A good point, I was unaware that she cosponsored Bernie’s bill, so yes then I agree at the very least her new position needs scrutiny. I was under the impression that this was her brand new whole cloth plan.
OK, I’m curious. Let’s dig into the merits of this argument. If the key point you are trying to make is that in order to remove Trump from office we need to run a centrist candidate who broadly appeals to a big tent of little ‘c’ conservatives, liberals, and nose holding leftists; that hypothesis has already been proven to not be the solution. Why does anyone think running the same playbook again will work?
I really really really want Warren to be the most left candidate who is able to run on positions that are both morally right but also politically popular. It’s massively disappointing that she seems to think that hedging her bets is the correct political solution.
To be fair, almost everyone in the primary co-sponsored his bill, so it’s not like that makes her unique. At least Warren is still holding the line saying we need M4A, unlike the others.
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Right exactly, which was why initially I felt the headline seemed a bit sensational implying she’d backtracked on M4A generally when she obviously has not.
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Wow, way to put words into my mouth.
Let’s check the score card for comprehensive healthcare reform, shall we?
Clinton proposal in 1994 - Complete and utter failure
Vermont’s single payer proposal in 2014 - Complete and utter failure
Colorado’s single payer ballot initiative in 2016 - Complete and utter failure.
By contrast, you have the Affordable Care Act, a compromise bill that doesn’t do nearly enough, but at least it passes… and as a result Democrats lose both the House and the Senate.
It’s almost as if unifying the entire medical industry, the insurance industry, most of corporate America, and people who are happy with their health insurance is a bad idea… Who would have thought that?
I’m not saying that we need a centrist candidate to run, but Warren delaying her plan (or backtracking if you want to call it that) doesn’t make her a centrist. It makes her politically realistic.
There is literally so much wrong with our country right now that Warren is probably thinking that it’s not worth dying on the hill of Bernie’s M4A plan, something that has almost no chance of being passed into law anyway.
She’s being tactical about healthcare. She knows that you have to win before you can pass anything.
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I’ve heard this story before.
Believing that Clinton’s policy stances were the reason she lost is pretty funny.
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No doubt there were a multitude of reasons, but they certainly didn’t help her!
It’s almost as if there’s a difference between promising people unrealistic plans, unicorns, and rainbows on the campaign trail and then having to deal with the reality of actual governing.
Do you honestly believe that Obama didn’t want single payer? Of course he did, but he couldn’t get it. So he got what he could. That’s governance in the real world.
I find it almost laughable that here we are, arguing about nuanced plans and the differences between Warren and Sanders, when the judiciary is going to gut any plans they put forth. That’s what I want to hear about at the debates. Tell me how you’re going to deal with a federal judiciary that is now 25% Trump appointees. Tell me how you’re going to deal with a 5-4 Conservative Supreme Court.
I can wish for M4A, for ponies, for whatever I want, but none of is realistic when you have a conservative judiciary looming over everything.
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Pack the court.
Give statehood to DC and Puerto Rico.
Right…
But first you have to:
Win the Presidency
Hold the House
Take the Senate.
If you fail at any one of those, bye bye court packing and statehood for DC and PR.
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OK, we are just going to have the same argument multiple times. It sucks we disagree on how to get there, but at least Warren and Sanders are miles ahead of any other candidates.
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I don’t want to belabor the point, but your strategy, and by extension Bernie Sanders’s strategy, requires a Moonshot. Literally everything has to go right in order to enact M4A. If even one thing fails, the plan falls apart completely.
I don’t believe in Moonshots. I don’t believe in everything going right. I like to hedge my bets and plan for contingencies.
As Ezra Klein put it:
"The rhetorical ambition of the Sanders/Warren camp can sometimes make it seem like they reject all compromise. But Warren and Sanders serve in the Senate. They’ve watched legislation pass. They know you don’t get everything you want. But they believe that if you start by asking for everything you want, you may end up with 70 percent, while if you start by asking for 70 percent of what you want, you’re going to end up with 40 percent.
The moderates think this mechanical understanding of the cost of legislative compromise is a mistake. The key mistake, in their view, is that it assumes passage and ignores the chance of failure. But in Congress, the likeliest outcome is always failure.
If President Bernie Sanders sends House Democrats his single-payer proposal and what follows is months of Democratic infighting followed by that proposal dying as moderate members refuse to support it, the next step isn’t a 70 percent compromise but the total collapse of the effort — the 1994 scenario, in other words. If you start with something that splits your own party and unifies the opposition, you’ll lose before you ever get to the final bargaining rounds. Begin by demanding 100 percent, in other words, and you’re likelier to end with zero percent.
Warren, in particular, has designed her financing plan around accepting the idea that anything that can be called a middle-class hike is politically lethal and that Medicare-for-all needs to be financed purely by new taxes on the rich and corporations, even if that means leaving in place a costly and inefficient system of employer-based financing.
Sanders, by contrast, has long believed that Americans will support European-style taxes in return for a European-style social welfare state, and that’s an argument that Democrats can win if only they make it. As my colleague Matthew Yglesias writes, these differing beliefs have led them to embrace policies that invert their reputations: “In this case, Sanders is the one putting more emphasis on technocratic soundness, while Warren seems more attuned to populist politics.”
The plans the candidates are proposing reflect their ideas about how politics works, not just what the ideal policy would be. Health care has become the defining fight in the Democratic primary, but the approaches the candidates have taken to the issue speak to their broader ideas about how to campaign and govern."
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This is just a clear example why defining your party around a broad coalition of centrist and center-left voters instead of energizing a clear left voting block is the fundamental failure why the current Democratic party can’t actually get anything done.
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Except appealing to centrist and center-left voters won the Democrats the House in 2018, so there’s that…
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100%.
Also the political landscape if we even manage to take out Trump and win 51 seats and get rid of the fillbuster, is that states like CT with a very powerful insurance lobby will put a Knee to their senators (remember Lieberman) The states not just going to sit back and commit economic suicide. That’s totally not assuming we’ll have senators like Manchin in WV and others who are going to be extremely reluctant to do anything beyond repairing the ACA and MAYBE putting a public option in. Then you’ll go into 2022 with a demoralized Liberal base which was promised the moon and was either given nothing or maybe is working with a strengthened ACA.
And who knows if the Trump economy finally hits that wall, whoever will be dealing with another taxing economic situation as well as trying to fix the corrupted executive branch while trying to deal with enviornmental topics as well. It’s going to be a mess.
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This argument is very energizing to voters and will definitely help turnout!
Attacking Warren for modulating her message in order to win is not helpful either.
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Do you think it will help us in 2022 if in 2020 we’ve promised MFA right away and it fails and congress blows a lot of time on it when they could have accomplished things with higher likely-hood of success and broader support?
Our argument is whether a revolutionary path vs a incremental path will get us the most progress. Not the overall goal, It is funny how much just that difference causes extremely heated arguments compared to people who have different overall goals completely. Ahhh I hate Dem Primary time :-p
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It kind of did work, by 3 million votes.
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