Progressive America Has No Problem With Female Politicians

Kylie Cheung of Rantt has written a problematic piece, "Ambitious, Overprepared, Opportunistic: America's Problem With Female Politicians," but while tackling any such problem would theoretically be a worthy venture, Cheung mostly just uses her article as an opportunity to recycle some of the tired, weaponized gender attacks of Hillary Clinton and her cult. Cheung:

"And as for Warren, despite how neatly she fits the mold of an economic progressive who's been fighting the same fight for years, the same likability politics that haunted Clinton are arguably in play here. A widely held belief among many Democrats is that Warren shouldn't run because she's too polarizing to be electable.

"Despite how Sanders and Warren are, in many ways, just the male and female versions of each other, 2017 polling shows Sanders is decently liked across the aisle while Warren is passionately despised by everyone outside of her general base of supporters. In other words, it's not her stances and candor--which she shares with the notably male Bernie Sanders--that render her 'unelectable.' It's her gender."

The poll you're citing (but perhaps didn't bother to read) measures the popularity of U.S. Senators in their home states, not, as you've suggested there, nationally. In the nearly-year-old poll, Warren has--or had--only 38% disapproval, placing her on the upper half of the popularity scale. Hardly "passionately despised."

It's also the case that no one of any note--no one--has made any case for Warren being "unelectable." It's a fact that she's a weak campaigner and that this would likely be a problem for her in a high-pressure presidential race but few have made any note of even this.[1] Warren is widely perceived as a presidential prospect and has received remarkably little flak for this so far, even from right-wing quarters where she is despised.

The reaction to Kamala Harris didn't, as you would have it, happen in a vacuum, nor did her gender play any part in it. Harris took a trip to the Hamptons to meet some bigshot oligarchs and Democratic Establishment types immediately began hitting the press to declare her the next Democratic presidential nominee. On most of the policies that matter to progressives, Harris was--and still is--a complete unknown and the rush by those who just lost the last election to publicly coronate her just because she'd shown some early signs of being willing to prostitute her future administration to the money-men was a toxic combination that immediately generated pushback, exactly as could be expected. Pretending this had anything to do with her gender (or, as also became popular on the Clintonite right, her race) is sheer demagoguery.

You note that Hillary Clinton was widely perceived as unlikable, unrelatable, inauthentic and put this down to sexism and misogyny. You don't like that "accusations of inauthenticity, establishment ties, corruption and coziness with donors" were thrown at Hillary Clinton but Clinton wasn't, as you would have it, seen as "inauthentic" because she was a woman; people saw her that way because she was, in fact, utterly inauthentic. In all her years in the public spotlight, she's never projected a single image of herself that didn't feel like some cynical, focus-group-tested put-on. In addition to coming off as heavily-scripted in public--because she is, in fact, heavily scripted in public--Clinton holds a master's degree in mendacity and she's been on every side of every important issue--blows with the political wind and seems to have no overriding political convictions other than those she's paid by her donors to hold. Her presidential campaign had no rationale beyond a narcissistic drive to be president for its own sake. Her attacks on Sanders and progressives were relentlessly disingenuous, slanderous and sickening and the personality-cult that gathered around her only amplified them, making the situation worse. Clinton and her husband had been central figures in driving the Democratic party to the right and into the arms of the same donor class that already owned the Republican party. They are Corruption Inc., and noting this historical fact entails not even a whiff of gender bias.

Your article jousts with phantoms. "The idea that we should not back women for office because they won't win," you write, is "harmful" and is "sexism." It would be if anyone made such an argument but, of course, no one has. While you falsely tar progressives as "sexists," you write things like this:

"The election of pro-choice Democratic Sen. Doug Jones in Alabama proved to Democrats that the key to winning in red states isn't compromising on fundamental values..."

In his very brief time in the U.S. Senate, Doug Jones has voted against the Dreamers and in favor of granting Trump expanded wireless surveillance powers. If that's the kind of "winning" you want to do, well, it pretty much speaks for itself. The progressives you attack with the accusation of sexism--an accusation you, of course, knew to be false before you made it--are, in fact, presently fielding a large and growing army of Berniecrat candidates around the U.S. intent on taking back the congress this year and they're disproportionately women (and people of color). The future of the Democratic party isn't in the tired, corrupt rightist Clintons and Doug Joneses and Kirsten Gillibrands; it's in people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez running in New York, Paula Jean Swearengin in West Virginia, Jenny Marshall in North Carolina and Sarah Smith in Washington. Progressives aren't some sexist obstacle to be overcome in the fight for that future; they're the ones leading it.

