The Democratic race is shaping up as most of the candidates expected, with the campaign appealing to the most fervent progressive wing of the party showing formidable strength. It’s just that Bernie Sanders is the one running that campaign.
At the beginning, everyone wanted to hug Bernie in the hope of replacing him. They’d be younger, more diverse, fresher, more acceptable to the Democratic mainstream or more electable than the old, white, male socialist standard-bearer.
Who could resist getting everything that Sanders stands for in a more politically palatable vehicle? The answer seems to be Democratic voters.
The would-be Bernies, who became uncertain over time whether that’s who they really wanted to be, have dropped out, or, in the case of Elizabeth Warren, lost altitude, while Bernie has a serious shot. The Bernie model is working for Bernie where it failed everyone else.
The foremost reason is authenticity. No one believed that Cory Booker — who the day before yesterday was the pragmatic mayor of Newark, championing charter schools and teaming up with then-Gov. Chris Christie and Mark Zuckerberg on an education initiative — was a progressive warrior.
No one bought into Kirsten Gillibrand, the erstwhile moderate from an upstate New York House district, as a left-wing purist.
Yet all of them stood with Bernie and endorsed his version of Medicare for All.
The plan would require massive taxes, entail huge cuts in payments to doctors and hospitals, forbid private insurance and impose a more restrictive and generous government-run health care system on the US than exists in European social democracies. It’s not something you endorse lightly, but Booker & Co. did. They all wobbled, hedged their bets or flip-flopped, demonstrating, if there were any doubt, their insincerity on a key issue with deep philosophical implications.
Warren has suffered from the same disease. She has didn’t want to admit she’d have to raise taxes on the middle class.
This led to an agonizing climbdown. She settled on the implausible compromise position that she’d initially pursue incremental health care policies until passing Medicare for All in the third year of her presidency, when presidents aren’t at a high ebb of their legislative power.
It’s no accident that the candidate thriving in the Bernie lane is the only one who is still a full-throated proponent of Medicare for All, namely, Bernie himself.
Warren’s struggles with Medicare for All played against a backdrop of other authenticity issues, most famously her purported Native American heritage. Bernie has no such issues, in fact, the opposite.