Warren Is Paying the Price for her Honesty. And Her Gender. [View all]

[BlueMTexpat]

Her willingness to provide the details of her plans should be a strength, not a drawback.

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/02/15/warren-is-paying-the-price-for-her-honesty-and-her-gender/

Excellent article!

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If Warren does end up falling short there will be numerous well-sourced accounts, but the trajectory from the outside is already clear enough. In a primary where voters have been obsessively seeking “electability,” and where other candidates have been willing to spin fables or dramatically change positions to secure votes, Warren’s basic decency and honesty have cost her. And the sexism undergirding much of the conversation around electability hasn’t helped.

Both Warren’s defenders and detractors on the left and right side of the Democratic field rightly point to the healthcare debate as the key turning point. As the primary hit the first series of debates, Warren remained ambiguous about the details of her healthcare plan, dodging questions about taxation and saying only that “costs will go down.” Both Sanders on her left and Buttigieg, Biden and Klobuchar on her right pilloried her for her lack of specificity on this front.

The Buttigieg/Biden/Klobuchar wing was content to diss Medicare for All entirely, hedging toward frankly unworkable “Medicare for All Who Want It” style plans. The challenge for the moderate approach to healthcare will be the same as that of the ACA: half-measures that will be immediately hobbled by the medical provider and insurance industries, and that will not provide the cost savings required for a universal plan to be effective. Politically, this was an attempt to undermine Warren whom they saw as the primary threat, and to solidify their own control of the “moderate” lane. None of them saw Sanders as a serious threat at the time, nor did they factor in the degree to which many of their own voters supposedly in the moderate lane had Sanders as their second choice. They also strongly underestimated the degree to which Democratic voters genuinely like and want Medicare for All.

The Sanders campaign, for their part, took advantage by playing a dangerous game. Sanders openly admitted to planning to raise taxes on more than just the top 1%, but correctly noted that it would be made up for by removing premiums. While this is correct on its own terms and is a smart play in a Democratic primary, it’s an extremely risky move for the general election where Republicans will take those “raise taxes” sound bites, scaring seniors into believing that Sanders will raise their taxes while destroying Medicare and handing their money to supposedly undeserving poor young people. There is a reason that no other candidate in the field was willing to deliver that sort of public sound bite–and it’s not due to dishonesty or corruption. Sanders’ strategy has been to simply win the Democratic primary and worry about the consequences for the general election later. ...
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LOTS more in the article.

And it's made me MORE determined than ever to KEEP ON supporting her!