ACA is a first draft compromise. Now over the next 20-30 years it needs to be improved and expanded until health insurance finally is covered for everyone.
They couldn’t put up a comprehensive system on the first piece of legislation as there are far too many vested interests involved and far too much push back from the right.
If Biden gets elected and lowers Medicare eligibility to 60 as he mentioned that would be a pretty nice step forward. Then with any luck more expansion can be done.
That’s the spirit! They don’t just make their dreams big enough. I remember it just like it was yesterday. Wake up in the AM, have a coffee, pass the ACA and then get in a full 18 holes that afternoon.
The fact that Libs and Greens are both so badly run with such awful candidates and platforms but still manage to piss off major party people with how many votes they ‘steal’ says a lot about how bad the major parties are. The Republicans have moved into far-right, ‘smash the government infrastructure’ mode to the point that Trump is the most Libertarian president that we’ve had since there was a Libertarian party to contend with (as measured by implementing LP platform planks). Meanwhile the Democrats keep wringing their hands and insisting that there’s nothing they can do against those mean Republicans, and do things like decide to make the ACA a ‘compromise’ even though the Republicans didn’t actually buy into the compromising part (if you have to force it through with no R votes, why not just force through what you want?).
I think that very, very few people actually vote FOR either the Libs or Greens, they’re just used as a protest vote. The assumption that people who go out and vote for one or the other would vote for a major party if the third party wasn’t there is not really supported by evidence; a lot of the people voting for G or L would just join the roughly 1/3 of the electorate that doesn’t vote in each election. In particular, I’ve seen that a lot of people who like to talk about being in favor of Libertarianism are horrified if you say “so you support A, B, and C, and don’t see any problem with it?” where A, B, and C are literal planks from the LP platform.
IMO they’re entirely set up as ‘protest’ parties that people can be angry in without accomplishing anything. Neither one has a platform that has actual wide appeal, or any real sense of how they’d incorporate the unique parts of that platform into local issues or deals that the major parties would buy into. There’s a lot of grandiose posturing, but any method of turning philosophical constructs into the kind of gradual change that can actually get implemented in the real world is beyond them.
I remember back in the 90s the Libs made a big push to have a candidate on the ballot in every election in several states. The local candidate for the Soil and Water Conservation Board in my state was on a message board, and someone asked “I don’t see how this position fits with Libertarianism, what would you do differently than the other candidates if you were elected?” to which she responded “oh, I’d act based on Libertarian principles.” She literally couldn’t answer the absolutely most softball question you can ask a political candidate, ‘what would you do different than the other guys?’ and in further conversation didn’t seem to have any idea what the board would actually do or what she would do if she was on it (it wasn’t just a single flubbed answer). That about sums up the ability of the LP to be an actual functional party to me.
Because the Democrats didn’t all want the same thing.
No, more like destroy the Republicans by any means necessary, as a starting point, and then make sure to educate the hell out of their children like Germany and Japan did after WW2.
My issue with the Democrats fundamentally believe the system is working – as Biden himself said. It’s not. The Republicans know it’s not, and capitalize on that by promising to “drain the swamp” (if only).
Incremental progress can never beat the scorched-earth tactics of the GOP. It’s two steps forward, four hundred steps back. Unless the Democrats are willing to see that and act upon by it, they’ve already lost.
Some analysts at UCLA would disagree. They found a 60/40 split.
The article also talked about JUST the Green Party (Nader):
Nader received 97,488 votes in Florida. And national exit polling showed Nader voters would have chosen Gore (47%) over Bush (21%) in a two-man race. A book by Burden estimated a similar breakdown.
21 percent that said they would vote Republican.
I also don’t know where you come up with the claim that a Greenie would never vote for a Republican.
What is the Green Party officially saying about the support they are receiving from the GOP?
I will say, I know (very peripherally) two people who are complete political tumbleweeds and who could easily support a Green one week and Trump the next. They consume every single headline and never read a story.
I went to the official Green Party website, and they don’t mention anything about their Republican supporters…but there is a shit-ton of anti Democratic Party stuff there, including a major bitch about Democratic voter suppression. If you can bring up voter suppression and not even mention the GOP in passing, I have no interest in your ideas.
