A lot of us have said, and for a long time, that Senator Sanders of Vermont has been given essentially a free ride by major media in his pursuit of the Democratic nomination for President. When he was mentioned, it was either as an irrelevant gadfly or, at best, an amusing sideshow to Hillary Clinton’s presumably unstoppable march to the nomination and hence to the Presidency.
To supporters of the good Senator the phenomenon manifested rather differently, as a media blackout that kept the voting public in ignorance of the qualities and agenda of a long-time Progressive leader, stifling the voice of a disaffected left and a public both angry and hungry for change.
As they say, be careful what you wish for. After the last debate, the media is paying attention.
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He is not my choice in the Democratic primary, nonetheless Bernie Sanders strikes me as a decent human being, certainly a solid Progressive and a man of character and worth. If he’s the nominee of the party, I will vote for him. If he’s not, I look forward to working with the men and women who support him not just in electing the next Democratic President, but in building a fairer, stronger and more just America.
He’s awoken something in the nation, a spirit and anger that slept for too long, and we should all be grateful to him for that alone.
I am however altogether pleased that his agenda and proposals are finally getting the critical scrutiny any aspiring nominee should expect, but that has been sorely lacking in the media and altogether absent in the effusions of praise heaped on him by his supporters here and elsewhere.
I am not one of them, but allow me to suggest that enthusiasm will not remedy deficiencies nor render them immaterial. That is not how politics works or for us Progressives should work.
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Matt Yglesias at Vox is first at bat, with It’s time to start taking Bernie Sanders seriously.
He starts with a critique of the newly-released Sanders healthcare plan, which is here. I’d encourage people to read it, it won’t take all too long.
Yglesias is not impressed, and neither am I. Three pages aren’t a healthcare plan, what they are is a press release. And the plan is not equivalent to, as titled, Medicare for All. That designation is marketing, pure and simple, or less charitably described, misleading.
Yglesias: BernieCare isn't really a plan
[...] In the debate [Sanders] thundered rhetorically: "Tell me why we are spending over three times more than the British, who guarantee health care to all of their people?"
As it happens, there is an answer to this question: In the United Kingdom, the central government acts to comprehensively set wages and salaries for doctors and other health care providers. They set them at levels far lower than what we see in the United States. And a government board with the friendly acronym NICE serves as a centralized authority empowered to decide what treatments will and won't be paid for (death panels, in short).
Sanders's "plan" doesn't cover any of this ground. Worse, his worldview doesn't seem to accommodate the questions. Instead, he says the only relevant issue is "whether we have the guts to stand up to the private insurance companies and all of their money."
This is a serious issue: no policy is perfect, seasoned politicians and the voters who support them know that. Nothing is incapable of improvement. If Bernie Sanders lacks the flexibility to critically examine his ideas – quite a few of his supporters notably seem to – that should give voters some pause. As should the idea that one man is so shiningly and inevitably right that he and his ideas are above criticism or betterment.
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Also on healthcare, Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine, The Case Against Bernie Sanders.
Sanders has promised to replace Obamacare with a single-payer plan, without having any remotely plausible prospects for doing so. Many advocates of single-payer imagine that only the power of insurance companies stands in their way, but the more imposing obstacles would be reassuring suspicious voters that the change in their insurance (from private to public) would not harm them and — more difficult still — raising the taxes to pay for it.
As Sarah Kliff details, Vermont had to abandon hopes of creating its own single-payer plan. If Vermont, one of the most liberal states in America, can’t summon the political willpower for single-payer, it is impossible to imagine the country as a whole doing it. Not surprisingly, Sanders's health-care plan uses the kind of magical-realism approach to fiscal policy usually found in Republican budgets, conjuring trillions of dollars in savings without defining their source.
What’s a trillion or two, whatever, but pretty soon you’re talking real money.
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Chait again on Sanders’ plans for the economy, Wall Street regulation and dismissal of the Obama administration’s achievements:
Sanders’s core argument is that the problems of the American economy require far more drastic remedies than anything the Obama administration has done, or that Clinton proposes to build on. Clinton has put little pressure on Sanders’s fatalistic assessment, but the evidence for it is far weaker than he assumes.
Sanders has grudgingly credited what he calls “the modest gains of the Affordable Care Act,” which seems like an exceedingly stingy assessment of a law that has already reduced the number of uninsured Americans by 20 million.
The Dodd-Frank reforms of the financial industry may not have broken up the big banks, but they have, at the very least, deeply reduced systemic risk. The penalties for being too big to fail exceed the benefits, and, as a result, banks are actually breaking themselves up to avoid being large enough to be regulated as systemic risks.
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Chait touches as well on the question of the grassroots army that – or so we’re told – will overwhelm the feeble ramparts of Washington’s status quo to impose a President Sanders’ agenda on establishment special interests.
