Occam's Razor

Campaign season involves a lot of predictable hand wringing. And so the hang wringing has started in earnest this year as Democrats decide who will be their presidential candidate.

Democratic Party leaders are starting to discover, as Republican Party leaders did in 2016, that the base is likely to reject anyone from their list of approved candidates. That’s because it’s looking more and more that Bernie Sanders will be that nominee.

Sanders they say is a fair weather Democrat, but so what? So was Donald Trump, who often claimed to be a Democrat. So is new “Democrat” Mike Bloomberg who famously ran New York City as its Republican mayor for eleven years.

It’s not hard to become either a Democrat or a Republican. Generally, it just involves going to your voter registration office and filing a form. There is no central party committee that gets to choose whether you are a real Democrat or Republican and if not reject your application. Both Bernie Sanders and Mike Bloomberg are using this fact to advance their candidacies. I suspect that Democratic Party leaders are doing a whole lot less hand wringing over Mike Bloomberg’s candidacy than Bernie Sanders’s. Bloomberg’s candidacy is a long shot, so expect that after he loses the nomination that he’ll become a fair weather Republican again when it suits him. If Bernie Sanders loses either the nomination or the election, he’ll likely go back to being an independent from Vermont, just as he did after the 2016 race.

If enough Democrats joined the Republican Party just to change it, the Republican Party, as we know it now, would cease to be. Those Republicans would probably form another party. Our party structure is by design big tent. A party is nothing more than a coalition, which can be often fractured, assembled for the purpose of trying to acquire and maintain political power.

Anyhow, Democratic Party insiders are upset because they don’t see Sanders as a true Democrat, as if Bloomberg is one too. They fear his label of being a Democratic Socialist will guarantee his election loss because it will suppress turnout among “mainstream” Democrats or maybe prod these Democrats to vote to reelect Donald Trump. In head-to-head matchups against Trump, Sanders does as well as any of the candidates, currently winning by about ten percentage points. Obviously we are a long way from November 3, and this will likely change as Trump and Republicans refine their attacks. But rest assured regardless of whom Democrats nominate, they would do this. Republicans won’t sit on the sidelines.

The hand wringing is rather strange because if Sanders wins the presidency, he would by no means be our most socialist president. That would be Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who lived a privileged, upper class life, but who started all sorts of public works programs and instituted the social security system. He won four terms of office by standing up for the people. By current thinking, Texan Lyndon Banes Johnson would be a damned socialist too. Johnson definitely had some faults, but he got civil rights and voting rights bill passed, and started a war on poverty that allowed many to live better lives. He also proposed and got Medicare enacted, which set up a health care system for seniors. The most radical thing Bernie is proposing is taking our existing Medicare system and expanding it to the rest of us because, well, it works great! Ask any senior if they are dissatisfied with it. We’ve even had a socialist Republican president: Theodore Roosevelt, who busted up large corporations, greatly expanded our national park system and pushed through the Pure Food and Drugs Act, that ensured our food was clean and safe.

Democratic leaders have turned into nervous nellies because Republicans succeeded in shifting the Overton Window. Republicans convinced many Americans that government is bad, and private industry is good. That led to a collapsed safety net and income going disproportionately to the rich.

It’s likely that a Sanders candidacy would not be necessary had not these failings of our system gotten so severe. There should be nothing radical about not having to worry about being able to afford the health care you need. It’s being done by all the other first world nations, just not here. The inflated cost of our medical system is bankrupting us and exacerbating income inequality. Sanders is just one of the few candidates running for president ballsy enough to say out loud what the rest of us already know.

Taking Medicare for seniors and making it Medicare for All is not radical; it’s an evolution of a system that has already proven very effective, but only for those who reach a certain age. With a system that contains health care costs, we can use this money for other things, like maybe real wage increases for those of us who rarely seem to get it. I would think some Republicans could be persuaded to vote for Sanders for just this reason: who doesn’t like having more money to spend as they choose?

So much of our government is broken because moneyed interests, instead of the people, are in control. It’s a corporate-ocracy right now and it’s going to stay that way until we change things. The Democratic Party leadership’s response seems to be to make the giant sitting on your chest go on a diet, rather than wrestling him off your chest.

Barack Obama famously won on a campaign of hope. But famously he didn’t deliver much. We did get the Affordable Care Act out of it, and it was certainly better than nothing, but it too didn’t get it right. It was a response to fit our need into our corporate controlled government, and it was enacted only by the slimmest of margins. Government isn’t governing very well, so we need someone who will fight for the rest of us.

Mind you that if Sanders does become president, his task to make government work again won’t be easy. Minimally he will need a Democratic Senate and senators would have to agree to drop filibuster rules. Both are problematic in 2020. And even if this is achieved, progress is likely to be minimal, and courts would block a lot of his agenda. So his election would be the start of a longer campaign to truly make us a government of the people again.

But you got to start sometime and you use the vehicle that you got. If Sanders is that vehicle, I’m in. I’ll likely be voting for Elizabeth Warren instead, but that’s only because I believe she would be wilier at enacting a true progressive agenda. Both she and Sanders though want big, structural changes to government.

It’s as obvious to me as the nose on my face that that’s exactly what we need. Trump was elected on this promise too, but obviously failed to deliver. At least we know what Bernie Sanders stands for because he’s been consistent his entire life. So I’ll be most comfortable with him or Warren as the Democratic candidate and our president. We need someone in the White House that is truly one of us. Trump isn’t, and never has been.