Political Irony

I realize that many of my readers also read Electoral Vote, which I have always encouraged. I still want to mention that they published another letter of mine today.

My letter was a response to a question asked by D.A. from Brooklyn, NY yesterday. His letter took Elizabeth Warren to task for her shifting rhetoric on health care:

I’m curious: Which version of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is he talking about? The one who was rock-solid behind Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) Medicare-For-All? Or the one suggested that the latter was an end goal that we needed to move gradually toward? Or the one who says that we just need the public option added to Obamacare?

When Electoral Vote published my response, they edited it down quite a bit. I have no complaint about that, but I feel like they deleted something significant, and that is the reasons I would prefer having a public option to actually implementing “Medicare for All”.

What follows is my letter as I submitted it to them (the last three paragraphs were not published):

Regarding D.A. from Brooklyn’s question about Elizabeth Warren’s seemingly changing stance on “Medicare for All”. Why do liberals seem to be so hung up when Democratic candidates’ opinions evolve over time? As someone who works with startup companies, I know that one of the hallmarks of excellent leaders is the ability to adapt to changing realities. I’ve worked with so many young companies, and I can’t think of a single one that ended up producing the same product as the idea that caused them to originally start the company. In Warren’s case, perhaps she noticed that Sanders was soundly rejected by primary voters, and that this rejection probably was not because of Sanders’ goals, but because of his tactics.

Consider the tactics of Barack Obama. It is clear that his goal was to get the country to single-payer health care. But as he often said “Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good”. Obama is a pragmatist. The Clintons had previously tried to push through a single-payer system, and it failed. Obama tried to push through a public option, which I think was a better strategy. I have lived in three different countries with single-payer systems, and it is obvious to me that if people had a choice between for-profit heath care or a public option, they would (eventually) pick the latter. So a public option is a significantly more pragmatic way to get the US to that goal. But even Obama’s public option failed (likely because the health insurance industry understood that they could never compete with a public option over the long term).

Pragmatism is one of the things I loved about Barack Obama. It allowed Obama to enact actual health care reform, which had eluded many past presidents. Likewise, as a pragmatist, Elizabeth Warren has also been able to get things done, even things opposed by powerful interests (e.g., consumer protection). I see Bernie Sanders as more of an ideologue, and while this may excite his base, it doesn’t help in actually getting things done (consider that his home state wasn’t able to actually create a single payer system). So even though I tend to agree with many of Sanders’ goals, I never supported him.

As a side note, why would anyone complain about Warren’s smart pragmatic tactics in comparison with the alternative? Trump seems to be happy to contradict himself all the time (occasionally in a single tweet!) and his base doesn’t even notice.

Finally, the term “Medicare for All” actually bothers me. I know that Medicare is popular in the US, and that politically “Medicare for All” might be a reasonable name to promote a single-payer system. But I don’t see “Medicare for All” as much different than a public option. In fact, now that I’ve experienced the US Medicare system for almost a year, I find it is NOT really a single-payer system at all. Part A is single-payer, but that’s the extent of it, and Part A pretty much only applies to hospital stays. And because in the US, public hospitals — and private hospitals in an emergency — are already required to treat patients regardless of their ability to pay, this is not a huge benefit. Plus even Part A has a deductible, currently $1408/year. On top of that I have to pay at least three different organizations to get similar health coverage to what I got in other counties: the government for Part B, a company for a Medigap plan (or a Medicare Advantage plan), and a different company for Part D (prescriptions). If I had vision coverage or dental coverage, I would have to pay additional insurance companies.

Medicare is complicated and confusing. I have no idea how older seniors can even deal with it. If “Medicare for all” simply means extending our current Medicare system to all ages, then I would prefer a public option that is comparable to single-payer systems I have experienced in other countries. Especially if that public option also guaranteed that employers would pass on the huge amount of money they currently spend on health insurance for their employees as salary, to make up for the extra taxes we may have to pay to finance the public option. Then Americans would have a choice.

A study from the Brookings Institution looks at counties that have newly been designated as having a “high prevalence” of COVID-19. These “high-risk” counties have at least 100 active cases per 100,000 people. The results are interesting:

• Starting on March 29, there were 59 counties considered high-risk, which represented 8% of the US population.
• Ending on May 17, the number of counties reached 1,538, with 79% of the US population.

Clearly, the virus is still spreading. Initially, COVID-19 was much more prevalent in urban areas, which tend to be primarily Democratic. But recently, this has changed:

• For the last 4 weeks, these new high-risk counties are more likely to have voted for Trump than Clinton in 2016. There were 697 new counties that voted for Trump, but only 127 that voted for Clinton. They are also concentrated in the South and Midwest, especially Texas (52 counties), Georgia (45), Virginia (36), Indiana (40) and Iowa (37).
• In the most recent week, the counties becoming high-risk favored Trump by a 12% margin. They are also much less urban and less racially diverse (fewer minorities and foreign-born people, more whites).