Sanders’s version involves the mobilization of a mass grassroots volunteer army that can depose the special interests. “The major political, strategic difference I have with Obama is it’s too late to do anything inside the Beltway,” he told Andrew Prokop. “You gotta take your case to the American people, mobilize them, and organize them at the grassroots level in a way that we have never done before.” But Obama did organize passionate volunteers on a massive scale — far broader than anything Sanders has done — and tried to keep his volunteers engaged throughout his presidency. Why would Sanders’s grassroots campaign succeed where Obama’s far larger one failed?
Chait is a little too cynical here, I think. But the question of how Bernie Sanders would succeed where Barack Obama did not is relevant, and I haven’t seen all that many convincing answers to it. Or rather, I haven’t seen the question asked.
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Moving on, foreign policy. How about the Middle East and ISIS/Da’esh?
You might recall the Democratic debate in the immediate aftermath of the Paris terror attacks, a debate focused on foreign policy, security and terrorism; Sanders spent a sentence or two on those horrific events in the heart of a European capital and major world city, then moved seamlessly to his standard stump speech – without regard to the rather obvious fact that it was of little bearing on the topic of debate.
Tim Mak on The Daily Beast titles his piece simply Bernie’s ISIS Strategy Is A Disaster.
Sen. Bernie Sanders wants Iran and Saudi Arabia to send ground troops into Syria as part of a coalition of Muslim nations to fight ISIS, an idea he’s pressed multiple times as a strategy to fight Islamic extremism in the region. [...]
“These comments indicate Sanders lack of serious engagement with foreign policy issues. While I appreciate his opposition to the Iraq War, perhaps if he was a little more engaged with that issue he would understand the problematic elements [of his proposal],” said Evan Barrett, a political adviser to the Coalition for a Democratic Syria, a Syrian-American opposition umbrella group.
Sanders has preferred to stick to economic issues, an environment that he is deeply familiar with. But he has been apparently unprepared to address national security topics, a primary responsibility of the commander-in-chief position he is seeking. His puzzling comments on how to fight ISIS are just the latest manifestation of his lack of foreign policy fundamentals.
Iran and Saudi Arabia are both Muslim nations, but adhere to diverging and oppositional forms of the Islamic faith, Sunni and Shi’ite, a division that goes back to the earliest days of Islam. Iran is mostly Shi’ite, Saudi Arabia mostly Sunni, with a large Shi’ite population concentrated in areas nearest Iran and the Persian Gulf, areas that also contain the bulk of Saudi oil production.
The Saudi embassy in Tehran was recently sacked by a mob angry over Saudi Arabia’s execution of a Shi’ite cleric. The kingdom broke off diplomatic relations a day later. Saudi Arabia and Iran are bitter rivals in the region, to expect them to work together to achieve a U.S. foreign policy objective is naive at best, dangerous incomprehension of regional dynamics in a key area of world instability at worst.
But that wasn’t just an off the cuff gaffe. It’s a point the Vermont senator has repeated in press releases for the past year: the war against ISIS, he said, “must be won primarily by nations in the region—Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan and Iran— which must be prepared to send ground troops into action to defeat Islamic extremists.”
You could argue that details of conflict in the Middle East and elsewhere can easily be acquired from briefings or delegated to competent aides, and you’d be right. It’s been done before. I wouldn’t consider that approach optimal, but it’s clear that Senator Sanders is no George W. Bush in temperament, intelligence or any other characteristic you might see fit to name.
That is however not the end of the story or even the most troubling aspect of this curious intransigence. Knowledge can be attained, but understanding requires a willingness to do so.
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Sanders’ lack of curiosity and apparent unwillingness to revisit a subject even faced with a live, nationally televised debate on it (as noted above) speaks to a character trait his colleagues are familiar with: his near-exclusive focus on matters he considers relevant, regardless of context.
The New York Times:
Mr. Sanders’s disdain for the things he views as unimportant is matched by his single-minded focus on the things he says are of real consequence, like the future of Social Security.
At the Democratic caucus lunches, at which he is a fixture, “all he ever talks about is Social Security,” one congressional aide said. “He doesn’t even try to relate it to the topic at hand.”
That focus was on display a few weeks ago when, on an especially slow day in the Senate with only a minor vote on the schedule, caucus members piled onto buses for a White House meeting with President Obama. Looking around the room, Mr. Obama was surprised to see Mr. Sanders.
“Bernie?” he said. “Shouldn’t you be out in New Hampshire?” There was a chuckle, and then the president asked Mr. Sanders what was on his mind.
“Social Security,” Mr. Sanders said.
Whether that’s a strength or a weakness, I’m not qualified to say. That is for the voters to decide. But I would hazard a guess that the media spotlight on Bernie Sanders will not fade soon.