A Peace Flag to encourage gentleness, even in disagreement.
First, a link to Laura’s diary. Laura is one of the best writers anywhere on things that affect working people. I share of a lot of the same interests and have lots of links to Laura Clawson diaries filed away with their useful data on various topics that I might write about some day. So let me start by saying thank you to Laura for all that great work. And let me say that I share some of the same frustrations with Bernie Sanders. He avoids giving details a lot of the time and talks in generalities. And he refuses to accept certain framing when it seems obvious that he should. For example, one of the things that most frustrates me is that he seems to insist on class-based solutions as the lone approach to race-based injuries, and absolutely refusing to accept the premise that part of the solutions must also be race-based.
But there are reasons why Bernie chooses to work the way he does. First, he is a politician with decades of experience and he has learned what works and doesn’t work over time. It’s not that he doesn’t have specific plans and it’s not that those plans don’t really add up. (More on that later.) The reason that Bernie avoids specifics sometimes is that he knows that you sell the smell and not the popcorn. In other words, he knows what motivates people to agree, to buy the political product he is selling. Details of plans are not really that exciting, at least not for most of us. Bold ideas and discussion of things like fairness and justice are exciting and appealing. They are the pleasant smell at the movie theater that makes you want the popcorn.
That is one of the key reasons that Bernie is doing better with young people than Hillary is. She is selling experience and details in plans. She is trying to sell the popcorn without the smell. But, if you are a detail person/wonk like Laura, you want to discuss details. That is what excites you. Hillary is also a wonk. She loves discussing details. (Bill is the salesman in the Clinton family. Of the two, Hillary has always been the one who can sit in a room alone and figure out how to do policies. I am from Arkansas and have long experience with them and people who know them and have worked with them. Bill doesn’t usually do well if locked in a room by himself for very long.) Anyway, it is no surprise that Laura is drawn to Hillary. They appreciate the same things, those details that make the policies work or not work.
To demonstrate how this focus on details has worked against Hillary in the past, in 2008 she actually had a better plan for health care reform than President Obama did. He insisted on no mandates and she said you couldn’t make the plan work without the mandates. President Obama eventually had to concede the point and mandates are now part of the Affordable Care Act. But, even though she had the better plan, he had the better sales pitch. She even mocked his hope and change mantra during the primaries. But hope and change beat out having the right details in her plan.
One of the downsides of focusing on the smell and never getting to the popcorn/details is that sometimes people begin to suspect that there isn’t really any popcorn, that it’s all just an illusion designed to fool you into buying something that isn’t really there. In the debates, Hillary has actually said that his plans don’t add up, that it’s all smell and no popcorn, that there is no there there. But with Bernie, there actually is a there there. If you listen to people like Paul Krugman, you get the impression that no one who knows anything about Wall Street or Healthcare thinks Bernie’s plans add up. But, simply put, when it comes to Wall Street, Bernie is on the same page with Elizabeth Warren and Hillary is not. (link) And when it comes to Health Care, experts agree that Bernie’s plan does add up and even his critics have said single payer is the best choice to move forward. (link) And let’s not forget Foreign Policy either. Bernie does have foreign policy advisors and is more serious on foreign policy than he gets credit for. (link)
Laura is right that Bernie has not really discussed the potential downsides of single payer, like rationing healthcare. She accuses Bernie, and this is where I most strongly disagree with her diary, of being dishonest, selling the smell without talking about the questionable quality of the popcorn. But what Laura is possibly unaware of is that experts say that single payer is the best popcorn/healthcare system available. President Obama always thought that his new healthcare plan would gradually transition to single payer. He hasn’t talked a lot about that and hasn’t really discussed the downsides either, but he thought it would be the best outcome. Ezra Klein even said publicly at Netroots in 2009 that Obamacare was designed to lead to a single payer plan. Ezra was advocating for single payer in the Washington Post as recently as November 2013. Even Paul Krugman has admitted that single payer is the best option available. His only concern was how to get it passed. He also thought, as did President Obama, that some transitional phase would be necessary before we could get to single payer. (All those links and more here.)
Of all those advocating for single payer at some point, including President Obama, none of them have really discussed the downsides publicly. You can look around on the internet, especially the parts frequented by conservative Republicans, and find more discussion than you want to read about all the horrors of single payer. As mentioned above in the smell and popcorn discussions, there is a reason Bernie is framing the discussion around the idea that if other countries can have this better health care system, then so can we. He is selling the idea that health care should be a right. If we can get people to agree that healthcare is a basic right, then we can get to the implementation. Remember that President Obama sold hope and change but implemented Hillary’s plan with the mandates, instead of his own non-mandate plan.
