the last 40 years.”
For those not reached by the benefits of economic growth, Bennet said, “those periods of economic growth have acted as a recession, and as a result, they can’t afford the basic components of a middle-class life.”
A poor American’s chances of advancing to the middle class, Bennet added, are lower now than they have been in generations.
“That is tearing at our democracy, and if we don’t figure out a way to address it… we’re going to have real problems,” he said, saying that candidates need not embrace socialism to believe in the idea that “everyone has a share in our prosperity.”
Bennet, who is on the moderate end of the Democratic primary field, made headlines last week when he volunteered to work with one of the faces of the progressive flank of his party, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and one of the most conservative Republican senators, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), on legislation to ban former members of Congress from corporate lobbying.