Why It Makes Sense To Refer To Comcast-TV As MSDNC

Bernie wants MSNBC to treat his campaign more fairly. And he's asked the station's top brass to do just that. But maybe that's a mistake. The more unfairly the #NeverTrump Republicans who dominate the MSNBC talking heads team treat Bernie, the higher his polling goes and the more contributions come rolling in. After the New Hampshire primary, Ari Melber-- one of the few MSNBC hosts who is neither a #NeverTrump Republican nor a biased anti-working class bigot-- asked a Democratic voter why she had voted for Bernie and she responded that it was in response to MSNBC's anti-Bernie coverage. "I think that it is completely cynical to say that he's lost 50% of his vote from the last time and there were two candidates," she told Melber. "Now, there are multiple, wonderful candidates who would be great presidents and people that I think we can unify and get behind, but the kind of 'Stop Bernie' cynicism that I've heard from a number of people. I watch MSNBC constantly, so I've heard that from a number of commentators... It made me angry enough, I said, 'Okay, Bernie's got my vote.'"

MSNBC hasn't done an editorial against Bernie per se, but working class supporters find it increasingly hard to watch anti-Bernie hate monsters like Joy Reid. Chris $5 million as year Matthews, or any of the afternoon #NeverTrump Republicans who populate the station's airwaves. On Tuesday, Vanity Fair published a piece by Tom Kludt explaining why Bernie's campaign is sick of MSNBC's coverage.

Faiz Shakir, Bernie's campaign manager went to NBC headquarters to speak with MSNBC president Phil Griffin. Shakir told Kludt that "We watched a ton of terrible coverage occurring and we thought we’d at least try to address it."

For months, the campaign bristled at slights from MSNBC’s stable of hosts and commentators. Jason Johnson, an MSNBC contributor, predicted in January 2019 that Sanders would drop out by August, and network analyst Mimi Rocah said in July that Sanders made her “skin crawl.” On-screen graphics have omitted Sanders and misrepresented his poll numbers, a trend that inspired a sendup from The Onion.

“It’s been a struggle to change the tone and the tenor of the coverage that we receive,” Shakir said in an interview. “They’ve been among the last to acknowledge that Bernie Sanders’ path to the nomination is real, and even when it’s become real, they frequently discount it.” (A study from progressive magazine In These Times buttresses Shakir’s critique). Sanders also attended the off-the-record discussion with Griffin; an MSNBC spokesperson said the network has hosted similar meetings with other Democratic candidates. Shakir said the 30 Rock chat was “open” and “cordial,” but now, months later, he’s “not sure it really changed anything.”

Sanders has long contended that the agenda of “corporate media” doesn’t necessarily reflect the people’s needs, and his 2020 campaign has doubled as a rolling media criticism shop. On Twitter, Sanders’s speechwriter David Sirota, a veteran reporter, has become a one-man rapid-response machine; last week, he chided a New York Times reporter for downplaying Sanders’s victory in the New Hampshire primary. Several key campaign figures hail from the media’s left flank: deputy campaign manager Ari Rabin-Havt (Media Matters), national press secretary Briahna Joy Gray (The Intercept), and Shakir (ThinkProgress). Sanders himself has suggested that the Washington Post “doesn’t write particularly good articles about” him because of his efforts to raise the minimum wage at Amazon, the company founded by the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos. He’s also railed against networks taking Big Pharma ads while on the debate stage.

Entering Wednesday’s debate in Las Vegas, which will be cohosted by MSNBC and NBC News, the ongoing tension between the titular liberal cable news network and the current Democratic front-runner has only intensified, and appears symptomatic of generational and ideological rifts within the party. It is at once a test of both MSNBC’s influence over the process and Sanders’s ability to withstand establishment resistance. Shakir said unflattering coverage on MSNBC has been “actively damaging” to the campaign. “The constant diminishment of Bernie Sanders on MSNBC,” he added, “hurts his case for electability.”

