Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren turn on each other and other commentary

2020 watch: The Hard Lefties Turn On Each Other

Before Sens. Liz Warren and Bernie Sanders announced their presidential runs, they agreed to “not go after each other directly on the campaign trail,” according to New York magazine’s Gabriel Debenedetti. But with Sanders now struggling to hold on to second place in the polls, his “campaign posture toward Warren” is subtly shifting. A few ambiguous tweets and comments from members of the Sanders team questioning Warren’s electability have raised suspicion that the Vermont socialist is starting to turn on “his closest ideological ally in the race.” Sanders has yet to (directly) break the nonaggression pact, but the “implied shots” at Warren are enough — and perhaps necessary in Sanders’ mind, Debenedetti argues: “It’s late enough in the game that he’s okay with that.”

Foreign desk: Putin Knocked Off High Horse

Although Americans tend to think of Russian President Vladimir Putin as “a master manipulator,” Frida Ghitis at Politico notes that his own people are “running out of patience with the stagnant economy at home, rising poverty, rampant corruption, repression and widespread abuses of power.” Putin’s recent failures have made Russian citizens “restless enough to challenge his authority boldly.” Putin’s iron grip on Russia may soon be loosed. The economy is “barely growing,” and “the cost of foreign adventure is taking a toll on family budgets.” Putin’s “once-stratospheric approval ratings” have plunged, and recent failures in Greece and Sudan are evidence of his diminished international status. Putin will no doubt try to re-establish domestic respect before his term ends in 2024, but Ghitis isn’t sure his people will ever be able to look at him the same way: “Russians have lost faith in his skills and are wondering if he has lost his touch.”

Conservative: AOC Doesn’t Know How Good She Has It

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez thinks her generation “never saw American prosperity,” but the Washington Examiner’s Michael Barone says that’s a “ridiculous” thing to say, not least for someone “who grew up in and worked in metropolitan New York City.” It’s true that there have been significant “weaknesses” in the economy over the years, but that doesn’t mean the federal government should “constantly fiddle” with the market. “AOC and most people busy living their lives,” Barone suggests, tend to take ever-improving technology and standards of living “for granted.” But taken in perspective, it’s unquestionable that “America has seen prosperity the likes of which our ancestors could never have imagined.”

Church & State watch: A Mixed Victory for Public Faith

A 7-2 majority on the Supreme Court on Thursday held that “a large Roman cross, known as the Peace Cross, could remain on public land and be maintained” by Maryland state, Ed Condon reports in First Things. The cross, erected by the mothers of fallen World War I soldiers a century ago, was more a memorial to America’s war dead “than an expression of public Christianity,” Condon notes, which is why the Supremes declined to remove it on Establishment Clause grounds. Even so, “in a country of ‘We, the People,’ the faith that shapes the people shapes the society and the country they build, and that can neither be denied nor expunged in the name of modern secular sensibilities,” Condon contends. “The decision in favor of the Peace Cross is a preservation order for the memory of the society we once were, but the fight to remove it reveals the society we have become.”

Iconoclast: McConnell’s Sensible Reparations Remarks

At PJ Media, Matt Margolis laments how “the left went into a predictable hissy” last week after Mitch McConnell’s “comments about his opposition to reparations for slavery.” The Senate majority leader pointed to the election of President Barack Obama as a hopeful sign of racial progress. His critics distorted McConnell’s remark, as if he’d suggested that Obama’s election were itself a form of reparation. But any fair-minded listener, Margolis counters, would have understood McConnell’s point: “that the election of Barack Obama was a symbolic moment in the progress America has made over the last 150 years.” High on the list of people who’ve repeatedly made the same point as McConnell: Barack Obama.

— Compiled by Ashley Allen & Sohrab Ahmari

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