Rather than address progressives' genuine concerns about overly conservative and corrupt candidates, you parrot the deflection of the Clinton cult about "the far-left Sanders wing" of the Democratic party and how it's unreasonably obsessed with "ideological purity." Here's a fact about Bernie Sanders: his positions on the major issues represent the views of the broad center of political opinion in the U.S., including, often, even majorities of Republicans. He's not "far-left"; he is the center. The real center. And his policies are overwhelmingly popular within the Democratic party. In trying to marginalize those views, you only succeed in marginalizing yourself.[2]

I'm sure many will continue to harp on this tired--so tired--theme of Clinton as the crucified martyr to a a sexist America, but as so many women rise through the political ranks, those harpists are, at some point, simply gong to have to come to grips with the fact that Clinton didn't lose because she was a woman, she lost because she was a terrible candidate and people don't like her. Those of you enthralled by Clinton draw some sort of comfort from pretending this was all down to her girl-parts but the world is passing you by; the longer you cling to your myth, the further behind you will fall.

--j.

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[1] It's also the case that in the national polling on Warren, she still has pretty high unknowns.

[2] And while you accuse Sanders of furnishing Trump with his anti-Clinton playbook, you link to another Rantt rant where another Rantt clown is using Trump's phrase "alt-left" to slander progressives.

Jake Novak Tries To Burn the Bern

CNBC "senior columnist" Jake Novak has ground out a hideous screed, "Bernie Sanders Is Still All Talk." His premise is that "Bernie Sanders is wasting his political capital, hurting Democrats aims and his own legacy," and Novak seems determined, in a relatively brief space, to try to squeeze in every vacuous anti-Sanders trope and calumny of the Clinton cult, with little regard for how distant from both relevance and reality itself most of them fall.

It's as if Novak is working from a checklist.

His big theme is a very familiar--and very tired--one: Sanders is a do-nothing. More than a year after Sanders presidential bid, Novak asserts, "so far, he's still all talk." While boldly consigning most of Sanders' activities in the past year to a Memory Hole and downplaying the rest (back to that in a moment), Novak writes that "Democrats need Sanders to do more than rant." And, being a good Concern Troll, he adds, "And [Sanders] needs to more than that as well, if he wants a legitimate political future." Of Sanders' attacks on Republicans, "America is filled with people" who do that. Sanders has "an ability to attract previously apathetic or disillusioned Americans and encourage them to vote and even work for a campaign... yet he's been sitting on the sidelines since the 2016 election ended."

Sitting on the sidelines. Hold that thought.

Attentive readers will see this next one coming. Novak goes into full robot mode: "But Sanders doesn't seem the least bit interested in getting into actual governing. In fact, he still isn't even officially a member of the Democratic Party." And one must be a member of the Democratic party to have any serious interest in governing, right?

Robot mode: "Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. Sanders has been in Congress since 1991, but has barely had a legislative impact in Washington during that 27 year period."

Robot mode: "Maybe he has renewed reasons not to get more involved like his advancing age; he is 76 after all."

Maybe, Robot Novak writes, Sanders do-nothing-ism is motivated by "a potential headache brewing at home" and he drops a reference to--you guessed it--the FBI investigation of Burlington College, which both Clinton cultists and the rightist Republicans who initiated it have long hoped will somehow ensnare Sanders' wife Jane. Novak devotes an entire paragraph to it.

Now here's a little reality check. Since he ended his presidential campaign, Mr. "Sitting On The Sidelines" Sanders has, in fact, been an indefatigable workhorse in advancing the progressive agenda. Some of the highlights: He and Amy Klobuchar offered an amendment that would have gotten the Senate to take up the question of legally allowing importation of much cheaper prescription drugs from abroad. Sanders managed to convince 13 Republicans to support the amendment, an extraordinary accomplishment, only to see his work torpedoed by Cory Booker's Dirty Dozen--"Democrats" financed by Big Pharma. Sanders has introduced legislation to strip pharmaceutical companies of their patents on medications developed on the public dime if said companies price-gouge the public, to make drug companies pay rebates to Medicaid when they increase the prices of generic drugs at a rate higher than inflation, to allow Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices. He's teamed with James Clyburn to introduce legislation to more than double federal funding to community health centers around the U.S.. He's crafted a bill aimed at cracking down on corporate tax-dodging, another at expanding Social Security benefits and extending the life of the program. He's introduced his latest plan for providing tuition-free higher education at public colleges and universities, advanced a bill that would raise the minimum wage to $15/hour, teamed with Jeff Merkley and Edward Markey to introduce legislation to "to build a 100 percent renewable energy economy by 2050," rolled out the latest iteration of Medicare-for-all healthcare reform and has so far gotten a third of the Democratic caucus in the Senate to sign on to it. He and Elizabeth Warren have introduced a $146 billion "Marshall Plan for Puerto Rico" aimed at rebuilding the destroyed island using, among other things, renewable energy sources. In all, Sanders has, in the past 12 months, sponsored 39 bills and co-sponsored 181 others.

