David Michael Miller
By the time the presidential nominating process gets around to Wisconsin on April 5, it’s likely to be all over but the shouting. About 30 states will vote before we do. There could be some questions left on the Republican side — I can’t bring myself to conclude that Donald Trump will have it locked up by then.
But for the Democrats it’s very likely that Hillary Clinton will be the presumptive nominee by early March. That’s not to say she should be. But even if Sanders wins in Iowa and New Hampshire, Clinton enjoys large double-digit leads in the next two states, Nevada and South Carolina. Then comes Super Tuesday on March 1, where Sanders might be competitive in a third of the 12 states holding Democratic contests that day. By then Clinton should be rolling to the nomination.
So Sanders’ candidacy is still a long shot, but Clinton, the people around her and some prominent East Coast pundits have taken a new and revealing line. It turns out that Sanders’ ideas are impractical.
The devil you say! It never occurred to me! Tell me more.
Well, kids, a single-payer health care system, they point out, just wouldn’t pass this Congress. I’m sure this comes as a complete shock to all those Sanders supporters out there. I’m sure they haven’t noticed that the Republicans control Congress or that that Congress has passed bills repealing the Affordable Care Act no less than 60 times. I’m sure they’re just now coming to grips with the realization that even when the Democrats ran the show they couldn’t get the “public option,” which was a sort of weak-tea single-payer system.
I’m sure millions of Sanders supporters are now thanking Clinton for explaining recent history and the American system of democracy to them. After all, the Bernie people are not the kind to be reading newspapers or studying the issues.
Listen, folks, nobody thinks single-payer health insurance is just around the corner, even if Sanders somehow won the election. Sanders is creating excitement on the left because he dares to talk about it. This is something that Clinton and normally sensible pundits like Paul Krugman and Charles M. Blow can’t or won’t get.
Clinton exudes the conventional strategy of the Democratic Party, whose recent track record is, ah, not so good. Republicans not only control both houses of Congress but a record number of state legislative seats and 31 governors offices.
And how did the Republicans get there? It wasn’t by reading the polls so closely. The GOP has been proposing one bold and bad and mostly unpopular policy after another and still winning elections. Obamacare is a good example. While the title itself is unpopular, the individual elements of the program are not. If the Republicans actually succeeded in repealing the provisions allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ plans or preventing health insurance companies from denying coverage based on preexisting conditions, there would be hell to pay.
And prominent Republican lawmakers like Paul Ryan continue to proffer the idea of disrupting Social Security with a loony privatization plan. Think what you want about Ryan, he’s not afraid to cozy on up to the third rail of American politics.
Siphoning money from public schools to pay for private ones, crippling or destroying public and private unions, allowing guns anywhere anytime, ripping down civil service protections, selling off public lands and on and on. None of those ideas was being demanded by the public, and most were pretty unpopular when they were proposed. And all are coming to reality someplace in the United States, most notably right here in Wisconsin.
The point that Sanders and his followers understand is that we won’t get a single-payer system, we won’t bring Wall Street to heel, we won’t have a sensible campaign finance system and we won’t win a fair share of the economic pie for the poor and the middle class unless we first talk about those things, unless we place those items on the national agenda.
The brilliance of what the Republicans have done in all their extremism is that they’ve pulled the entire conversation way to the right. The brilliance of what Bernie Sanders is doing is that he’s forcing us to consider what a liberal future might look like.
And his success so far is likely to inspire more liberal candidates to be more outspoken down the ticket this time and in the future. It’s likely to even spark another similarly positioned candidate in the next presidential election.
The numbers just don’t bode well for him, but if Sanders is still standing and viable by the time Wisconsin gets its two days of fame in early April, that will be a good thing for the public conversation whether or not the man ever gets to be president.
