Big ideas and bold actions have long had an audience in America. Decades ago, in The Art of the Deal, now-President Trump laid bare his approach to winning over the public: “People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do.” Ronald Reagan rose to power calling for “raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors.” And in Tuesday night’s debate, Bernie Sanders pushed back against other candidates on the stage by declaring that, indeed, “Republicans aren’t afraid of big ideas.”
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, with extremely similar, extremely liberal agendas, spent the evening battling their rivals over the value of big ideas: eliminating the employer-based health insurance system, decriminalizing illegal border crossing, and more, while those more pragmatic or moderate adversaries blasted those ideas as too extreme or unworkable.
The Democratic base’s top priority is defeating Trump in 2020, and Tuesday night’s debate laid bare the divide in the party over the best way to do so, and whether it involves contrasting Trump with a strongly liberal and disruptive agenda or with a more pragmatic, if timid, approach. But for all their talk of being bold, Sanders and Warren notably dodged the tough and legitimate criticisms lobbed their way by their fellow Democrats, not quite being bold enough to admit just how much their policies will cost and how much they will require average people to change their way of life.
Nowhere was this more pronounced than the debate over healthcare.
While some like Sen. Kamala Harris have sought an off-ramp from a “Medicare for All” proposal that would shut down employer-based health insurance and move everyone to a government plan, Sanders and Warren doubled down. When pressed by the moderators, Sanders claimed the idea would work because it works in other countries, conveniently ignoring the fact that socialized medicine failed in his very own home state because the tax hikes that would have been required to pay for it were much too high. Warren dodged the tax question as well, because it is clearly not a political winner to acknowledge that, to pay for universal benefits, countries like Denmark require taxes that have sky-high rates hitting the middle class.
Other Democrats on stage criticized Medicare for All as too disruptive and unworkable. They pointed out how this would take away union members’ hard-fought employer-provided coverage. They called for more incremental change and even Marianne Williamson, perhaps the most “big ideas” candidate of them all, lamented the political infeasibility of full-fledged, high-octane socialized medicine, noting “I do have concern that it will be difficult. I do have concern that it will make it harder to win. And I have a concern that it will make it harder to govern.”
Big, bold reforms have foundered politically when it turned out the public wasn’t actually on board with the disruption headed their way. President George W. Bush found this out the hard way when trying to use his second-term political capital to advance a “big idea”: entitlement reform. It turned out people were not interested in changes to the system. Republicans built congressional majorities out of voter frustration about a “big idea,” the Affordable Care Act, as Americans were upset to discover maybe they couldn’t keep their doctor or the plan they’d enjoyed before the law was passed.
Trying to pretend taxpayer-funded universal healthcare won’t be disruptive or require huge tax increases to remake the entire healthcare sector of our economy isn’t bold or brave at all.
The cautious pragmatists on the stage won’t make headlines, and probably won’t win the Democratic nomination. The candidates who claim they’ve got the big ideas are probably right to bet the Democratic base will be wooed by those who paint in bold colors, and it seems likely Warren and Sanders will retain their top-tier position in the Democratic field.
But their Democratic counterparts sounding the alarm on stage aren’t off-base to worry that chasing the “big idea” of eliminating employer-based insurance might be a bad idea after all, and to see what conclusion Democratic voters come to about what electability, and the ability to ultimately govern, really means.