In between all of this, Sanders, who is the head of Democratic outreach in the Senate,[1] has also spent the entire year touring on behalf of progressive causes--the "Unity" tour, a tour on behalf of healthcare, a "jobs, healthcare and the economy" tour, a tour in opposition to the recent Republican tax bill, as well as a plethora of other stops for other causes along the way (including endorsing a raft of Democratic candidates around the U.S.).[2] He’s been a strong voice for progressive opposition to Trumpism in four primetime CNN debates, seriously mopping the floor with his Republican opponents in three of them. While the Democratic National Committee is facing a fundraising crisis this past year as a consequence of blowback from its conspiring with the Clinton campaign to screw over Sanders in 2016, Sanders, who is Not Even A Democrat, donated $100,000 to the committee.

Given that Republicans presently control all branches of government and refuse to work with Democrats on much of anything or allow them any substantive role in governance, what does Novak think Sanders should be doing that Sanders isn't?

Well, Novak is one of those unthoughtful journalists who, seemingly oblivious to the present political reality established by the ruling party, evaluates a lefty politician's seriousness by how willing that pol is to entirely abandon his own principles up front in the name of "compromise." He writes that, "unlike the tax bill, the current budget and immigration issues will require at least some Democratic votes to resolve, handing [Democrats] a golden opportunity." And to tackle it, Novak thinks Bernie ought "to get involved and push for some real compromise." A real leader, as Novak sees it, isn't someone who fights for what he believes; instead, "real political leaders have to make compromises." Sanders recently wrote an editorial in which he insisted there be no end to DACA protections, better protection for Social Security and Medicare, etc.; instead of seeing these as baseline markers, Novak snips, "those are more like demands than opening offers..." He hits Sanders for being "a no-show at that big publicly televised meeting at the White House Tuesday on the budget and immigration issues," as if Sanders can simply invite himself to a tightly-controlled White House event with the "president."[3] Concern Troll thinks Sanders is about ego: "At some point, he may realize that making deals is the better choice if he wants to carve out a real legacy for himself."
It's pretty clear Sanders would think a much better legacy would be to see finally adopted the policies for which he has fought his entire life. Sanders has lain the groundwork for this but Novak is having none of it. In evaluating Sanders' extensive legislative agenda, Novak simply erases all but two items as if the rest never existed. Then, he dismisses both. And anything else Sanders might offer:

"Sanders did craft a bill calling for the federal government to negotiate prescription drug prices for the entire country like it currently does for Medicare. But the bill went nowhere and there's no evidence that Sanders made any effort to negotiate the plan with the White House.

"He has another bill to provide single-payer style health coverage for all Americans that has more than a dozen Democrat co-signers, but that bill isn't going anywhere.

"Proposing bills that have no chance of passing in a majority Republican Congress isn't the best way Bernie can use whatever political capital he earned from the election."

Most of Sanders' proposals can't, in fact, pass at present but with them, Sanders has endeavored to provide an ambitious, affirmative--and extremely popular--legislative agenda around which Democrats can rally, one that gives voters something to support, something more than, "hey, at least we're not the Republicans." This is exactly what Democrats will need to battle Republicans this year and in 2020. With Novak, though, this counts for nothing. A pointless waste of political capital--Bernie should, instead, be at the White House tv show with Trump selling out the "Dreamers" to Republicans (who won't give him anything in return).  Like a real leader.


Or maybe not.

--j.

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[1] A fact that puts Novak's complaints about all Sanders' talking on rather shaky ground. Not that Novak ever acknowledges this. He is aware of Sanders' position though--he even mentions it.

[2] Our Revolution and Brand New Congress, founded by former members of Sanders' campaign, are working on behalf of an astonishing number of crowd-funded, Bernie-inspired progressive candidates who have sprang up all over the U.S..

