This is not about math — this is about people’s lives, and we should level with the American people. Every progressive economist who has analyzed that say the numbers don’t add up. And we should level with the American people about what we can do to get quality affordable health care. — Hillary Clinton, at […]
Socialism has always appealed to the young, the cure for which isn’t age but responsibility. This usually comes in the form of taxes and children, both of which involve working and sacrificing for the benefit of others, the extent of which forms the axis upon which all politics turns. That Sanders never outgrew his own […]
A progressive is someone who makes progress. That’s what I intend to do. — Hillary Clinton, during last night’s debate. Clinton also thinks a “conservative” is someone who conserves. Which, she says, also is what she intends to do. First, though, she intends to redefine the entire Oxford English Dictionary. Progressive, and presumably then, conservative don’t […]
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. I have been firmly in the conventional wisdom camp that Bernie would never be the ultimate candidate and so as much as I always wanted to “Feel the Bern” and more or less identify with Sanders as a Social […]
Okay, what she actually said is that she can’t be part of the establishment, because she is a woman. Because by definition, women aren’t part of the establishment. Shucks! No one told all those corporate folks who paid her $225,000 to hear her reminisce to them about how stressful it was to advise President Obama on whether he should approve the raid on […]
I’ve been a fan of New Republic senior editor Brian Beutler dating back to his days as a Salon writer, but in a piece today called “Bernie Sanders Will Be Unelectable If He Keeps This Up” he misinterprets the essence of Sanders’s current criticism of Clinton as a fair-weather progressive in a way that I […]
It’s worth noting that Clinton has an interesting built-in advantage here. Clinton is campaigning as the candidate of continuity, at least in the sense that she is promising to build incrementally on the Obama agenda, while Sanders is implicitly arguing that the change of the Obama era has been woefully insubstantial when compared with the […]
Clinton received 49.8 percent support and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) received 49.6 percent support, according to the Iowa Democratic Party’s website. — Talking Points Memo, 1:11 p.m. Okay. I do not think Clinton won the caucuses. I watched the entire count, on my computer, on the New York Times website, which had a map of Iowa, […]
Clinton put her presidential experience in stark terms by telling detail-laden stories about her political life, including one about dealing with a terrorist threat around President Barack Obama’s first inauguration from the White House’s Situation Room. “I was able to bring my years of experience to the forefront,” Clinton said about having to decide whether […]
Sarah Kliff has a very helpful account of Vermont’s attempt to create a state-level single-payer health care system, and why it failed. It’s a bit like the old joke about the farmer, asked for directions, who says “Well, I wouldn’t start from here.” The point is not that single-payer is a bad idea. It is that given […]