Does The Government Work For Billionaires-- Or For The Rest Of Us-- A Guest Post By Daniel Biss

Daniel Biss practically was just a kid when DWT started covering his ideas about what could be accomplished in politics. When I first met him, in 2007, he told me that folks in Illinois "believe government is capable of benefiting people. The Republican Party functions as if government has to be kept out of the way." He's an intellectually rigorous mathematician, trained at MIT, now a state Rep with a great record of accomplishment, and a candidate for governor. His two opponents are hereditary billionaires with powerful names-- if not minds-- who can spend whatever they want without blinking an eye in an attempt to buy the race. Daniel's a middle class guy like you and I and he can't write himself a check to finance a political campaign. All he's got is what's in his mind... and heart. I asked him to re-introduce himself to DWT readers. If you like what he has to say, please consider chipping in what you can at the Blue America gubernatorial page, accessed my hitting the thermometer below.

No Time For Half Measures
-by Daniel Biss

The Democratic Party is at a crossroads. Amidst the fear and chaos of the Trump administration, and having lost control of many state governments, it’s time to reassess our priorities and ask where we went wrong. It’s time to ask whether we represent the middle class or the billionaire class, and whether we’re going to fight for progressive reform or just defend the status quo from attack.

I’m a progressive serving my seventh year in the Illinois legislature and I’m running for governor to fight for middle class families like mine. My opponents? A billionaire and a multi-millionaire, neither one of whom has ever held public office. The winner of the primary will take on Republican Governor Bruce Rauner, a private equity billionaire whose foray into politics has been an utter disaster for our state.

In this primary, and in primaries across the country, we are taking on this great challenge of defining our party’s values-- especially as we consider the future of healthcare.

I believe that healthcare is a human right. It’s something everyone deserves-- regardless of pre-existing conditions, citizenship status, or ability to pay. For me, believing that healthcare is a human right means fighting for a single-payer system in the Illinois. It’s right there on my website, and it’s been part of my platform since I launched my first campaign in 2007.

My opponents take a different view. While we agree that the federal government should move toward single-payer, we disagree about the role state government should have in these efforts. In other words, they want someone else to fight this fight for them.

The truth of the matter is that the best way to move the federal government towards single payer is to enact it at the state level first to build a movement of people across the country united around a shared vision of universal healthcare and armed with examples of success. We can’t just sit around and wait.

This is no time for half measures. It’s no time for concessions, and it’s no time to accept the status quo. This is a time to stand up for our values, to demand that our state government reflects our needs, and to rebuild our party from the ground up.

It’s larger than healthcare, and it’s larger than Illinois. It’s about deciding who the Democratic Party works for, and who our government works for. Does it work for billionaires, or for the rest of us? Does it respond to corporate greed, or people’s needs? And does it cling to the status quo with a tired machine playbook, or innovate and improve when we demand it?

And so we have a choice in March-- about who will be the Democratic candidate for governor in Illinois, but also about who our Party and government represent. But we also have a lot of choices before then. Every day, we have an opportunity not just to resist Trump’s disastrous attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act but also to demand universal healthcare in Illinois, and to build a movement powerful enough to take our state back from the billionaires who have failed to represent us.