There is a notable partisan split in the recent spread of the virus. This tracks the fact that “Republicans are more willing than Democrats or Independents to attend in-person gatherings.”

The virus doesn’t care about politics.

We often hear about Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump, who set his son up in the Brooklyn slumlord business. However, we never hear anything about Trump’s mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump. But just watching her son Donald try (and fail miserably) to send out Mother’s Day wishes this year, you gotta wonder what the hell?

What I want to know is how people who watch Fox News all the time can listen to Trump and think that he is anything but completely insane.

This short video was created by The Atlantic. Watch it. They go on to say:

One knows, of course, that Donald Trump behaves differently from the leaders of other countries, especially the leaders of other Western democracies. One knows that he disdains facts; that he does not read briefing papers; that he has no organizational talents; that he does not know how to make use of militaries, bureaucracies, or diplomatic services; that he has no basic knowledge of history or science, let alone government.

But seeing him in this video, produced by my colleagues in Atlantic Studios, juxtaposed with other world leaders during this coronavirus pandemic comes, nevertheless, as a shock. Chancellor Angela Merkel, President Emmanuel Macron, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and President Moon Jae-in all speak of evidence-based policy, of the need to take the disease seriously, of empathy and solidarity. Trump speaks of hoaxes, of a disease no different from the flu, of a “germ that has gotten so brilliant that we can’t keep up with it,” of disinfectant as a miracle cure. Even now, even in the worst public-health crisis in a century, he divides people instead of unifying them, creating precisely the kind of distrust that makes the disease harder to defeat. He cannot demonstrate empathy, because he is incapable of feeling any. He cannot demonstrate solidarity, because he has only disdain for his fellow citizens.

Americans, as a rule, rarely compare themselves with other countries, so convinced are we that our system is superior, that our politicians are better, that our democracy is the fairest and most robust in the world. But watch this video and ask yourself: Is this the kind of leadership you expect from a superpower? Does this make you feel confident in our future? Or is this man a warning signal, a blinking red light, a screaming siren telling all of us, and all of the world, that something about our political system has gone profoundly awry?

They aren’t the only people who are alarmed. British newspaper The Guardian reports:

The Trump administration has repeatedly claimed that the US is ‘leading the world’ with its response to the pandemic, but it does not seem to be going in any direction the world wants to follow.

Across Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, views of the US handling of the coronavirus crisis are uniformly negative and range from horror through derision to sympathy. Donald Trump’s musings from the White House briefing room, particularly his thoughts on injecting disinfectant, have drawn the attention of the planet.

Here’s an interesting demographic group: the people who hate all the presidential candidates, but still end up voting for one of them. For whom do they vote? Politico has an interesting article about this.

Who are these people? According to one pollster, “There are a number of people who hate politics and politicians, and they play somewhat of a swing role in the country.” Let’s call this demographic the haters.

In 2016, both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton had high disapproval ratings, and almost 20% of voters were “haters”, which makes it a rather significant demographic. In exit polls during the election, Trump got 17% more of the hater vote than Clinton. This was more than enough to change the winner in several of the battleground states.

Indeed, our Electoral College system can turn a 17% lead in a single demographic group into the difference between winning and losing. This is especially true for a demographic like haters, which is spread out over a large number of states.

In the upcoming 2020 election, the haters number around 25% of registered voters, but at the present time Biden leads Trump with haters by a 40 point margin. There are a number of reasons for this. First, Clinton was very unpopular, while Biden’s approval ratings are significantly better. As one Republican consultant put it, “There’s no way Joe Biden will be as bad a candidate as Hillary Clinton.”

Second, and more importantly, haters tend to vote against the status quo. In 2016, Hillary Clinton was strongly identified with the status quo, while Trump was the opposite, promising to shake things up. For 2020, it is now Trump who represents the status quo, and the current status is pretty bad.

Disclaimer: Just because this is a good sign for Joe Biden, don’t assume the election is in the bag (like many of us did in 2016). It is still 173 days away and as we have just seen with the COVID-19 pandemic, things can change dramatically in just a week. At this point in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton had a larger polling lead over Trump than Biden has now. Biden has not been the (presumptive) Democratic nominee very long, and Trump has just barely started to attack him. Trump’s campaign manager has bragged about how much money they have that they will use to attack Biden, calling it a “death star” of negative advertising. I am expecting the ads to be especially nasty, as Trump can’t run on the economy anymore, and their attacks on Biden’s son Hunter didn’t go anywhere. And reality nor facts will not limit them.