I’ve always felt Warren was a combination of Bernie’s big dreams and Obama’s pragmatism. This is actually a very positive development because it reassures progressives that she’s not going to commit to a policy that will get shot down by her own party.
I guess my question to you is: do you think she actually meant what she’d been saying before, and actually means what she’s saying now? Or is it that she still thinks the same way she did before, and merely changed what she’s saying?
I don’t really care: I think she wants to expand access to the healthcare system for nearly everyone. Like others, she’s trying to figure out the best way to do that without scaring people and allowing her proposal to fall victim to propaganda.
I know I’m an outlier on this, but, to me, representative is a job title. The job of the representative is to represent the views of their clients (in this case, their constituents). Ideally, this persons personal viewpoints would align with that of her constituents and the policies that she’s promoting but that’s a very small piece of the puzzle for me.
It should be a back and forth process. Part of being a successful representative is sussing out what your constituents want and modifying your stance accordingly — as well as bringing as many of your constituents as possible around to your point of view. So, what many critics regard as “flip-flopping” I see as “doing your job”. Yes, there has to be a certain artfulness to your position shifts, but the fact that political positions shift doesn’t bother me in the least. The content of the platform/policy changes sometimes bothers me - especially if I aligned more closely with the old positions, but the idea of shifting positions doesn’t.
She not only allowed herself to get sucked in, she tried to position herself as the leader on “a plan for that.” Even with this tack back she is placing revolutionizing what we’ve accomplished with the ACA as the big item for her first term to try to accomplish. Somehow she and her team, chasing Sanders’ voters, have actively made that the key aspect of her brand, to be prioritized over everything else.
IMHO - nah.
She made herself fairly unattractive to the larger group who actually like what the ACA is doing, who would much prefer building on it, and those who had begun to consider her as more electable, without picking up any of the Sanders support she was aiming for, and now is making herself less appealing to them as well. The debate moderators huge focus on healthcare may have put the brush in her hand, but the she’s the one who painted herself into the corner she is now stuck in.
To the degree that voters care about “authenticity” I think she has lost it.
ALL the candidates want “to expand access to the healthcare system for nearly everyone.” Lots of progress has been made in getting there and building on the ACA can make a great deal more progress (see some analysis by The Commonwealth Fund) SHE however took the angle of condemning anyone who did not agree with the MfA approach to doing that as candidates who really only wanted to provide care for those who could afford it, and as candidates without the guts to dream big and fight hard.
Well, OK, maybe we can’t. Or maybe we can’t yet. I want a progressive candidate that tells me the truth, if we can’t yet go there, what steps need we take to get closer?
Furthermore, Warren had years and years of time to do the research and homework on MfA. She should have known all the details cold before even throwing her hat into the ring. For a candidate to promise something, then say, “Well, errr, on second thought, it looks like we didn’t do the math” suggests a shoddy, thrown-together campaign mindset.
‘Progressives’’ are only about 20% of the electorate. And they are only about 30% of the Democratic party, which is why Biden is still in the lead despite the fact he’s basically in the candidate protection program to keep him out of the public where he tends to say stupid things that get him in trouble.
If your candidate is too far to the left for the Democrats, imagine how they will do in a general election. That’s how you get four more years of Trump.
Democrats seem to be thinking that Trump is so hateful and weak that they can finally run their dream lefty candidates and win. What they ‘should’ be thinking is that Trump is so bad and so dangerous that now is not the time to risk running an extreme candidate who might lose. They should be focused like a laser beam on finding a compromise candidate who can attract moderate Democrats, independents, and Republicans sick of Trump. Get rid of the orange man, try to take the Senate back, then they can move to the left in the next election.
Obama has been sounding this alarm for weeks. You should listen to him.
Another thing Progressives should worry about: The black and hispanic vote. Progressives are heavily made up of young, white, college educated people. More women than men. In the meantime, the most socially conservative cohort in the party is black and hispanic.
If I were a Democrat, I’d be very worried about losing those votes that they have been taking for granted for decades. Trump is already making inroads here. Black and hispanic unemployment is at an all-time low, wages are up for blue-collar workers, and Kanye’s album is #1. He’s now going around preaching to blacks in sold-out stadiums as an unabashed Trump-supporting Christian.
If the Republicans become the party of blue collar populism and the Democrats become the party of white college educated progressives built around a coalition of feminists, gay people and open borders, just where do you think some of those socially conservative, religious black and hispanic votes might go?
If the Democrats lose even 20% of their current share of black and hispanic voters, they cannot win. They’ll become the party of the urban coasts and a few large dysfunctional cities, and that’s about it. If Warren keeps yapping about completely banning fracking and offshore drilling while taking away the hard-fought gold-plated health care plans of blue collar union workers, she’ll drive another nail in the coffin, and guarantee the loss of electoral college votes in otherwise winnable states in the midwest and northeast.
As long as the GOP is the racist party (the party of Steve King, Stephen Miller, Rush Limbaugh, the Trumps, and many more racists), as it currently is – welcoming white nationalists and white supremacists within its ranks, including Congress and the White House – the chances of these voters going to the GOP is nil.
