If the airlines and other industries are going to be bailed out, it shouldn’t be a freebee. Public ownership should be a part of the discussion. Experience hasn’t been very kind to the old canard that only free wheeling capitalists can run in industry successfully and efficiently.

We desperately need a sustained economic stimulus, but a stimulus of a particular kind. It should be centered on people, small businesses, and the most severely hit communities, not another corporate bailout. They got theirs earlier in a corporate tax cut and cheap money, which they then used, not to expand production and hire new workers, but to buy back their stock. We should flood the Congress with calls and electronic messages to do the right thing.

There is evidence that some of Bernie’s supporters are reacting in a sectarian spirit to Biden’s surge and his near lock on the nomination. They apparently have forgotten, if they ever learned, that this is a democratic moment, not a socialist moment. And it calls for a particular strategic approach that draws together a broad, diverse, and multi-class alliance against right wing authoritarian rule. Such an alliance doesn’t preclude struggle, but its accent is on unity in the face of an existential threat — a second Trump term.

But Bernie and many of his supporters don’t seem to understand this. They fight the Democratic Party Establishment (read the moderate and liberal wing of the party) as much as Trump. And why not? In their understanding, the task is to usher in a political revolution. Thus the problem in this phase of the elections in their rendering isn’t so much Trump as weak kneed Democrats who won’t drink the socialist Kool Aid.

But here’s the problem with this approach, it isn’t just Establishment Democrats who aren’t on board with a political revolution. Tens of millions of other Democrats have said No Thank You as well. That’s the meaning of the Michigan primary and other recent primaries where voters supported Joe Biden in large numbers. Later tonight we will see if primary voters in Fl, AZ, and IL do the same. Realism has a place in politics.

The coronavirus and the accompanying economic crisis that it triggered are remapping not only everyday life in countless ways, but also the the terrain, not least the issues, on which the elections will be contested.

I believe this primary process should come to a close asap. But on the face of it, it appears unlikely. If anything because of the coronavirus, it is could be extended into late June and whatever steam and energy that existed — and there was a lot — will dissipate, a casualty of the pandemic. But what if the remaining primaries were clustered together and scheduled for a day in late April. And instead of voters going to their voting site, they send in their mail ballot specifying which of the two presidential candidates they support.

The convention could still take place, conditions permitting in July or August and its normal business could proceed ahead. But in the meantime, the nominee and the Democratic Party, even with the limitations imposed by a spreading pandemic, could begin the process of unifying the party and turning its full attention to defeating Trump and gang. And its urgency has only been magnified by his gross mishandling of this spreading virus in recent weeks.

Trump and team have in place an election juggernaut, and it isn’t waiting for Labor Day to start its engines. They are humming now. Time for Democrats and the larger movement against Trump to get busy too. Obviously Tom Perez isn’t asking me for my opinion, but I do hope that such conversations are going on among Democratic Party leaders and the two remaining contenders for the nomination.