Why Left-of-Center Wonks Are Skeptical of Bernie Sanders
Most recently, Mr. Friedman projected a growth rate of 5.3 percent a year under a Sanders administration, compared with a Congressional Budget Office projection of 2.1 percent annual growth over the coming decade. Mr. Friedman, a professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, also estimates that Mr. Sanders’s policies would bring an unemployment rate of 3.8 percent (the lowest since 1969) and 3.2 percent annual productivity growth (more than double the C.B.O. projection).
.. Now comes a man who has had to answer only to voters in the most liberal state in the nation, who has never had the responsibility to actually pull together the disparate center-left coalition that is the Democratic Party to enact concrete legislation.
.. But if Mr. Sanders wins the nomination, a fascinating test for how he will govern will be whether he mends fences with left-of-center policy wonks — or views them as part of the problem of establishment thinking he is trying to overcome.