Are mandates bad for some people who make too much money for subsidies but still can’t really afford the policies available to an individual, or others in similar positions? Of course they are. Was it dishonest for President Obama to campaign on one plan and then implement another? Some people might think so. But he sold the idea and then implemented what he had to in order for it to work. As Mario Cuomo is famous for saying, we campaign in poetry and govern in prose. For now, it might be best to focus on the idea rather than the details. If we sell the idea, then we can work out the implementation. And all of this might be a moot question without a different congress. The current congress probably isn’t interested in improving Obamacare, even incrementally.
As Ezra noted in that November 2013 tweet, our healthcare system is absurd and most people hate it. We need to replace it with single payer. That is why we need leaders who can sell the idea rather than the implementation. We need someone who can sell the smell, not the popcorn. We do need someone who can inspire the masses. Even though the numbers are not at 2008 levels yet, it is clear that Bernie is inspiring young people and running a very competitive race against Secretary Clinton. In New Hampshire he had more votes than the top two Republicans put together. (link) As more people become convinced he is electable, those numbers will grow. He already beats the Republicans in polls by larger margins than Hillary, even without her level of name recognition.
Laura also defends Hillary’s experience and reputation and discusses the unfair sexism that Hillary faces. I will concede that Hillary faces sexism and that it isn’t right, and if I were a woman, that would probably inspire me more to support her. I’m not quite sure what a man, without sounding sexist, could say about a woman voting for another woman out of gender loyalty. So I’m going to leave that alone and just discuss Bernie’s experience and try to highlight some differences between them. For someone who has been accused of being a pie-in-the-sky all-hat-no-cattle idealist, Bernie has gotten a lot done over his career, earning the nickname of the Amendment King. And he has a separate impressive record on civil and human rights. He has also been a prolific Democratic fundraiser, despite accusations in public debates to the contrary.
So let’s look at some of the differences between Bernie and Hillary. Here is one in a tweet from Laura’s diary:
Yes Bernie voted for the Crime Bill. So did many black members of congress and other black community leaders supported it. Here is what Michelle Alexander had to say about that support for the bill within the black community:
Of course, it can be said that it’s unfair to criticize the Clintons for punishing black people so harshly, given that many black people were on board with the “get tough” movement too. It is absolutely true that black communities back then were in a state of crisis, and that many black activists and politicians were desperate to get violent offenders off the streets. What is often missed, however, is that most of those black activists and politicians weren’t asking only for toughness. They were also demanding investment in their schools, better housing, jobs programs for young people, economic-stimulus packages, drug treatment on demand, and better access to healthcare. In the end, they wound up with police and prisons. To say that this was what black people wanted is misleading at best.
For me, it is hard to watch this speech by Bernie about the Crime Bill, without feeling that he was on the same page with the black community. He saying exactly what Alexander said the black community wanted:
But what about Hillary and the blame attributed to her? According to Alexander, it isn’t really the crime bill itself that is the problem. It is that she offers incremental solutions when a larger agenda (like what Bernie is advocating for) is needed:
To be fair, the Clintons now feel bad about how their politics and policies have worked out for black people. Bill says that he “overshot the mark” with his crime policies; and Hillary has put forth a plan to ban racial profiling, eliminate the sentencing disparities between crack and cocaine, and abolish private prisons, among other measures.
But what about a larger agenda that would not just reverse some of the policies adopted during the Clinton era, but would rebuild the communities decimated by them? If you listen closely here, you’ll notice that Hillary Clinton is still singing the same old tune in a slightly different key. She is arguing that we ought not be seduced by Bernie’s rhetoric because we must be “pragmatic,” “face political realities,” and not get tempted to believe that we can fight for economic justice and win. When politicians start telling you that it is “unrealistic” to support candidates who want to build a movement for greater equality, fair wages, universal healthcare, and an end to corporate control of our political system, it’s probably best to leave the room.
Again, it is Bernie’s big visionary message, rather than detailed policy proposals, that appeals. What we are getting right now is a lot of the enticing aroma with often vague references to what the popcorn should look like. The campaigning is being done in poetry. We are selling the smell. The governing comes later . And it will necessarily be done in prose. Only then will we really get to the popcorn.
