Elizabeth Warren has been my favorite for the nomination since near the beginning of the campaign.
As time went on – and she came out quickly for impeachment, performed excellently in the early debates, gained momentum, wowed her growing crowds, spoke important truths, showed that she’d thought through a whole range of issues with care and intelligence – my enthusiasm grew.
Back in the summer, I wrote here that the Democratic nominee will likely be either Biden or Warren. And I argued that – as defeating Trump is the absolutely necessary thing in this upcoming presidential election (assuming that Trump survives to be on the 2020 ballot) -- we should hope that by the time people had to make choices, it will be clear that it is Warren who is really the candidate more certain to be able to defeat Trump.
(I said that because I think that Biden represents the Democrats’ old pattern of ineffectually fighting the destructive force that’s taken over the Republican Party over the past generation, whereas Warren seems more aware of how the battle needs to be fought.)
But now I’m worried. My worries center around the way Senator Warren has been dealing with the Medicare-for-All issue. I worry that she appears to be making an important unforced error in her positioning. And I worry about what that error might say about the way she thinks and acts politically.
Would “Medicare-for-All” be a good thing for America? Yes, probably. I hope we get to that kind of single-payer system. But it’s much less clear that getting from where we are now to Medicare-for-All in one step is a smart way to proceed, even in terms of policy.
It seems to make more sense to put in place the long-sought “public option” – which I believe equates to “Medicare for All Who Want It.” That would give the Medicare-style coverage the chance to demonstrate its superiority to what the corporate health insurance industry provides; and then, as people migrate to what gives them better coverage for less cost, the way would be cleared to inaugurate the single-payer system Warren (and Sanders) want to institute right away.
Maybe my judgment is wrong about that step-by-step approach. Maybe I could be convinced that – policy-wise – the single step into single-payer would be the best thing. But – when it comes to the politics -- I have been looking for a reason to believe that Warren’s “Medicare For All” position is smart, and I haven’t found it.
Rahm Emmanuel has never been a favorite of mine, but his recent op/ed in the Washington Post provides a persuasive articulation of why Warren’s position on this issue is troubling.
Emmanuel gives three reasons why “the politics [of Warren’s position] is a minefield”:
First, experience teaches us that much as Americans hate the status quo, they’re not too excited about change, either.
Second, policy is not everything — political communication counts, too.
Third, success ultimately rests with uniting your allies and dividing your opponents.
Medicare-for-all is guaranteed to frighten many among the vast majority of Americans who already have health coverage. It would require a disastrously unpopular tax increase on the middle class. And it would unite a world of the special interests against us.
Lots of polling backs him up. For example, only a quarter or so oppose a public option, while about half of people oppose Medicare for All.
As people have strong feelings about their health care security, it does seem dangerous to tell the roughly half the country -- that feels OK about the coverage they’re getting through their employment -- that they will no longer have the option of continuing their arrangement.
(Dangerous, meaning that unnecessarily scaring off a lot of voters might be the difference between getting rid of this wrecking-ball of a President, and thus enabling him demolish the foundations of our democracy for another four years.)
So I’ve been pondering: if Warren – who is still my favorite, though more shakily so – is making a bone-head play here, why is she doing it? What does it tell us about her? (Does it show her to be “rigid,” as I’ve heard suggested?)
I was disturbed to read one take on the “what does it tell us about her?” question, by someone I’ve respected greatly since early in the W administration, William Saletan, at Slate.
(NOTE: Back when there weren’t many people who saw how lawless and dishonest that GW Bush presidency was (something that America now seems to have collective amnesia about, since its crimes were never prosecuted or even investigated, and now that we’ve got a still-worse Republican President to worry about), Saletan was one of those who saw and wrote clearly about the dangerous path that President had taken this nation down.)
Saletan has plied his skilled analytic mind to how Elizabeth Warren has conducted herself on this issue—particularly in the most recent candidate debate. He calls her position both “coercive” and “unpopular,” and he worried that she is coming across as an “ideologue.” Saletan documents her unsatisfactory way of dealing with some challenging questions about “the wisdom of coercing everyone into Medicare” from CNN’s Van Jones. And he writes:
If that’s how she conducts herself in the general election [i.e. as an ideologue] —or if Republicans can effectively paint her that way—it substantially increases the danger that President Donald Trump will be reelected.
So, though I’m sticking with Warren, and don’t really have a fallback second choice, I worry.
Motivated by that worry, I reached out to a friend of mine – who is politically knowledgeable and astute, and with whom I’ve been discussing the American political situation since we first met in Berkeley in 1968 – to ask him a) if he thinks Warren’s Medicare for All position is a political mistake, and if so b) if she thinks there’s a way she could back away from it if she saw her position to be a mistake.
I like what he wrote back. Yes, he does think she’s erred in taking the position she has. And, though she’s been doubling down on it rather than backing away, if he were Warren, he would say “I hear you. The goal is Medicare for all, but the way forward is Medicare for Those Want It.”
And something like that is what I would like to see my still-favorite candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination come forward and say, to strengthen her positioning for the general election and to demonstrate her capacity to make a mid-course corrections when some misstep has made it necessary.