{"id":94277,"date":"2019-05-02T13:46:41","date_gmt":"2019-05-02T19:46:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/colorado-sen-bennet-becomes-latest-democratic-presidential-candidate\/"},"modified":"2019-05-02T13:46:41","modified_gmt":"2019-05-02T19:46:41","slug":"colorado-sen-bennet-becomes-latest-democratic-presidential-candidate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/colorado-sen-bennet-becomes-latest-democratic-presidential-candidate\/","title":{"rendered":"Colorado Sen. Bennet becomes latest Democratic presidential candidate"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"U.S.
U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, left, chats with Durango resident Jennifer J. Goodwin, right, about water conservation during a tour of downtown Durango led by Durango Mayor Sweetie Marbury on June 15, 2018. Bennet announced Thursday he is joining the Democratic presidential race.<\/span>Claudia Laws\/Durango Herald file<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Bennet announced in April that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. After surgery, he reported that it had been successful and he had no need for further treatment.<\/p>\n

He made his announcement Thursday during an interview on CBS News\u2019 \u201cThis Morning\u201d program. He is the 21st major candidate to enter the primary.<\/p>\n

Bennet\u2019s entry as a self-described \u201cpragmatic idealist\u201d adds yet another more-moderate face to a sprawling Democratic field that has been dominated for the first few months of the nomination race by more-liberal voices.<\/p>\n

In his travels to Iowa and New Hampshire this year, Bennet has repeatedly called on Democratic voters to resist the lure of more ideologically extreme candidates in favor of a nominee who is positioned to reject pressure by its left wing.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve got to nominate somebody who can beat Donald Trump,\u201d he said at a recent stop in Concord, New Hampshire. \u201cThat means we have a responsibility not to do ourselves in.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bennet, 54, has called Medicare-for-all \u201ca bad opening offer\u201d to achieve broader health care coverage and prefers creating a public option for health coverage that could be offered in the current structure of the Affordable Care Act. He has been critical of liberal calls to pack the Supreme Court with more justices to counteract its current conservative-leaning majority.<\/p>\n

Instead, his policy prescriptions have been more conventional, including calls for fiscal responsibility. He has co-sponsored legislation to expand the child tax credit and described the lack of economic mobility and growing economic inequality as the most pressing issues facing the country. A book he has written on his policy prescriptions for the country, including a vision for moving beyond its political polarization, will be released later this year.<\/p>\n

He made headlines in January when he broke with his normal tone by angrily denouncing fellow Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, on the Senate floor for criticizing the last government shutdown, after previously leading an effort to shut down the government in 2013.<\/p>\n

Bennet also criticized Trump in the speech for demanding $5 billion for \u201ca medieval barrier on the border of Texas.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a joke,\u201d Bennet thundered.<\/p>\n

His critique of dysfunction in the U.S. Capitol is central to his political approach. During the Obama years, he referred to the nation\u2019s capitol as the \u201cLand of Flickering Lights\u201d because the major accomplishments in Congress were limited to finding a way to keep the government open. And he has been a vocal opponent of the doctrinaire Freedom Caucus \u2013 a hard-line coalition of conservative and populist Republican lawmakers.<\/p>\n

Born in New Delhi while his father was working for the U.S. ambassador to India, Bennet was raised in the District of Columbia and educated at St. Albans School. He later earned degrees from Wesleyan University and Yale Law School. His younger brother, James Bennet, the editorial page editor of the New York Times<\/em>, vowed to recuse himself from any work related to the presidential election if his brother entered in the race.<\/p>\n

The future senator showed an early interest in following his family\u2019s calling in politics \u2013 his grandfather had been an adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt, and his father also worked in the State Department and for several Democratic senators. In junior high school, Bennet worked as a Senate page. He later worked for then-Ohio Gov. Dick Celeste, D, and as an attorney at the Justice Department during Bill Clinton\u2019s presidency, before moving to Colorado in 1997.<\/p>\n

There, Bennet worked as an investment adviser for Anschutz Investment, which is run by the conservative billionaire Philip Anschutz, a major Republican donor. He is the second politician from Colorado to enter the 2020 race, following former governor John Hickenlooper, whom Bennet previously worked for when Hickenlooper was mayor of Denver. Bennet later served as the superintendent of Denver Public Schools, before his appointment to the Senate in 2009 to fill a vacant seat he has held ever since.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you look at my career, it\u2019s not been about plotting how to grab the brass ring or move up to the top of the ladder,\u201d Bennet told The Washington Post<\/em> in 2016. \u201cI took jobs that a lot of people in similar situations wouldn\u2019t have taken \u2013 in fact, a lot of them said I was crazy. And yet every one of those jobs powerfully informed the next job, or the one after that, in ways that I, certainly, could have never predicted.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, left, chats with Durango resident Jennifer J. Goodwin, right, about water conservation during a tour of downtown Durango led by Durango Mayor Sweetie Marbury on June 15, 2018. Bennet announced Thursday he is joining the Democratic presidential race.Claudia Laws\/Durango Herald file Bennet announced in April that he had been diagnosed with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":94278,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5736,5735],"tags":[25],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-94277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","category-news","tag-u-s-sen-michael-bennet"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94277\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/94278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94277"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=94277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}