An Open Letter to Elizabeth Warren

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Dear Senator Warren,

You are now, by far, my preferred candidate. You are the only one to whom I make monthly contributions. Sometimes I lie awake at nights, thinking how much more promising our national future would be if you were in the White House, and wondering what I can do to help you get there.

But in order to realize the waking dream of me and millions of others, you have to win. And I fear you are now making a grave mistake—one of the same kind that contributed to Hillary Clinton’s unexpected loss.

We Americans hate being told what to do. That’s been true since an early revolutionary flag appeared, the one with the coiled snake and the legend “Don’t Tread on Me.” It’s still true today.

Surveys have shown Americans’ appalling ignorance of the details of our Bill of Rights. What “freedom” means to most of us, especially recent immigrants from controlled societies, is control of our own private lives as we see fit. Virtually every American considers this freedom his or her birthright or hard-won right as a naturalized immigrant.

Now you want, in effect, to tell over 150 million Americans to give up the private health insurance that they like. You would have them accept a government-run program that has yet to take shape. You want to force on them something that doesn’t exist yet, in lieu of what they have and know. To most of us, that smells like government coercion.

There’s also a huge timing problem here. Even if your plan would ultimately be better for all, voters will not know that when they have to vote. All they will know for sure is that they will have no choice. They will have to vote for coercion in advance, without knowing precisely what the result will be.

They will also have to reconsider and re-agonize the whole matter of health insurance, as part of the presidential campaign, with inadequate information. Inevitably they will rely on opposition propaganda, at least in part.

How can that possibly help your campaign? In farmers’ terms, you are asking voters to buy a pig in a poke.

It doesn’t matter how good you think your numbers are. It doesn’t matter how much your program ought to reduce costs. As the brilliant realist that you are, you know how unreliable economists’ predictions are, especially on something this complex, with so many variables, whose details are years away from becoming fixed.

Being told what to do is a simple, compelling issue that any voter can understand. Your rivals will demagogue it to death, both within and without the Democratic Party. You will lose ground that you have no good reason to give up.

On this point your recent change to a phase-in is no change at all: it merely delays the coercion. In any event, coercion is unnecessary, especially if delayed. If the price and other advantages of expanded voluntary Medicare are as decisive as you suggest—and I believe they will be—consumers will switch from private insurance to expanded Medicare on their own. They may take a bit more time than you or I hope now, but they will switch of their own free will.

History teaches how dangerous coercion is. Although Obama started out avoiding coercion in his 2007 campaign, both he and Hillary Clinton adopted so-called “mandates” (penalties for not buying insurance) by the end of their 2008 campaigns. They did so under the influence of economists’ projections, which suggested mandates could make their programs affordable.

What was the result? For all of the crying need, Obama’s immense political skill, and Nancy Pelosi’s leadership as House Speaker, “Obamacare” passed the House by three votes. Three votes out of 435, in a House much less radicalized toward the right than today’s! Not only that: during the legislative process and for years afterward, opponents whittled “Obamacare” down by a thousand cuts.

Today, after years of GOP opposition, with no credible alternative offered, “Obamacare” hangs by a thread. The mandates are gone, killed by litigation. Yet some 20-million-plus people who never had health insurance before have it now, and they like it.

They like it in part because most of them chose it voluntarily. They weren’t forced into it. History has rendered the economists’ optimistic projections about mandates as irrelevant as most business-projection spreadsheets become after the marketplace does its work.

Projections, after all, are little more than educated guesses. Neither legislators nor the public trusts them, and rightly so. They are too often subject to hidden assumptions, wishful thinking, bad or missing data, conscious and unconscious bias, and simple mistakes. Trust projections too much or too often, and voters will stop trusting you.

Obama is the only American pol since Ike to have won two terms as president with clear popular-vote majorities. He did so against a still-appalling tide of racism. Until we pick a nominee for 2020, he will remain our Party’s leader, with good reason.

More than that: you are trying to duplicate his “miracle.” He broke the “glass ceiling” for African-Americans, despite all the conscious and unconscious racism we now know to exist. You are trying to do something similar, against a tide of residual sexism and misogyny of unknown and unknowable strength.

So you should listen to Barack Obama above everyone else. When he speaks about what’s politically possible, in his indirect and understated way, naming no names, you should treat him as the oracle he is. He’s telling you, in effect, that the opposition of doctors, hospitals, and nurses—who all think that any expansion of Medicare will cut their incomes—is quite enough to take on. The unnecessary opposition of over 150 million insureds who are happy with what they have now, coupled with the do-or-die-opposition of the entire existing health-insurance industry, is too strong to overcome.

