Re: Campaign 2016 - Snow White and the 7 dwarfs.
Any candidate, be it someone who wears pantsuits a lot, an anonymous governor of a blue mid Atlantic state, or an old crank who walks on water, is going to get gutted like a deer by the Republicans in a general election if they run on a middle class tax hike. Agree or disagree Kep?
I agree we should take a page from Dubya: campaign as moderates, govern as radicals.
The difference between you (and the centrist half of the party) and me (and the liberal half of the party) is that you think liberal policies are aspirational and theoretical but fenced in by reality, while I think liberal policies are pragmatic and optimal in result. You keep missing the point (to the extent you even have a point amidst all the pundit snark you try to muddy the waters with) that liberalism isn't good because it's morally superior, it's good because
it works. Yes, it does also happen to be morally superior, but that's just icing on the cake.
I think you are still smarting from the whuppin' we took all through the 80s whenever we had the temerity to challenge the Republicans' cynical bribe of "free stuff." It's true that when the Boomers dominated the media and politics the message that you didn't have to pay for anything resonated with their self-absorbed, intellectually lazy, entitlement character. It happened again with the housing boom and the idea that markets would never go down. Saint Ronny's irresponsibility was the American national character for a generation, and anyone who told people they had to pay their bills was booed off the stage.
But since 9/11 and the Great Recession, as the Boomers sink into Alzheimer's dotage, Americans have become far more mature and responsible. We know that the things we get cost money. We know there is no free lunch, and if you follow the GOP siren song and don't pay now, you'll pay far more later in debt service. The rest of the country has caught on to what liberals knew all along: "no new taxes!" is just a shell game that passes costs down the wealth spectrum. It's just garden variety theft from the public treasury, made up for later by austerity and regressive economics.
Plus the right is so crazy now they'll call
anything they don't like Communism. Essentially, the GOP has made restoring taxes to pre-1980 levels more practical now because their chicken little routine is so mindless and blaring that people no longer even listen to it.
Liberal convictions were always correct, but for a while it was smart to be a duplicitous Clinton and not have the courage of our values, because we were dealing with a nation of whining, spoiled babies. That's no longer true -- the country grew up fast when faced with the damage that right wing quack economics did. Obama, sadly, campaigned as a liberal and governed as a centrist. Hillary will do the same. But that is no longer necessary or advisable for the country: a Sanders or Warren (or somebody else) could campaign as a liberal and govern as a liberal, and start to undo the great unraveling of American values.
Is anybody worried that Bernie Sanders just called for a tax hike on the middle class to put single payer in place, which is going to get him gutted like a deer in a general election? Call me a DINO, but what world is this guy living in? Middle class voters are not going to vote to pay more taxes to re-open the whole healthcare debate yet again.
