Eventually, Bernie Sanders Will Have to Collide With Elizabeth Warren
DES MOINES—Bernie Sanders dropped by the Iowa State Fair late on Sunday afternoon. He drew a big crowd. Not as big as the one he drew four years ago, and not as big as the one Elizabeth Warren had drawn the day before, but his crowd jammed the small area around the Des Moines Register's "Soapbox" set and spilled over into the fair's main drag and spread itself all the way back toward the Iowa pork producer's booth.
Let me begin by thanking the people of Iowa for playing an extraordinary role in transforming politics in America. Four years ago, I stood right up here and I said that if you work 40 hours a week in America, you should not live in poverty. We have to raise that minimum wage to $15 an hour. Workers should find it easier to become members of a union. Four years ago, that seemed like a wild and crazy idea. Since then, seven states and the U.S. Congress have passed legislation raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Thank you, Iowa, for helping to lead the way.
Four years ago, I came here and I said, you know what? If we want to be the best educated country on earth, we need to make public colleges and universities tuition free. And that idea was considered wild and extreme. Since then, state after state, city after city have done just that. We are going to make public colleges and universities in America tuition free. Four years ago, I said, sounds to me a little bit crazy that we are punishing young people for the "crime" of getting a higher education and finding themselves $50,000 or $100,000 in debt. And I said then and let me say it now more clearly, that in America today, we need to cancel student debt.
Here in America should do what every other major country on earth is doing. That is guaranteeing health care to all people as a human right. Guess what? Everybody said that was too radical. American people won't accept it. Yet, the people of Iowa understood that there is something wrong when 87 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured. Something very wrong with today, 30,000 people a year die because they don't have access to health care. Something awful when 500,000 Americans go bankrupt because they cannot afford the incredibly high medical bills that they receive when they got out of the hospital. Something is very wrong when we spent twice as much per capita on health care as the people of any other country, and yet one in five Americans cannot afford the cost of prescription drugs because the pharmaceutical industry rips us off every single day. I said that four years ago and the people of Iowa said, Bernie, you are right. Since then, what we have seen is poll after poll that the American people want us to move to a Medicare For All single-payer program.
I quote this at length because, in recent days, there has been something elegiac about the Sanders campaign. It seems to be developing an argument for its candidate based on the notion that he came to all of the driving ideas of the current Democratic Party first, and that, because he changed the game, he is best positioned to win it. That this comes dangerously close to the notion of it now being Sanders's "turn" to be nominated—an idea he rightfully scorned when it was applied to Hillary Rodham Clinton in the 2016 primaries—is only the most obvious risk in this new strategy. Unless it is handled very carefully, it could position Sanders as a candidate of the past, owed a vote of thanks, but not an actual vote next winter.
That, eventually, he is going to have to collide with Senator Professor Warren to be the progressive alternative to Joe Biden—and one of the most remarkable things about the campaign so far is that no centrist alternative to the former vice-president's stumbling campaign has emerged—and, again, unless that's handled with political deftness, it could do damage to both their campaigns, and to the issues on which they share positions. And, finally, the problem with arguing that, "I got there first," is that it's an inherently empty assertion. Nobody votes for that person.
But, one day, it's entirely possible that Bernie Sanders will be reckoned with spurring a progressive revival in American politics the same way that Barry Goldwater's crash-and-burn campaign in 1964 is now seen to be the seedbed for the conservative revival that is just now beginning to lose steam because of the malignant presidency* it always was destined to produce. That would make him a major figure in modern political history. But I also think it will make someone else president.
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