You can easily adopt the “mainstream” Democratic position: “Medicare for All Who Want It.” The very title belies coercion. It’s a heavy enough political lift all by itself, as Obama recognized twelve years ago. It’s no less a heavy lift now, with “Obamacare” hanging by a thread against the gravitational force of alternative-less but relentless GOP opposition.

Some will call you a “flip-flopper.” But many, including me, will admire you more for having the flexibility and humility to understand when you’ve overreached and move on. And you will have lots of political “cover” from your Democratic-Party rivals, most of whom support Medicare’s voluntary expansion.

Please let your points of distinction be your fine mind, your clear sight through the oligarchs, your superb debating, your general realism on how to campaign, your adroit dodging of code words like “socialism,” and your other plans for economic justice—not a Quixotic quest for the impossible in our time. Please don’t get caught up in a counterproductive Democratic bidding war for victory-deprived progressive voters. That’s a prescription for any nominee losing the general election.

So please change your stance on this critical kitchen-table issue. Your doing so will appeal to many undecided voters. It will unify the party—except for Sanders, who bears the burdens of age, suspected ill health, and incessant demagoguery against his “Democratic socialism.” It will unite Dems behind behind a popular and defensible health-insurance plan: “Medicare for All who Want It.” Thus it will help any eventual nominee win.

If you “pivot” on this issue now, voters will see you as gaining practical wisdom and experience and strengthening party unity. They will see your decisiveness, strength and independence as a leader.

If you pivot after winning the nomination, voters likely will see you as a weathervane and hypocrite, a female Mitt Romney. The Internet will let no one forget: there will be video clips to play in endless loops.

This issue is also a test of your ability to control and direct your campaign. Your awkward shift to a phase-in shows that you already sense something is wrong. But a phase-in is a transparently inadequate half-measure. It doesn’t address the fatal flaw: depriving nearly half our population of a choice, with inadequate information about its consequences now.

You have a much needed-chance to demonstrate your strength as a leader and “decider.” Obama did that in his own campaign when he cut the much-defamed Reverend Jeremiah Wright loose, despite a long friendship. At a critical stage in her campaign, Hillary Clinton failed to act decisively with Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Huma Abedin, who had made serious errors in judgment regarding party procedure and/or e-mails. Obama won, and Clinton lost. Therein lies one of many lessons of a flawed campaign.

Admitting and correcting an error requires as much decisiveness as being right the first time, maybe more. You will need that sort of decisiveness in the White House. Never having held an executive post in politics, you will have to show voters that you have that trait in order to win. That’s one reason why Pete Buttigieg, one of only two hardened veterans in the Dems’ debate lineup, would be your best running mate. Nothing hones tactical skills like combat.

Your plans are generally good. Your mind and spirit are excellent. Your stamina is impressive, especially as your strongest rivals approach 80. You are a superb thinker and debater. With more conviction and specificity than any other candidate, you see precisely what has brought our egalitarian democracy down. (Billionaires are not the problem. What they do with their wealth and how they keep and grow it is.)

Practical politics and showing decisiveness under pressure are the biggest obstacles to your getting the chance to make your good plans real. For your own sake and our nation’s, please don’t blow that chance.

Please stop pledging to force Medicare on all. Please do so now, and announce your change publicly and dramatically, so as to show the world your wisdom and strength as a leader.

With this single decisive move, you can plant your flag firmly on that hard-fought ”middle ground” over which Dems and mainstream pundits struggle so obsessively. You cannot “finesse” something so big, controversial and visible, let alone with mere delay. Trying to do so only makes you look weak, indecisive and shifty.

With the greatest respect and admiration and hope for your success,

Jay

P.S. In the last few weeks, three new candidates have entered the Democratic race: a serious, experienced state-level executive, Deval Patrick, and two billionaires: Michael Bloomberg, with city-level executive experience, and Tom Steyer, with no experience in public office at all. Could it be that all three see you gaining in the primaries but fear you might lose the general election tarred an “extremist” or “socialist”?

Bloomberg offers a more specific lesson. His first dramatic act of campaigning was to go down South and apologize for “stop and frisk” before a largely African-American audience. It doesn’t matter whether “stop and frisk” was a wise or effective policy at the time. It’s political suicide now, when a robust and enthusiastic African-American vote, especially in the South, is absolutely critical to Democrats and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

That’s the kind of don’t-look-back tactical decisiveness that you will need to win the general election and lead this nation as president. You will need it almost every week. Renouncing forced Medicare could be your first big show of leadership, as distinguished from abstract thinking—at which voters paying attention already know you excel.

Permalink to this post