Trump did better than Romney with blacks and hispanics, and he did so even though Hillary grabbed something like 94% of black and hispanic females. We have no idea how much of that was due specifically to Hillary, and how they’d vote against say, a gay white male candidate. Or a white male billionaire.
And the ‘racism’ that you see everywhere is part of the progressive worldview. Most people don’t equate wanting stronger borders with racism. If you asked the average person to describe the characteristics of Trump, they’d call him a loudmouth, a boor, a sexist, a business crook perhaps, lots of things. ‘Racist’ wouldn’t automatically come to mind. And the ‘white supremacists’ in the Republican party aren’t anti-black. If anything, they are anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner. There are blacks in the ‘white supremacist’ far right.
Again, progressives see ‘white supremacist’ when others might see blue-collar people trying to protect their jobs from immigrants and their way of life from culture shock. And guess what? That describes a lot of blacks and hispanics, who are the demographic groups hardest hit from cheap immigrant labour.
There’s a big difference between a Klan member and a rural hispanic family terrified of losing their jobs to cheap illegal immigrant labor.
Gee, what could that be due to? Wait a sec, was Romney the guy who ran against Obama? Hmm, do you think Obama had something to do with Romney performing worse? Maybe?
Bernies plan, called MfA, was not in any way shape or form MfA. It was just called that, which led to endless confusion. A REAL MfA plan could work. Bernies plan was pie in the sky.
Neither do I.
Actually, a majority of voters think Trump is racist. Donald Trump is a racist, majority say in Quinnipiac University poll
Trump is doing absolutely nothing to change this perception in his favor.
Lots of them are anti-black, and certainly they tolerate anti-black rhetoric from many of their fellow Republicans.
If accurate, this doesn’t tell us anything – there were (very few) Jews who cooperated with Nazis; (very few) blacks who helped the Confederacy and Jim Crow system; etc.
You are not accurately describing the views of progressives here. Border security is not racist. Deliberately separating immigrant families and harming migrant children because the administration believes that deliberately harming children deters future migration is racist, as an example. Calling majority black countries “shithole countries” is racist. Etc.
Of course. Which is why you shouldn’t take that vote for granted when you replace a charismatic, center-left black candidate with a far-left white candidate whose constituency is primarily college educated progressives.
That kinda goes in the “no shit” file. Obama being a high water mark is not a mystery to anyone. But you didn’t even mention his name. It was “Trump beat Romney”.
Um, that doesn’t follow. If true (I have never heard this ‘intentionally hurting children’ thing), how can it be racist to do that if it isn’t racist to prevent them from coming into the country in the first place? The only way it would be racist is if they were doing this because of the child’s race. Child abuse does not equate to racism. Or are you suggesting that they are only picking out children of certain races for this treatment?
Is it? Really? Are you denying that there are ‘shithole countries’? If there are, are we not allowed to say that if some of them happen to be majority black? What about countries like Syria, which has plenty of ‘white’ people? And did he ever say that the reason these countries are ‘shithole’ countries was because of the ethnicity of the people?
Somalia is a ‘shithole country’ that happens to be majority black. But its shithole status has nothing to do with the color of the people, and everything to do with the despicable tyrants that have been in power there, stealing resources and preventing capital formation by the public to keep anyone from building political power that might threaten the corrupt rulers.
So am I a racist for saying that?
Yes, but I wasn’t trying to make a point about Trump, but rather that Democrats shouldn’t count on getting those high levels of black support forever. Democrats had high black support because of the civil rights movement and because Democrats spoke more to issues that blacks cared about.
If the Democrats become the party of open borders, climate change taxes and white progressive ‘woke’ politics, they risk alienating huge swaths of their former constituencies who are blue-collar and socially conservative.
Here you go: Trump administration family separation policy - Wikipedia
Trump administration officials are on record for advocating purposefully harming children, by separating them from their families, for deterrent purposes. It’s not credible to claim that they would be willing to do the same to white people, not when Trump and his team are on record, over and over again, saying racist things about Hispanic migrants.
Trump’s assertions lack any of this nuance. You seem willing to bend over backwards on the tiny chance that these ridiculous, ignorant, and hateful assertions by Trump and his administration might not be motivated by any ill-feeling towards black people, Hispanic people, or others. That’s just ridiculous. We know who this guy is, and who the people he’s surrounded himself are. They’ve shown who they are again and again – from ‘Mexicans are rapists’ to ‘the judge can’t do his job because he’s Mexican’ to spreading a racist, evidence-free conspiracy theory (birtherism) for many years to telling American women of color serving in Congress that they should ‘go back to where they came from’ to praising white supremacists at Charlottesville…
It’s just not credible. It’s ridiculous. We’ve heard it again and again from his mouth and from those serving him. I don’t know why you’d want to go to so much effort to insist that none of this is relevant to his various policies that just so happen to harm people of color.
I’ll take half a loaf rather than nothing.
But I don’t think the democratic congress will even pass a public option, let alone medicare for all.
Buying into medicare for 5% of gross income really isn’t bad. Its not M4A but its vastly superior to what we have now.