Sherrod Brown? No

Yesterday, The Washington Post introduced us to a sad new feature of its 2020 coverage, The Post 2020 Power Ranking. Karen Tumulty, the moderator, noted that her "pick for the most interesting candidate-to-be is Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH). He’s seasoned, a little on the bland side for a populist, and most importantly, a Democrat who knows how to win in a swing state that became Trump Country in 2016. His 'Dignity of Work' swing through Iowa is a pitch-perfect way to start." His ranking is an absurd #4 on their list. Outside the Beltway, the only things remotely interesting about Brown showing up in Iowa was him calling Howard Schultz a "total idiot" and then going on to disqualify himself by giving a thumbs down to Medicare for All.

Brown, whose Senate voting record is consistently ranked by ProgressivePunch in the Top 10, is known to grievously disappoint at key junctures. In 2006, when he made the jump from House to Senate, he cravenly voted for Bush's torture program-- the only progressive who did-- because he thought it would play well in Ohio. (He later apologized and admitted he fucked up but not before he became the first Blue America-endorsed candidate to ever be un-endorsed in the midst of a campaign.) That torture bill Brown voted for was opposed by all but 34 Democrats, almost all of whom have long since been defeated for reelection or otherwise driven from office-- garbagecrats like John Barrow (Blue Dog-GA), Dan Boren (Blue Dog-OK), Jim Marshall (Blue Dog-GA), Leonard Boswell (Blue Dog-IA), Gene Taylor (Blue Dog and then R-MS), Tim Holden (Blue Dog-PA), Stephanie Herseth (Blue Dog-SD), Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT), Harold Ford (Blue Dog-TN), Melissa Bean (New Dem-IL)... I basically don't care about fake Democrats who can almost always be counted on to support conservatives in a pinch. I very much did however, care about Sherrod Brown's vote, a vote that revealed the man's character to me. I expect more, a lot more, from self-promoted leaders like Brown, whose record has been so mostly exemplary. But he violated a core value-- Thou Shalt Not Torture Nor Tread On Habeus Corpus. No exceptions.

Just before his 2018 reelection a few months ago Brown did an interview with CNBC's John Harwood during which he disavowed his own past support for reinstating Glass-Steagall (while still trying to sound as though he's a progressive or a populist).

Harwood: But it sounds like it's more of a defensive agenda – that is, to prevent things that have been done from being dismantled, as opposed to trying to break up banks or reimposing Glass-Steagall.

Brown: Yeah, I have little interest in reimposing Glass-Steagall. That's an answer to a question that's not being asked. Breaking up the banks-- they're too big and too powerful-- that's not on my agenda. My agenda is to, as you say, play defense, to make sure we have a vibrant consumer protection agency. It's to do oversight. I mean, the appointees from the administration to be these regulators are people, some of whom had a lot to do with the housing crisis, and a lot to do with the Wall Street greed and overreach. So you're damn right I play defense when they're trying to do things to undermine the economy.

A couple of weeks ago, reporting for Splinter. Libby Watson wrote about how soft Brown has been on Medicare-For-All. She noted that it isn't just the "centrists" who are "cautioning against moving too fast or far on single-payer, worrying that focusing on Medicare for All will water down the Democrats’ message on protecting the Affordable Care Act from Republicans" and pointed out that Brown backs Medicare for retiring cops and firefighters before 65 but isn't backing Medicare for All. "Remember," she warns, that despite his left-ish credentials on issues like Wall Street, Brown took $830,000 from corporate PACs in 2018."

Giving cops and firefighters healthcare is fine, just as it would be great to give teachers or nurses or public sanitation workers healthcare, but it’s in no way an alternative to Medicare for All, and it sure is a weird way to approach the problem of the financial barriers to adequate healthcare-- expanding access one job at a time, in order of how noble Sherrod Brown deems your job to be. Similarly, Brown’s other proposed Medicare for All alternative-- a bill that would allow a Medicare buy-in at age 55, which he proposed in the last Congress-- kicks the can down the road for a lot of people, as if no one under 55 has medical debt or puts off necessary medical procedures or buying prescriptions because they can’t afford it.

