A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis, serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. © James Conner.
Provided I can work it into my unexpectedly tight schedule, I’ll be live Tweeting (@jrcflatheadmemo) tonight’s Democratic debate in Des Moines, IA. The town hall format event starts at 1900 MST, and will be broadcast and live-streamed by CNN. There’s plenty to debate, but the format makes asking follow-up questions difficult. And CNN is notorious for asking questions intended not to elicit truth and understanding but to incite conflict, and thus “good television.”
The format rewards a laid-back, friendly one-to-one approach, best exemplified by Bill Clinton’s demeanor in his town hall debate with George H.W. Bush in 1992. I hope Bernie, Hillary, and Martin, know the price of a gallon of milk.
We can expect questions on racial reparations, single-payer health care, and, I hope, questions on environmental issues such as clean drinking water (think Flint, MT), the ethanol as biofuel foolishness, coal or clean air, and law and order issues such as mandatory minimum sentencing, and the illegal crackpot right occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge.
Reparations. Last week, literary provocateur Ta-Nehisi Coates, who lives in Paris, attacked Sanders for Sanders’ rejection of reparations for slavery. In that attack, Coates likened Sanders to Civil War abolitionist and terrorist John Brown, and killer and abortion clinic bomber Eric Robert Rudolph:
…he is not the candidate of moderation and unification, so much as the candidate of partisanship and radicalism. There is neither insult nor accolade in this. John Brown was radical and divisive. So was Eric Robert Rudolph.
What’s divisive — and indefensible — is comparing Bernie Sanders to convicted killers.
Sanders’ bona fides on civil rights are as good as anyone’s and better than most — he marched with Martin Luther King — but Coates is trying to depict Sanders as a racist — and worse — and to stir up racial animosities within the Democratic Party. Sanders is Jewish. I hope Coates’ jihad is not the latest incarnation of Jesse Jackson’s Hymietown slander.
There’s finally some pushback against Coates’ mischief — see Conor Friedersdorf piece in today’s Atlantic — but Coates has coarsened the debate and exploited, and inflamed, racial tensions for his own self-aggrandizement and literary spoils.
Single-payer heath care. Sanders, who helped mark-up, and who voted for, the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, proposes replacing the ACA, which is far from perfect, with an everyone covered for everything, federal single-payer health care system. To pay for it, he’d increase taxes — but the increases in taxes would be more than offset by the elimination of the private insurance industry and premiums for its products.
Hillary and her supporters came unglued. She and the rest of the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party made a pact with private health insurers and big pharma: cover more people, and with less onerous policies, and we’ll guarantee you more customers (the individual mandate) and profits. That created a mutual dependency. Big insurance and big pharma need Democrats in office to keep and enforce the individual mandate, and Democrats need campaign contributions from big insurance and pharma to stay in office. Hillary and her allies intend to honor their deal with the devil.
To pay for buying off insurance and pharma, and still have enough money for social programs, the ACA is designed to (1) not cover everyone or everything, and (2) provide a lower standard of care. Chris Brooks’ essay in Salon provides an unvarnished summary of what went down and Hillary’s intellectually dishonest attack on the very idea of single-payer health care. And at the Huffington Post, Nancy Altman, author of The Battle for Social Security,explains why the attack on single-payer is bogus and dishonorable.
Experience. Hillary Clinton presents herself as the world’s leading authority on health care and foreign policy, and may well believe that’s true. Indirectly, she presents herself as the most experienced candidate, which is not true:
HRC does understand health care policy, although she’s not the only one who does, which is why her lies about single-payer health care are so dismaying and aggravating. And she does understand a bit of foreign policy, but her understanding is many levels below that of our current Secretary of State, multi-lingual John Kerry. Her level of knowledge, and the nature of her experience, is that of a policy technician. Her natural position is deputy chief of staff in a policy bureau, not President.