About Howie Hawkins’ political qualifications, from his Wiki page:
“Hawkins has run for various offices on twenty-four occasions, all unsuccessfully. He was New York’s Green Party candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2006. In 2010, Hawkins ran as the Green Party’s candidate for Governor of New York, which restored ballot status for the party when it received more than the necessary 50,000 votes. In 2014, Hawkins ran again for the same office and received five percent of the vote. Hawkins ran for Mayor of Syracuse in 2017 and received four percent (about 1,000) of votes. He then ran a third time for Governor of New York in 2018 but received less than two percent of the vote.”
What has this guy got going for him, besides a minuscule personality cult?
Fucking Montana?
That’s some sever scorched earth tactics there. Or else they’re practicing for a bigger nationwide effort next time and are training operatives in the safe sandbox of MT where even a major scandal / explosion won’t hurt the R’s chances.
No, they wouldnt. They found that likely split 20 years ago with Ralph Nader as the candidate.
Because the entire concept of the Green party is that they are too far left for the Democratic party, so why would they vote right wing? They’re for social justice, not against it. Plus they explicitly are about supporting environmentalism, which the Republican party is generally against.
The only way it makes sense is if they are accelerationists and would be voting for those they hate the most. But that seems really odd for an environmentalist group, since there is definitely a point of no return on the environment.
The main takeaway I get from that article thus is that many Green voters don’t support Green policies, and are just protest voting. Plus the fudge factor of people who would lie to screw the system–you can get a decent percentage of people supporting the absurd option in any poll.
As I understand the Green Party - they’re not necessarily left or right. They have one specific issue (environmental issues) and everything springs from there.
Right now, because the Democratic Party tends to pay more attention to the environment Greens are more likely to support Democratic candidates. But the party isn’t fiscally or socially liberal or conservative - they’re pro-environment.
Considering this administration’s environmental record, I have trouble thinking anyone who really cares for the environment would support Trump in any way, shape, or form. Let’s put it this way, Charles Koch would have difficulty being worse than Trump. Equally bad, probably, but being worse would be hard.
I don’t understand why people make sweeping statements about what a party’s goals are without looking at the party platform, unless they’re asserting that the party goals don’t match the platform. The Green party platform is pretty left wing by world standards, much less US standards and significantly left of anything Bernie Sanders promoted pretty much across the board. They’re not just pro-public schools but seek to expand the areas covered by public schools, pro living wage (not just $15/hr minimum wage), and pro federally funded childcare for pre-school children. They are in favor of creating new anti-trust laws and breaking up all major media corporations, and also of government-funded broadband internet access nationwide as a right. They want to repeal the Patriot act and stop warrantless wire taps. “We are committed to establishing relationships that honor diversity; that support the self-definition and self-determination of all people; that consciously confront the barriers of racism, sexism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, class oppression, ageism, and ableism, and the many ways that our culture and laws separate us from working together. We support affirmative action to remedy discrimination, to protect constitutional rights, and to provide equal opportunity under the law.” They support Universal Basic Income and reparations to black Americans for slavery. “We endorse women’s right to use contraception and, when they choose, to have an abortion. This right cannot be limited to women’s age or marital status. Contraception and abortion must be included in all health insurance policies in the U.S., and any state government must be able to legally offer these services free of charge to women at the poverty level.”
I could go on, but it’s pretty clear that there is simply no way to claim that they are ‘fiscally conservative’ or ‘socially conservative’ in the least unless you assert that they don’t follow their official platform.
Except, socioeconomic policy has a significant effect on the environment. One would expect a realist Green agenda to support social balance, which generally would work in favor of Greenward goals. I should think they would ultimately be opposed to consumerism, industrialism and careless extraction of resources (you pull the stuff out, you clean up the site now, before you haul the stuff away). The general, stated policies of Greens would trend liberal/progressive.
I have not, myself, read their platform, but here it is if you want to examine it and prove me wrong (like most Parties, I would expect the text to be more middling than their real target goals).
Most people do not plumb deeply into a Party’s platform but rely on a vague sense of who they are. Many people who might vote R proceed on emotion and might just as well vote some other thing, sometimes choosing the thing that has a recognizable name that is not D. Or maybe D, if they feel like it.
Sweet Jumpin’ Jeepers, this is a wonderful pair of posts!
Dan