You can argue that this is a matter of only proposing what’s “possible,” that Brown and other Democrats don’t believe Medicare for All is possible in one go, and so an incremental approach is needed. But a Medicare at 55 buy-in isn’t going to pass a Republican Senate, and I’d bet that even Medicare-for-Cops wouldn’t either-- this is the party that just tried to kill the Affordable Care Act and eliminate protections for preexisting conditions, after all.

Democrats like Brown don’t understand that proposals by major party members also define what’s “possible.” That’s why we’re talking about single-payer at all. If you’ve got two years of twiddling your thumbs before another shot at passing legislation, why propose these half-measures unless you really believe only people older than 55 deserve healthcare?

Brown has 2020 presidential aspirations, so it’s hard not to see this odd proposal as trying to ride cops to the White House. He’s clearly of the generation of Democrats that grew up believing the way to get Middle America to trust you is to talk a lot about cops and the troops, and the “dignity of work” over the indignity of rapacious capitalism. But “give Medicare to cops” or lowering the Medicare age to 55 doesn’t get us closer to Medicare for All, and it doesn’t make it easier to make an argument about universal care to expand eligibility to other selected groups. At this rate, lowering the Medicare age by 10 years once every 50 years (or one or two careers at a time) would get us single-payer by approximately 2300. Chuck Grassley might still be kicking around by then, but most of us won’t be.

If anything, both these proposals double down on the bizarre proposition of the current American system that only certain groups deserve healthcare. That’s awful policy, but it’s also shitty politics, as anyone who isn’t a cop or a firefighter or was born after Cheers premiered has no reason to support these policies. Brown might find that in 2019 and 2020, “Healthcare for Some” just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Now with Brown all but in, Common Dreams staff writer Jon Queally followed up on his Medicare-For-All not practical comments over the weekend. On Friday, Brown "broke from the pack of announced and expected Democrats by coming out against Medicare for All-- characterizing a system that would cover everybody and leave nobody as not 'practical'-- and was greeted by a widespread reaction of Thank you, Next and Adios from progressives no longer willing to entertain half-measures when it comes to solving the nation's healthcare crisis or bolstering the private insurance industry."

"I know most of the Democratic primary candidates are all talking about Medicare for all. I think instead we should do Medicare at 55," Brown said during a question and answer session at the Chamber of Commerce in Clear Lake, Iowa. Brown said that reducing the age or letting people over 55 buy into the existing Medicare system early would have a better chance of getting through Congress.

"I'm not going to come and make a lot of promises like President Trump did... I'm going to talk about what's practical and what we can make happen. And if that makes me different from the other candidates so be it," Brown said.

Progressive critics like Splinter's Libby Watson, however, took issue.

"You know what isn't practical?" she added. "Spending twice as much as other rich nations for worse outcomes."

"It's always 'practical' to leave people behind, and maintain corporate power," tweeted Michael Lighty, a healthcare policy expert and founding fellow at the left-leaning Sanders Institute. But ith the right kind of "leadership," he noted: "We can make the necessary possible."

Ahead of Brown's comments, Watson on Friday wrote a long and detailed column explaining why the kind of "Medicare at 55" or "Medicare buy-in" plan the senator is proposing-- basically a public option, but available only to certain segments of the population-- is not just bad policy, but bad politics.

It's not necessarily that what Brown is calling for would "make things worse," she argued, "it's that things are already catastrophically bad, and anything that just tinkers around the edges keeps us in dire straits." And by not taking the fight over healthcare to the next level by demanding a policy that would actually solve the problem, Brown is exemplifying the worst tendencies of the Democratic Party's old guard:

Democrats frequently admit defeat before they've even got their trousers on. This is one of the major differences between establishment Democrats and the newly popular leftist politicians, like Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: They understand that you don't turn up to a knife fight with a banana and a shirt that says I Am So Frightened on the front. But prominent Senate Democrats and at least one presidential candidate have already shown that they're willing to compromise on single-payer. That is not how you win a fight.

