I admire her effort to put such a plan together. I don't believe it will happen overnight. I don't believe it will happen exactly as she wants it. But I do know what will happen if Dems buy into compromise too early, if we negotiate with ourselves. We will not solve the problem.
I have seen both movies before. Pioneers and change-makers set their sights on difficult goals and move us toward them. Seeking the status quo plus small incremental change is the way DC preserves special interests,it is how we got to be the only developed country in the world...
...that does not offer health care coverage as a right to all. Every single one of those other countries offers it and has found they can afford it. That must be our goal because it is good policy, good economics, and because it is right. It should be our policy because...
...those systems work better than ours. And we will only ever get there if we elect visionary leaders with the courage to fight for what the politically timid or those who have already been co-opted consider to be impossible.
Warren alone among candidates has offered a plan to try to get to where we must be & attempted to show a way to pay for it. Others have talked of the goal without the roadmap. Still others have said, in effect,we're not ready to do what is right or necessary or humane or better.
Presidents must work within our system. Sen. Warren knows how that works. What she is arguing that we want a president with a vision and with the courage to lay it out to be evaluated. She knows how democracy works. She has seen what happens to plans as they become programs.
Which is why she knows that only through daring to be specific, daring to describe how a vision can become a reality, can we start on the path to realizing that reality. The others, the incrementalists, can chip away at the vision. They can serve their special interests.
But they will never get us to the change that the millions of Americans who our system does not serve deserve and demand. They deserve and demand real changes in our tax law, in our health care system, in our education system, in our climate policies, in how we go...
...from a government that serves the few to the one that was intended, a government that serves the many. Disagree with her on her specifics. Debate them. But recognize that her brand of vision and her intellectual and political courage is what we sorely lack in our system.
Finally, for those who say Americans don't want to be bold and are risk averse, let's be honest. They elected an African American in 2008 and 2012 and made a woman the top vote getter in 2016. Even selecting Trump was bold...even if it was grotesquely wrong.
Voters seek change. Voters seek real solutions. Voters seek leadership. Donald Trump can be defeated by the incrementalists. But he can also be defeated by leaders like @ewarren who promise real change. Polls show it.
What we need to decide is whether we want to end just the Trump Administration or whether we want to end Trumpism--which is fueled in part by a sense that Washington no longer works for the average American. What can be more appealing, what can make more political sense...
...than a candidate from humble beginnings in Oklahoma who had to save and scrimp and fight to become a teacher and then a professor,who has fought for average people and stood up to power her entire career in the Senate, & who dares to describe how we restore the American dream.
I'll vote for whomever the Democratic candidate is. But I hope the party chooses not just to express its aspiration but to work toward them, not just to say we'll restore Washington to what it was but who says we must do better, who says I know people say details are dangerous...
but I will put them out there and then let's have a discussion. We need real change. We need to put both GOP corruption and faux-centrist collaboration with and appeasement of that corruption behind us. We need to turn the page. Let's choose vision and courage.