Sanders’s legion of very online supporters are quick to share clips and gripes after any perceived slight against Sanders. The anti-Bernie highlight reel grew in recent weeks, with some moments verging on parody. Joy Reid hosted a body-language expert who said Sanders’s posture revealed that he was “lying” about a recent dispute with Elizabeth Warren. Chris Matthews’s appearances, meanwhile, have become appointment viewing for his anguished warnings about Sanders. On the day of the Iowa caucuses, a glum Matthews invoked the ghost of George McGovern in forecasting a wipeout for Sanders in the general election. “Bernie Sanders is not going to be president of the United States, okay?” Matthews declared. Following the most recent debate in New Hampshire, Matthews breathlessly offered another history lesson. “I have my own views of the word socialist and I’d be glad to share them…They go back to the early 1950s. I have an attitude about them. I remember the Cold War,” Matthews said. “I have an attitude towards [Fidel] Castro. I believe if Castro and the Reds had won the Cold War there would have been executions in Central Park and I might have been one of the ones getting executed. And certain other people would be there cheering, okay?”

While Matthews’s rant was mostly met with mockery, there was anger last week when Chuck Todd quoted a story from a conservative publication on-air that described Sanders supporters as a “digital brown-shirt brigade,” prompting a condemnation from the Anti-Defamation League. (Todd will be one of five moderators at Wednesday’s debate.) And despite his newly minted status as the party’s national front-runner, Sanders has continued to face skepticism about his viability. The real story out of New Hampshire, Lawrence O’Donnell said, was “how much ground [Sanders has] lost from four years ago,” when he won the state’s primary in a decidedly smaller field than this year. “I don’t understand how Bernie is considered a front-runner,” Todd said after Sanders’s primary win.

...When we spoke Friday, Shakir was clearly frustrated by what he saw as a mix of dismissiveness and disparagement toward his candidate. He bemoaned a “double standard” in which the campaign faces relentless scrutiny over its most vocal online supporters, the so-called Bernie Bros, while MSNBC pundits have impunity to knock the candidate or his base. “You can feel the disdain they have for Bernie Sanders’s supporters,” Shakir said. “It’s a condescending attitude: ‘Oh, they must not be that intelligent. They’re being deluded. They’re being conned. They’re all crazy Twitter bots.’ My view is that there’s a bit of detachment from MSNBC and the people who this campaign gets support from. It feels like they’re covering progressives from an elitist perspective.”

Shakir credited CNN for making “efforts to try and diversify their voices,” citing the network’s hire of Alexandra Rojas, the executive director of the progressive organization Justice Democrats and a veteran of the 2016 Sanders campaign. Even Fox News has been “more fair than MSNBC,” according to Shakir. “That’s saying something,” he said. “Fox is often yelling about Bernie Sanders’s socialism, but they’re still giving our campaign the opportunity to make our case in a fair manner, unlike MSNBC, which has credibility with the left and is constantly undermining the Bernie Sanders campaign.”

Still, Sanders has made his own case several times on MSNBC, sitting down with Rachel Maddow earlier in the race and appearing last week on Chris Hayes’s show. His campaign surrogates get airtime too. On the night before the Iowa caucuses, Sanders campaign cochair Nina Turner accused Michael Bloomberg of being an oligarch trying to buy his way into the election. Johnson, the MSNBC contributor, disputed Turner’s characterization as “dismissive” and “unfair.”

A spokesperson for MSNBC declined to respond to Shakir’s specific critiques, but the network has previously brushed off complaints from Sanders as just another case of a campaign working the refs for more favorable coverage. “A presidential campaign complaining about tough questions and commentary speaks for itself,” a spokesperson for MSNBC told the Daily Beast in July. “Our anchors and analysts are doing their jobs: discussing day-to-day developments that have an impact on the race.”

