John Hood: Sanders would hurt state Democrats

RALEIGH — The confusing jumble that was the 2020 Iowa caucuses proved to be a very public disaster for Hawkeye State Democrats, national party leaders, and the campaign of former Vice President Joe Biden.

It was also a disaster, although not yet as public a disaster, for another group: North Carolina Democrats such as Gov. Roy Cooper.

Cooper has amassed an impressive war chest and enjoys early polling leads against his likely GOP challenger, Lt. Gov. Dan Forest. Other Democratic candidates for state and local offices have high hopes, as well, fueled primarily by the polarizing presidency of Donald Trump.

But if Bernie Sanders — headed from a strong performance in Iowa to a likely win in New Hampshire — ends up at the top of the ticket, all bets will be off. North Carolina Republicans couldn’t ask for a bigger favor.

Sanders isn’t a garden-variety Democrat. He isn’t even the kind of progressive Democrat who can now find a secure political home in urban counties such as Wake, Mecklenburg, and Guilford. Sanders is a self-professed socialist. In fact, he is a barely reconstructed apologist for communist dictators.

I use the term advisedly. In his early days as an activist and local politician, Sanders championed the Cuban revolution of Fidel Castro and the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. He honeymooned in the Soviet Union. Much later, in 2011, Sen. Sanders would even list Venezuela, then under the thumb of dictator Hugo Chavez, as one of the South American places where “the American dream is more apt to be realized, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who’s the banana republic now?”

Sanders did not praise Chavez personally, and he sometimes criticizes past actions by communist regimes. That’s why I call him a “barely reconstructed” apologist. While he may occasionally express regrets about real-world socialism’s broken eggs, Sanders has always been more about the omelets.