[3] Or should even bother, even if asked. Trump's big televised "summit" was nothing more than a PR stunt intended to counter recent reports that questioned his mental health. Trump put on a show of being utterly reasonable, agreed with everything everyone suggested, even Democrats, then immediately after the meeting was over, started walking back his agreeable words toward Democrats, just as he always does in these circumstances. The White House even published a transcript of the event from which it omitted a key line in which Trump agreed there should be a clean DACA bill. Novak thinks a willingness to participate in such a farce makes a pol serious and a leader.

A Little History of Healthcare Reform

As many of the articles archived here attest, it's hardly novel to encounter Clinton cultists making jaw-droppingly stupid claims. The louder ones seem, in fact, to be grossly misinformed about just about everything with regard to public affairs (or at least the public affairs on which they choose to comment). Among other things, there seems to be no limit to the lengths to which the cult will go to try to credit Clinton with something historical, groundbreaking, gooder-than-good. Hanging out on Medium, I came across a curious Clinton cultist who furiously objected to my citing the fact that Bernie Sanders is largely responsible for the current Democratic drive for single payer "Medicare For All" healthcare and had gotten it into her head that it was Hillary Clinton who "was the one who first brought [single payer healthcare] to the national stage" and, more generally, that Clinton was "the first person in America to get the idea of a federal government supported healthcare system to the national stage." And she said I was obviously ignorant of history.

Yeah.

Having some time on my hands, I authored a response that became a bit of a mini-history of healthcare reform efforts in the U.S., one I thought I'd preserve here. I've slightly reworked this version of it to make it more of a standalone piece (the original is here).

National health insurance initiatives started appearing in Europe in the 1880s. In the U.S., the Socialist party under Eugene Debs began advocating national healthcare in 1904; Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive party adopted it in 1912 but Teddy lost the election.

The original proposal for Social Security included health coverage but American Medical Association opposition to this led FDR to drop it instead of imperiling the entire SS effort. In 1939, New York Sen. Robert Wagner, the author of the Social Security Act, first introduced what became known as the Wagner National Health Act. This went through several evolutions in the new few years to become the Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill, a comprehensive national health program. When Harry Truman became president, he endorsed it and the AMA launched the biggest campaign in its history up to then to kill it. That campaign succeeded but the legislation become something of a fixture; it was reintroduced in every congressional session for years, and when it's sponsor John Dingell died, his son, John Jr., was elected to fill his seat and continued reintroducing it right up until 2010.

The 1950s saw the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) call for a comprehensive national healthcare plan; it would continue to do so for decades.

The '60s, of course, saw the creation of Medicare. Upon its adoption, UAW president Walter Reuther called for a national healthcare program and created the Committee for National Health Insurance, which crafted a model program that was subsequently introduced in the Senate by Ted Kennedy. That same year, 1970, saw two other single payer bills introduced in the body. Kennedy would, for years, continue to introduce versions of his legislation, sometimes his own, sometimes in concert with others, and competing national health proposals by Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and various legislators consumed the decade. In 1971, a then-obscure fellow named Bernie Sanders entered his first political campaign, a third-party bid for governor of Vermont. "There is absolutely no rational reason why in the United States of America today," he said, "we could not have full and total free medical care for all." In 1972, he jumped into another campaign, this one for U.S. Senate, on a platform that included "provid[ing] free and excellent medical and dental care for all." He has continued to advocate the same to this day. The '70s also saw, among so many other things, the Medical Committee for Human Rights--the medical arm of the civil rights movement--launch a campaign for national healthcare. In 1977, California congressman Ron Dellums, in cooperation with the MCHR, crafted the National Health Service Act, which would have created a full-blown British healthcare system in the U.S.. Dellums reintroduced this legislation in every congress until his 1998 retirement from the body. His successor, congresswoman Barbara Lee, continued to reintroduce it into the present century.

In the 1980s, the issue was generally shoved to the backburner but the decade also saw the creation of Physicians for a National Health Program, which was and continues to be one of the major advocates for single payer. By 1988, a majority of respondents were telling pollsters they supported the idea; that same year, Jesse Jackson ran for president on a platform that included it (Bernie Sanders, then mayor of Burlington, would endorse Jackson, citing this as one of his top reasons for doing so). The end of the decade also saw the publication by the Heritage Foundation of "A National Health System For America," the first link in a chain that would eventually morph into Obamacare, and the creation by the House of Representatives of the Claude Pepper Commission, established to study the healthcare issue.

