People may not believe this, but I was an undecided Democratic voter until earlier this month. I watched both Hillary and Bernie — and their campaigns — with a singular focus on who I think has the best chance to win in November.
I concluded that Bernie, while inspiring young voters, independents, and disaffected liberals, just doesn’t have what it takes to win. Everything I’ve seen over the last three weeks from him and his supporters only reinforces my views.
And in the last few days, I’ve realized something new about Bernie that always bothered me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Bernie is inspiring and has offered big ideas, but is almost insultingly vague in both the policy details and in the politics. And that vagueness juxtaposed against his big broad ideas is not a winning combination.
Let me start with this basic point: If Bernie were to win the White House, he would be the most liberal elected official in the entire Federal Government. This would be unprecedented. Never before in U.S. history has the most liberal or the most conservative elected official of the Federal Government been President. And this point alone makes it exceedingly hard for me to see how he would get anything done — even getting his cabinet confirmed would be a gigantic fight with a Congress far to his right.
So, this question of how would he actually govern is a very important question, one he has not come close to answering.
When pushed last night by Chris Matthews on how he’ll win the votes to move any of his big policy proposals, Bernie could not name a single Senator who would support his plans. Instead, he deflected and said he’ll inspire a million Americans to stand outside Mitch McConnell’s window to scare him into supporting Bernie’s plan.
He then said that we’ll flood email inboxes and mobilize young Americans to demand change.
I’m a huge believer in grassroots advocacy and have been involved as an activist and organizer for more than 20 years. I’ve been in more marches and protests than I can possibly count and have sent thousands of emails to my elected officials over the years.
But even if you delivered 500 million emails to Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and the entire GOP caucus and you won’t get a single vote for single-payer or for free college paid for by financial transaction taxes. Ain’t gonna happen.
The immovable math here is to get any of these big ideas done, you need at least 60 Democrats in the Senate, and you need to have them all on board. That’s just plain, simple reality.
This yawning chasm between Bernie’s big ideas and his inability to connect those ideas with any concrete political math is dooming his campaign. Add to this the fact that he is trying to mobilize “a political revolution to take on the establishment” in his campaign, and it really calls into question his ability to win over even some “establishment” Democrats in the leadership and on the committees.
But it’s more than that. Bernie’s big policy ideas are also vague and lack critical details, which makes it hard to assess if the big ideas are even good ideas.
I don’t want to get involved in the economists battle royale on whether 5.3% growth rate is feasible. I’m nowhere near qualified to do so.
But I am qualified to ask questions about how his single-payer plan would work. I don’t even know, because his plan doesn’t spell it out clearly, whether his single-payer plan would include rolling the current Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans, and federal workers plans all under the same system. Maybe he’s answered this somewhere, and perhaps it’s implied in the term “single-payer.” But I haven’t found a clear answer on this.
That’s a relatively minor point. The much bigger questions include:
- Would Bernie’s plan allow individuals who can afford it the opportunity to buy supplemental private insurance? And if so, how does that affect the pricing of health care across the country?
- Who would determine what treatments are covered under the single-payer plan? And if you wanted a treatment not covered, would you be able to pay for it yourself outside the plan?
- How would costs be negotiated? Would there be regional differences in health care costs?
- What happens if in these negotiations, smaller, local hospitals and clinics can’t operate at the pricing being offered by the federally managed plan? If these hospitals can’t afford to stay open, would there be a support system put in place to ensure convenient patient access to health care?
- In the European systems, care is openly rationed. Yes, it’s also rationed here, but in a much different way. If you have health insurance, you often have many opportunities to get treatments even in cases of terminal illnesses. Not so in many European systems. Would these “end-of-life” coverage decisions be managed by the federal government’s plan? Because, I certainly don’t want to stand in front of the armed revolt this would cause in this country.
- European systems work well in large part because their societies are much more homogeneous and egalitarian. The U.S. is a VERY different kind of country on both counts. How do we sell this plan to upper middle class and wealthier families, especially since they’ll be stuck with a huge portion of the bill?
- And the financing for this plan — Forget about whether the numbers add up. This is a very complex financing scheme with many different sources of revenue. I’m concerned that even if you were to by some unimaginable miracle pass Bernie’s exact plan, how in the world can we ever believe that these taxes won’t be chipped away over the years. Other national systems are financed a lot more directly. I just don’t see this financing structure working.
Now, Bernie has a big idea. But he’s not doing anything to explain or address these very common and basic questions with any level of specificity. He retreats back to the moral argument, which is fine for stump speeches, but not good enough to win over more discerning voters.
I’m not here to bury Bernie. I’m here to critique him. And I see this political and policy vagueness, combined with the frontal attacks on the establishment, as major problems for him. I think this above all else is dooming his campaign.