...MSNBC’s coverage is also a microcosm of the generational split that Sanders faces in the primary. While Sanders cleans up among young Democratic voters, the 78-year-old fares poorly among his own age cohort (which also more closely mirrors the cable news audience). Voters aged 65 and older were shaped by the Cold War, leaving many wary of the ”socialist” label that Sanders embraces, and they were scarred by McGovern’s landslide defeat in 1972. They are more contemporaries and ideological peers of Matthews, and theirs-- not Sanders’s-- is the predominant point of view heard among MSNBC’s center-left pundits.

“There’s a reason the network is mocked as MSDNC: because it’s long been little more than an arm of the party’s establishment apparatus,” said Glenn Greenwald, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who had appeared as an MSNBC guest before becoming a staunch critic. MSNBC is “not some news organization with an anti-Sanders bias,” Greenwald said, but rather “a full-scale disinformation machine serving the primary goal of the DNC [Democratic National Committee]: destroying the Sanders campaign at any cost.”

Greenwald pointed to Hayes as an exception to his critique; Shakir also said the prime-time host “has been generally good” in his coverage of the campaign. Anand Giridharadas, a political analyst for MSNBC, has also been one of the few commentators to push back against the network’s criticism of Sanders. But identifying a Sanders sympathizer on MSNBC’s roster is reminiscent of “Where’s Waldo?” MSNBC hasn’t gone the route of CNN, which loaded up on pro-Donald Trump pundits like Jeffrey Lord and Corey Lewandowski during the 2016 race and beyond because its existing stable of conservative analysts were largely critical of the Republican insurgent.

Oh... and by the way... I just couldn't resist.

The Most Important Question In Decades: Will Bernie Be President?

Netroots Nation happened. One of the guys who runs it, Markos from Daily Kos, told Vox that "Nobody’s excited about Biden. He’s old, tired, and elite." Nor was he there. Except for Elizabeth Warren, Markos' top pick, none of the front-runners showed up this year-- not Bernie on the left, Biden and McKinsey Pete on the right and not even Kamala from the identity politics lane lane. "While attendees have yet to identify which of those three candidates is their favorite, wrote Ella Nilsen and Tara Golshan for Vox, "it was clear the conference’s progressives had identified their enemy: Vice President Joe Biden, the frontrunner in the 2020 field. The weekend even featured a pop-up podcast titled “Why Joe Biden is the least electable major Democrat for president in 2020.”

[W]hile Sanders and Harris were absent, their surrogates and fans certainly were not. The same couldn’t be said for others like South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg or Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), however.

“You had the Buttigieg boomlet earlier this year and you might have thought that might have continued into a place like this, but it really hasn’t,” Neil Sroka, a spokesperson for progressive political action committee Democracy For America, said. “What’s pretty clear is it’s Bernie, it’s Warren, and maybe it’s Kamala.”

...Seven months from when the first 2020 voters have a say in the Democratic primary in Iowa, progressives are winnowing down a deep field of candidates in a party that’s increasingly turned toward more left-wing ideals-- from public health care to wealth taxes and free college proposals.

But at Netroots, only three names had any meaningful energy behind them: Sanders, Harris, and, of course, Warren.

Across the street from the Netroots convention on Thursday, Sanders’s campaign co-chair Nina Turner took the stage at a protest outside Philadelphia’s Hahnemann Hospital, a local institution that’s set to shutter in coming weeks. Among the protest’s attendees were local activists, physicians, and Netroots attendees showing solidarity with the movement. Sanders himself wasn’t in attendance, but it was a show of the political revolution he’s been trying to build a campaign around.

“With these hands we will save Hahnemann hospital, and with these hands we will elect Sen. Bernie Sanders as the next president of the United States of America,” Turner said to a crowd with raised arms chanting “Bernie, Bernie, Bernie.” Sanders is scheduled to rally at the hospital Monday.

...Biden’s lead in the polls means progressive activists are approaching their choices in the primary with some caution.

“I like both of them-- Bernie and Warren-- I trust both of them. Ultimately, it will be where are they in January or February of next year?” Sroka said. “Who is up and who is down?”

