While Republicans are in rebellion against each other over saving the lives and economic health of America, Politico is on the hunt for a "Dems in Disarray" story. They think they found one in a push by delegates to the Democratic National Convention to include a "Medicare for All" plank in the national platform, which they're trying to make into a big deal break between presumptive nominee Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders.
The 360 delegates pledging to vote against the platform if it doesn’t include Medicare for All, Politico says, are Sanders backers. “This pandemic has shown us that our private health insurance system does not work for the American people. Millions of people have lost their jobs and their health care at the same time,” said Judith Whitmer, a Sanders delegate from Nevada who helped spearhead the pledge. “There’s people leaving the hospital now with millions of dollars in medical bills. What are we going to do about that?” It’s is a really smart question, and one that lots of people who are not even Sanders supporters are also asking because it's kind of a really big deal.
“The sea change that’s underway could swell as a result of this initiative,” Norman Solomon, national director of RootsAction.org and a Sanders delegate, told Politico. “It’s a reasonable hope that historians will look back at the next couple of weeks as a time when hundreds of delegates stepped forward and said, ‘This is a red line for a humane society and we’re not going to stop saying so.’” Four paragraphs down, Solomon adds, "We're going to fight like hell for Biden. And there's no contradiction between doing that and supporting this pledge."
The draft language on health care now includes this: “Generations of Democrats have been united in the fight for universal health care. We are proud our party welcomes advocates who want to build on and strengthen the Affordable Care Act and those who support a Medicare for All approach; all are critical to ensuring that health care is a human right.“ Yeah, it falls a little short and yeah, with the Trump administration trying to destroy the Affordable Care Act, putting a point on the fact that we're fighting for truly universal health care would be helpful.
But here's the thing: Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has been working with Biden for months on building unity task forces to drive the platform, told his delegates in a Zoom call last week, “Did we get everything we wanted? Obviously we didn’t. That's for sure. But I think we reached agreements on all, in all of these areas." He's okay with it and encouraged his delegates to “engage in coalition politics with the goal of defeating Trump,” and to ”make sure that a Biden administration is the most progressive administration in modern American history."
This is the platform and it’s important, but not the be-all, end-all of the convention. The ringleaders of this effort have made it clear that they're not going to use it to oppose Biden. It's not going to blow up the virtual convention. It is an area of contention between progressives and moderates? Yes. Is it “Democrats in disarray?” Not by a long shot.