The 1990s opened with that commission's report, which didn't endorse single payer but was important for documenting the gathering healthcare crisis and was prescient as to where it was likely heading. In 1991, only six months into his first term in congress, independent congressman Bernie Sanders introduced the National Healthcare and Cost Containment Act, which would have created a single-payer delivery system to be administered by the states. Hawaiian Sen. Daniel Inouye introduced the NASW's proposed single payer plan, the National Health Care Act, in 1992 and 1993. In '92, Michigan Rep. John Conyers also introduced his first single-payer bill, the Health Care For Every American Act. He would continue to tinker with this proposal over the years and has reintroduced a version of it many times. That same year saw both then-House Republican leader Bob Michel and, on the other side of the aisle, Democratic congressmen Jim Cooper and Mike Andrews, working together, introduce much less radical "managed competition" healthcare plans. In 1993, Washington Rep. Jim McDermott introduced a single payer plan and Bernie Sanders and John Conyers became its original co-sponsors. McDermott too would reintroduce this plan repeatedly over the years; Sanders himself would craft and propose multiple single-payer plans over the decades to come as well.

It was six months later that Hillary Clinton came along to become, in that Clinton cultist's narrative, "the first person in America to get the idea of a federal government supported healthcare system to the national stage."

Clinton's plan as it emerged--popularly dubbed "Hillarycare"--was an industry-friendly "managed competition" plan largely lifted from that of Republican leader Michel (who, himself, subsequently introduced a different plan). The notion that it was Clinton "who first brought [single payer healthcare] to the national stage" seems rooted in an odd but apparently popular myth that Hillarycare was a single payer plan. It, of course, wasn't, and Hillary Clinton has never, in fact, advocated single payer healthcare.[1]

Hillarycare led to a flurry of competing Republican plans, the major one being the one that would eventually become Obamacare. There were Democratic alternatives as well.

When Barack Obama became president, he endorsed that Republican plan. Various Republicans had, by then, advocated essentially that same plan for 15 years. Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who would later be Obama's Republican opponent in the 2012 presidential race, had actually enacted the plan in his state. Upon Obama's endorsement though, Republicans abandoned it as a monolith, dubbing it damnable "socialized medicine." Congress would pass it, Obama would sign it into law and it would go on to take a very bad healthcare situation in the U.S. and, for the most part, just make it worse.

Clinton cultists commonly argue that Obamacare was some sort of "first step" toward single payer. The cultist that inspired this piece argued that "Democrats have been steadily moving towards a single payer system through [Obamacare's] expansion of Medicaid," but that's neither a "single payer system" nor was it ever even envisioned as morphing into one. Nor, in fact, would it have ever become law if anyone involved would have believed that was even possible. As had happened with Clinton's deliberations in the '90s, single payer advocates were locked out of the process of crafting reform. The Medicaid expansion was just to help provide coverage to people at the bottom of the scale in the context of preserving for-profit insurance. Obamacare put the failed insurance companies on federal welfare, which, in turn, helps subsidize their purchase of legislators and makes any effort at real reform increasingly difficult. Obama's proposed public option, the major innovation in his own initial version of this plan, could have created a mechanism for a slow transition to single payer--too slow to be particularly helpful--but Obama threw even it away in a backroom deal with hospital lobbyists in the earliest stages of the reform debate.

When, in 2015, Bernie Sanders, then a senator, introduced his latest single payer plan, no one--not a single senator--stepped up to co-sponsor it. Sanders' strong advocacy on this issue throughout the 2016 presidential cycle and beyond has meant that public support of the idea has continued to grow and 1/3 of the Senate Democratic caucus has now gotten behind his latest single payer plan, including all of the 2020 presidential hopefuls in the body. His advocacy has paid off in the House as well. In 2015, John Conyers' single player plan had only 49 co-sponsors; it now has 120, the most in its history. Some of this support in both bodies will no doubt prove to be opportunistic but Sanders has moved the needle. These facts certainly present quite a contrast with 2016's Hillary Clinton, screeching like some insane Alex Jones-ite monster about how single payer "will never, ever come to pass!!!"

--j.

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[1] Hillary Clinton has never advocated any "universal healthcare" plan either, a phrase that is often used to obscure. Her support of "universal healthcare" is limited to falsely pretending as if the plans she has endorsed, all of which would indisputably have left millions of Americans with nothing, are "universal."