U.S. Sen. Chris Coons’s committee vote of “Present” to forward CIA Director Mike Pompeo’s name forward to become America’s next Secretary of State may have been an exceptional signal that reflected what his home state voters expected of him.
Sen. Coons, a liberal by any definition, compromised his principles a bit to give President Trump the team on the field that Trump says he needs for the good of our country.
I first met Sen. Coons in October 1993, when he served as a young lawyer laboring mightily as an extended part of the Gore family at the W.L. Gore family business.
We sat shoulder-to-shoulder for several years as volunteers on chamber of commerce legislative committees.
Clearly a conscientious progressive and even liberal as the term fell into some disrepute as a political label,
Coons at the time remained “a business Democrat.”
Today, his liberal bona fides are such that if Joe Biden does not become the Democrats’ presidential nominee in 2020, taking Massachusetts U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren with him as his VP pick, I would not be surprised to see Chris Coons as a VP pick under the alternate Democrat presidential nominee Sen. Warren.
Sen. Coons’ star — like his mentor Joe Biden’s — clearly is in ascension.
He has done an incredible job of not only positioning himself as a conscience of the left, but getting media accolades and coverage for how he’s done it.
Except for the hard-core liberal fringe on the extreme left that has been in frothy uproar over all Delaware’s Democrat leadership, Gov. Carney, Sen. Carper and Sen. Coons, and except for what seems to be a conservative bloc that appears less driven by making the state into a monotheistic society, Delaware’s electorate for today still seems solidly anchored in the middle.
Keep in mind that Delaware is a state that sent a liberal Joe Biden, a conservative Bill Roth and a Rockefeller Republican Mike Castle to Congress for years, retaining moderate Democrats like Tom Carper for governor.
Despite political forces that continue to pull elected officials to the fringes, voters still remain for the most
part centrist.
While no evidence exists that President Trump enjoys any resounding popularity in the First State, Delaware voters still value the fairness of giving the POTUS the team he wants, hence, the reasonableness of Sen. Coons’s “Present” vote.
“Shared concern for their families and their communities, people who want to make a difference” is how Delaware money-manager excelsior Murray Sawyer recently described his Westover Capital firm’s Delaware-centric clientele in a country club economic outlook conference. It would not be surprising to find as many Democrats in that Westover audience as Republicans.
Sawyer went on to attribute values he’s discovered among those Delaware elites to include decency, openness and intellectual curiosity. Left unsaid, but assumed, of course were commitments to a small-D democratic society and free enterprise AKA capitalism.
James Pethokoukis, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the keynote speaker at Sawyer’s late April event, warned the audience of demographic shifts that presage a fundamental shift, if not erosion,
in those core shared values.
“More than 30 percent of the millennial generation — those roughly 35 and younger today — say that democracy is not essential in our society,” Pethokoukis warned. “And some 42 percent of the millennials say capitalism is not essential.”
Racial, affluence, geographical and other attributes of society in general would be reflected in the millennial generation. As a result, those are attitudes that should create concern for all of us.