...Brown's comments on Friday appear very out of touch with national voter sentiment-- whether in the mid-west or elsewhere-- by calling a solution that garners massive (and growing) public support, and which studies show would be less expensive and more cost-efficient than the current profit-driven system, not politically realistic:

For Watson, however, not even the strong polling numbers tell the whole story. "Single-payer supporters don't say we should have the policy because people support it," she wrote. "We believe it's good, just, and more humane than our current nightmare, and that the conventional wisdom that it would be deeply unpopular is wrong."

While all the Democratic 2020 candidates will ultimately be pressed on their solution to the nation's ongoing healthcare crisis, Dr. Carol Paris, former president of Physicians for a National Health Program, which advocates for a single-payer system like Medicare for All, told Think Progress this week that anyone who runs must demonstrate they understand that only Medicare for All—a system with "No co-pays, no deductibles, no need for supplemental policies, no private insurance"—has the the ability to confront the current system's inherent failure.

"I want to know that candidates," she said, "are using that term to mean improving traditional Medicare and expanding it to everyone from birth to death residing in the United States."

Because they've taken great pains to lay it out clearly and succinctly, other Medicare for All proponents like the Democratic Socialists of America have said the American people should "accept nothing less."

In the closing argument of her column, Watson put it this way:

The American healthcare system is fundamentally broken. We spend twice what other rich nations do for much worse outcomes, with the highest infant mortality and the lowest life expectancy. Like the Affordable Care Act before it, the public option would preserve the rotten system that leads to this. It is motivated by a cowardly, straight-up wrong idea of pragmatism, the kind of half-hearted idea that Democrats—willingly bullied for 30 years by Reaganite, anti-government, Chamber of Commerce-funded slimeballs—think is all we can possibly achieve.

"Fuck that," she concluded. "Fight for single-payer or get kicked out of Washington trying."

Updated: Sen. Brown spars with Iowa Democratic voter over his refusal to embrace Medicare for All.

On Friday night at meet and greet event at the home of a local Democratic leader in Black Hawk County, Iowa, Sen. Brown was pressed on his Medicare for All stance by Ruth Walker, a 78-year-old retiree from Cedar Falls. The following transcript of the "lively exchange" was posted Saturday morning in a news story by Cleveland.com reporter Seth A. Richardson:

Walker: “It isn’t like it won’t work. I think advocating part way measures is not going to work. We tried part-way messages and it doesn’t work.”
Brown: “I want to get there, but I want to help people’s lives.”
Walker: “But we’ve been doing this forever. We need to get there.”
Brown: “I understand that. I understand that. We missed by one vote getting Medicare-at-55 because of one guy.”
Walker: “I mean Medicare-for-all. That’s the problem, though.”
Brown: “I know you did. I know you did. I understand that, but we are no closer to Medicare-for-all today than we were 15 years ago.”
Walker: “We haven’t been advocating very long.”
Brown: “OK, well, I want to improve people’s lives today. I know Congress won’t pass Medicare-for-all.”
Walker: “They will if they found out the people are brought – educate the people.”
Brown: "Well I try to educate the people. But I want to help people make their lives better right now. If we can pass Medicare-at-55 tomorrow, two things would happen: a whole lot of people’s lives would improve and a whole lot of voters would think that the next step is to do more.

"My ideology says universal coverage today, just like yours. But I want to see people’s lives better. We’ll keep having this debate and people will say, ‘Medicare-for-all. Medicare-for-all,’ and nothing will change. I think if we can make that change of Medicare-at-55 or Medicare-at-50, it will make all the difference in the world and then we get to the next step. Otherwise it’s this sort of tilting at windmills where everybody feels good saying, ‘ I’m for Medicare for all. I’m for Medicare-for-all,’ but nothing changes.

“And I want to educate people too, but I want to change people’s lives and help people now. We have a different disagreement there. We want to end up in the same place, but we’ve got to get Congress to act as quickly as we can when we were so close before.”