...Progressives may not know exactly who they want to be the Democratic nominee in 2020, but they know who they don’t want: Joe Biden.

Some activists [keyword: "Some"] at Netroots conceded they would support Biden in a general election if they had no other choice. But as far as exciting the base at Netroots, Biden seemed to represent everything attendees disdain, particularly because, despite clearly trying to capitalize on his ties to Obama’s progressive brand, Biden hasn’t made an effort to cultivate a progressive base.

“Biden is using a strategy of running out the clock,” said Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party. “There’s a number of forums and spaces he could place himself in, in order to be scrutinized by the grassroots. Our job is not to coronate the person that the Third Way and elite media decision-makers think is most electable.”

“Biden’s campaign headquarters is four blocks away, and the only person I have seen come here is his digital guy,” Sroka said. “The fact that they are not even working to try and make the argument to this community is the sign of a campaign that doesn’t get where the future of the party is.”

The Biden campaign would not comment on their presence at the conference.

Underscoring the theme of there being a top-tier group of three, some Netroots attendees were gifted a six-pack of craft beers by event organizers. Warren, Sanders, and Harris were the only presidential candidates with a beer named after them: There was the “Professor Warren Perfect Plan Pale Ale” (a “quasi-session beer”), the “Kamala’s California Common” (a lager), and the “Bernie’s Barleywine” (“Gritty’s favorite beer”).

Joe Biden and the group of other moderate white men running for president, however, were symbolized by the “Average Centrist White Guy Cream Ale”-- “pale and not strong,” according to the beer guide handed out to attendees.

While progressives are only one segment of the Democratic electorate, Biden, and other candidates Netroots attendees were less than enthused about, could use their support. Particularly as it was progressives who helped energize the party’s base ahead of the 2018 midterm elections that saw Democrats retake the House of Representatives.

Progressives have grown sick and tired with the unabashedly biased way the corporate media covers Bernie and his campaign. As we noted last week, the NY Times coverage of the campaign is headed by rot-gut Wall Street shill, Sydney Ember, whose every piece reads like unadulterated Biden propaganda. Monday morning, Michael Calderone, posted a piece about that widespread bias for Politico readers. Bernie's campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, told Calderone that some reporters, "attempt to hide their disdain and masquerade their commentary behind purported straight pieces that amount to seeing everything as a 'bad news for Bernie' moment."... "If Bernie Sanders’ team had its way," wrote Calderone, "every reporter covering the Vermont senator would put out a tweet disclosing their unvarnished, personal feelings about the candidate." By the way, that ActBlue thermometer on the right? That's so you can contribute to Bernie's campaign if you want to. Just click on it.

It’s not going to happen, but campaign manager Faiz Shakir thinks he knows what it would reveal anyway.

"This isn't intended to be a sweeping generalization of all journalists,” he told Politico, “but there are a healthy number who just find Bernie annoying, discount his seriousness, and wish his supporters and movement would just go away.”

In the 2016 Democratic primary, Sanders’ complaint about the media was that he was ignored, especially early in the campaign, while a phalanx of reporters trailed Hillary Clinton and cable networks turned live to Donald Trump’s raucous rallies.

Now, he’s not having trouble getting airtime, giving interviews in just the last week on ABC, NBC, MSNBC and CNN. Among the Democratic field, Sanders ranks behind only Vice President Joe Biden in mentions in traditional news outlets this year, according to an analysis by global media and intelligence company Meltwater.

In the 2020 campaign, his team’s frustration has morphed, centering on what they see as excessively negative stories and dismissive commentary. Even though he’s consistently near the top in the polls, Sanders’ staff thinks pundits write off his chances. And they’re unusually vocal in calling out coverage they dislike on Twitter and on the media channels they’ve created in-house, fueling frustration once again among the senator’s supporters about whether he’s getting a fair shot at the White House.



