Welcome to Super Tuesday 2!

After I noted last week that Elizabeth Warren had hat-tipped Teddy Kennedy's 1980 withdrawal speech in her own remarks pulling out of the presidential primary, I did a little more reporting on what to make of all that.

I found that Warren gave a series of speeches set in historic moments, but all of them related to protest or activism or reform movements. (Thanks to Kristen Orthman from the Warren campaign for helping me with that).

That made the Kennedy reference all the more unusual in a sense, because he is about as establishment as it gets.

I spoke to Eli Attie, a former speechwriter for Al Gore who is now a screenwriter in Hollywood, and to Dan Schwerin, who was a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign and her top speechwriter.

Attie told me that Warren might have benefitted from connecting her candidacy to Kennedy more often: "She has a lot in common with Ted Kennedy. She should have been invoking him more. She’s progressive and iconoclastic and has signature issues she works on, but works within the system to get things done."

Schwerin pointed out how Bernie Sanders could just call himself an FDR Democrat, since his politics are in many ways simply a return to that old-style liberalism. Sanders, in fact, directly connected himself to FDR in a speech last June.

"We must take up the unfinished business of the New Deal and carry it to completion,” Sanders said. “This is the unfinished business of the Democratic Party and the vision we must accomplish.”

And yet Sanders almost never mentions FDR in his stump speech.

Schwerin: "There is this funny thing about insisting on calling yourself a democratic socialist, whereas if he just called himself an FDR Democrat every would know what he meant, it wouldn’t put a target on his back and it wouldn’t rankle so many Democrats. It may not, however, be as sexy to his base of younger voters.”

Biden's success while linking himself back to Obama, and his use of the term "Obama-Biden Democrats," is a rebuke to this historical amnesia in some ways.

"We’ve kind of lost all connection to [the past] and I think that’s a mistake. That’s where the politicians might be, but I don’t think that’s where most voters are," Attie said.

You can read the whole piece here.

While reading the text of Bernie's June 2019 speech about FDR, this line stood out to me: "Today, we are all rightly repulsed by the sight of neo-Nazis and Klansmen openly marching in Charlottesville, VA, and we are horrified by houses of worship being shot up by right-wing terrorists. But on February 20, 1939, over 20,000 Nazis held a mass rally – not in Berlin, not in Rome, but in Madison Square Garden, in front of a 30-foot-tall banner of George Washington — bordered with swastikas — in New York City."

It turns out that a filmmaker found archival footage of the Nazi rally in the Garden and edited it into a 7-minute short film. You can watch that here. Pretty chilling stuff.

If Sanders loses Michigan tonight, and it's clear he's not going to catch Biden, what does he do then? That's one of the big things I'm watching.

Thanks for reading! Jon