Is Brown worth saving? I wonder if he knows Stephanie Kelton. He should since, from 2014 until 2016, she served as Democratic chief economist for the Senate Budget Committee. Over the weekend, she wrote a column for Bloomberg thaBrown would be wise to pay attention to, The Wealthy Are Victims Of Their Own Propaganda, to avoid that kind of victimhood himself. One of her wealthy friends, she wrote, was complaining to her about AOC's 70% marginal tax rate and about the new wealth tax proposed by Elizabeth Warren. She's argued in the past that we can pay for a Green New Deal and that the obsession with finding a dollar of new 'revenue' to offset every new dollar of spending is the wrong way to approach the federal budgeting process. She worries that we have a long way to go before politicians and the journalists who interview them stop demanding a road map to the source of funding for every new spending proposal. "My wealthy friend," she wrote, "doesn’t want to pay for your child care. He doesn’t want to help pay off your student loans. And he sure as heck doesn’t want to shell out the big bucks for a multi-trillion-dollar Green New Deal. So where does that leave Democrats, who insist that they need the rich to pay for their progressive agenda? Here’s what I told him."

"I am with the Democrats. I want to see us build a cleaner, safer, more prosperous world. I agree with billionaire hedge-fund manager Ray Dalio, who argues that inequality has become so extreme that it should be declared a “national emergency” and dealt with by presidential action.

"And I worry very much that it may prove impossible to raise taxes on the ultra-wealthy (who have enormous political power). Then what? The planet burns, our third-world infrastructure falls into total disrepair, and our society becomes ever more bifurcated until the tensions reach a boiling point and... The pitchforks are coming.



"The problem is that every politician is confronted with the question, “How are you going to pay for it?” What these journalists are really asking is, ‘Who’s going to pay for it?’

"The question is designed to stop any meaningful policy debate by dividing us up, and get us fighting over where the money is going to come from. Since none of the headline politicians has really figured out how to respond-- by explaining that when Congress approves a budget, the Treasury Department instructs the Federal Reserve to credit a seller’s bank account-- they all end up trying to answer it by pointing to some new revenue source.

"And then there are self-imposed constraints, like PAYGO, that require lawmakers to offset any new spending with higher taxes or cuts to some other part of the budget. That means you can’t even get a piece of legislation to the floor for a vote if isn’t fully “paid for.” It also makes passing anything that much harder, since it requires politicians to raise taxes or carve out money from other programs. And don’t even get me started on CBO.

"So that’s why you see people like Representative Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Warren looking at the ultra-rich to fund their agendas. Billionaires are the magic money tree!

"To be blunt, the super-rich have become victims of their own successful marketing campaign. Conservative billionaires like Pete Peterson spent decades complaining about debt and deficits, putting enormous sums of money into a PR campaign to turn politicians and the public against deficit spending.

"So here we are. As Hillary Clinton said during the 2016 campaign, ‘You have to go where the money is.’ That means you!

"What can higher-income taxpayers do? I guess they could point the finger at Congress and say: “Don’t look at us! That’s where the money comes from!” Because the truth is, funding a Green New Deal with some deficit spending means we get good-paying jobs, a cleaner world and more safe assets (Treasuries) for everyone, including wealthier taxpayers."

To help my friend see the choices we face, I sent him a sketch that is shown here in a chart.

You don’t need precise data to make the point. Just think of it, loosely, as a reflection of the gap between the top and the bottom. Start off with today’s degree of disparity, represented by the black bar on the left.

Now suppose someone offers you three different ways to reduce inequality, shown in bars A, B and C. Each will leave you with a less unequal society but the same absolute disparity between the top and the bottom.

To get outcome A, you simply tax money away from the rich (the part shown in gray at the top). This does nothing to improve the material well-being of anyone below, but it does compress the distribution, so inequality is diminished.

Option B is your standard Robin Hood redistribution. Money is taxed away from those at the top, and money is invested in programs to lift everyone else (shown in blue). Again, the distance (or degree of disparity) between the top and the bottom is the same as under Option A, but this time the top lost and the bottom gained.

Finally, consider what happens if we simply invest in programs to benefit the non-rich (student-debt forgiveness, free child care and so on) without treating the super-rich as our piggy bank. In Option C, the top doesn’t move, but the bottom is boosted to new heights.

It’s sort of incredible that the option that is clearly better for both groups is the one we’re most afraid of. But that’s what happens when deficit phobias force politicians to “pay for” everything by going where the money is.