Highlighting the part of my post you missed. I entirely agree that when you break things down by individual policy supported the country is aligned with FDR. They just don’t vote that way.
This is somewhat a labeling problem; recall all those people who in polls said they hated Obamacare but loved the ACA. Also to large extent the anti-Choice vote.
That’s like saying “the center of this circle is way over here on this edge (If we block most of the circle with a square).” You may be technically correct for your given assumption, but the assumption skews the result so much it defeats the purpose.
Sarah Palin tried that for a while
“If you make a mistake and do not correct it, this is called a mistake.” -Confucius
It seems clear that the DNC has learned nothing from 2016 or 1968 for that matter.
Apparently, many minority voters in the south put identity politics (association with Obama) ahead of their own interests in selecting Biden. Crime bill? Civil forfeiture? Drug war? Student loans and bankruptcy? Biden’s record toward the poor and marginalized is abysmal, but who needs facts? Encouragement from the media and mediocre Beto, Klobuchar, Buttegeig plus Obama’s coattails satisfy voters, I guess.
No matter what it looks like to this crowd (me included), many people still support Trump and many more are undecided, no matter how bad he is. DNC establishment pushing Biden may just give us four more years of Trump. I’m still for anyone but Trump, but Biden is only better because he is not Trump. He’s the last person besides Bloomberg I would have chosen if the DNC didn’t change the menu for me. We have a chance for something besides the lesser of two evils here if the DNC will allow it.
we’re going to have a general election season where people have to debate which candidate’s brain disease is progressing more slowly
If the purpose is to win elections, then for a party to judge the center from the votes is sensible.
Describing Biden as the “edge” is misleading. His political stand is not so very far from Bernie’s, except perhaps on the role of wealth in the economy. ACA+Public Option is much closer to NHS than it is to greed-based health policy, especially if you believe (as I do) that once people have the national option available they will quickly migrate to single payer.
Pretty sure that the image that you were replying to was referencing the less-than-stellar turnout among younger voters this year. Hard to know what it was for California until the votes are all counted but in many states turnout among young voters was worse than it was for the 2016 primary. Even in his home state of Vermont only 11% of primary voters were 30 or under, vs. 15% of voters in the 2016 primary. So the percentage of those young folks who showed up that voted for Bernie doesn’t at all invalidate the idea that many chose not to show up at all.
That completely ignores the 50% of eligible voters who don’t historically vote. If you limit yourself to only those people who already vote, you’ve already lost.
That’s so far wrong, I don’t know where to start. Their policies are only close if you’re looking at them from space. Biden is the true conservative within the whole presidential candidate field - his policies are literally a return to the Obama administration. Sanders’ policies want a return to and an enhancement of the New Deal - high marginal tax rates for the top earners, huge public infrastructure projects, etc. etc. etc. We’re talking FDR vs. Nixon, but only if Nixon supported MUCH lower taxes for business and billionaires.
What will win or lose the election for Biden is his choice of running mate. Say he picks Beto as his VP, it will show voters a non-septuagenarian potential successor and a clear head present in the WH. Any other person below retirement age would also help.
Mondale and Dukakis were also pretty donut-like
Yes, I’m serious. Having lived in the UK and in Scandinavia, and experienced the health systems both there and other countries, I would say that single-payer national health is superior, but ACA+Public Option is a big first step in that direction.
I wonder what side he’s on?
O, ok.
It’s a step, yes, but the notion that an ACA+public option plan is “much closer” to the NHS, which literally puts all doctors and public health care outlets directly on the government payroll, than it is to our current system is like saying the Moon is “much closer” to the sun than Earth is during a solar eclipse.
Have you maybe considered that this kind of “The minorities don’t know what they’re doing!” shit is a big reason why so many black voters are not keen on Sanders and his most vocal supporters?
Biden has historically had a very good working relationship with African-American voters and politicians; NAACP gave him a 100% favorable rating in 2006, for example. All too many people here on BoingBoing imagine he (or anyone to the right of Bernie, apparently) is essentially a Republican, when that’s just plain not true.
ACA made big advances into one of the two big problems we have had with health care (universal access). It did nothing for the other big problem, runway costs due to corporate greed, but even just having the public option as an option will already threaten the latter; it immediately sets public health care as a major competitor to the private companies, grabbing a big slice of their business and threatening to drive down their prices.
Whoever the Democratic nominee is, we can than Bernie for this; over the last 4 years he has almost singlehandedly moved the health care Overton window enough to make this possible. Even in the 1960s and 1970s, when single-payer national health was a mainstream Democratic proposal, we weren’t as close to having a decent system as we are today…provided the Democrats win in November.
I completely agree with the second half of your sentence.
The ACA exacerbated the cost problem. Adding a public option will add to the cost problem, too, only much more. Instead of that group of uninsured & critically underinsured 20-25% of Americans, you’ll have written a blank check to the healthcare industry. That won’t drive down prices, it will increase them. Unless you’re following it up with a single-payer mandate, it will be just like college costs over the past 30 years.
If Democrats win by what majority? If we don’t get rid of the filibuster you need to convince 60 senators to support it. It was monumental effort to convince 60 Democratic senators to support the far less ambitious ACA, thanks to holdouts like Joe Lieberman, who, under pressure from HMOs reneged on his earlier support for Medicare buy-in among other things.
The public option can either just accede to extortionate pricing or use its pressure to force costs down, just as MFA intends to do. It depends on how the option is set up.
Yes, but now ACA is wildly popular with the public.