On Sanders’ live-streaming show, The 99, three campaign staffers spent more than an hour last week discussing what they perceive as media bias, such as the tendency to focus on the shiny and salacious rather than Sanders’ decades-long advocacy for the poor and working class. “Standing up on these issues over 40 years is not new and exciting for people,” said chief of staff Ari Rabin-Havt.

...Rabin-Havt told POLITICO there’s something akin to a language barrier between political journalists and the campaign.

“They just will never buy that we don’t think it’s a game,” he said.

Sanders hosted a cable access show in the 1980s, and many of his campaign staffers have backgrounds at progressive news outlets-- Shakir was founding editor of ThinkProgress, Rabin-Havt served as executive vice president at Media Matters, Sirota wrote for The Guardian, and national press secretary Briahna Joy Gray was an editor at The Intercept.

They all share a skepticism of the “corporate media.” “The media work for huge multinational corporations,” Sanders told Rolling Stone last month, adding that “anyone with my agenda is going to attract a lot of opposition.”

He doesn’t have much patience for reporters who want him to talk about anything other than that agenda. Good Morning America host George Stephanopoulos kicked off an interview Thursday by telling Sanders that voters want to know more about him as a person.

Sanders didn’t take the bait. Americans “have a right” to know about a person running for president, Sanders acknowledged, but “sometimes the media goes overboard on that and does not pay enough attention to what you are trying to do to transform the country."

On Sunday, he said on NBC’s Meet the Press” that he had no plans to change his approach.

“When the poor get richer and the rich get poorer, when all of our people have healthcare as a right, when we are leading the world in the fight against climate change, you know what? I will change what I am saying,” Sanders said.

Are Americans Ready For A Transformative Presidency?

The woman in the video is Disney heiress, Abigail Disney, a member of Patriotic Millionaires, which released the video yesterday to advocate for the inclusion of an ultra-millionaires tax in the New York state budget (which is going to be wrapped up in 2 weeks... and the villains here are Governor Cuomo and Senate Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, of course + The Long Island 6: Todd Kaminsky, Monica Martinez, Kevin Thomas, James Gaughran, John Brooks and Anna Kaplan). The tax only affects individuals with annual income over $5 million. It's meant to help bail out cash-strapped public schools that are facing further budget cuts, and the long-neglected subway system which just continues to decline.

I'm glad New York is trying to solve these problems on a local level. As for addressing these kinds of problems across the country-- on the national level-- obviously nothing's going to happen while Trump and McConnell have a choke-hold on the political system. But a transformative presidency would. Not a Status Quo Joe bullshit presidency or that of any other pick-me, pick-me candidate with nothing to offer the American people-- but a really transformative presidency, the likes of which we haven't seen since FDR passed away. I guess I gave it away, right? Bernie.

You've probably noticed that many of his once-shocking policy ideas have lately moved from the fringe to the mainstream of the Democratic Party-- from Medicare-For-All and the Green New Deal to putting working families interests before Wall Street's interests. Most of the potential nominees-- despite their own histories and records-- are now trying to offer some version of Bernie's populist economic message.

Faiz Shakir, Bernie campaign manager, reminds the media that all Trump offered to woo working class voters was a ripped-off, hollow version of what Bernie has been advocating for decades-- almost making himself sound like what Shakir calls a "faux-Bernie Sanders."

Yesterday the AP reported that the case for Bernie being able to beat Trump is now front-and-center in discussions of the Democratic nomination.

“The polls have been pretty consistent that Democratic primary voters are very focused on which candidate has the best chance to beat Trump, so I expect all the candidates to argue why they are uniquely positioned to win,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama.

“Bernie Sanders has a strong case that his economic message works in the states that delivered Trump the presidency in 2016, but his challenge is going to be articulating how he can defend himself against attacks that he is a socialist,” Pfeiffer said.

Karine Jean-Pierre, a Democratic strategist and senior adviser at MoveOn, argued against the notion that a more centrist candidate is inherently more electable. “Often you’ll hear arguments from centrist, or more corporate-aligned, Democrats that a candidate needs to run as a centrist to win-- but those comments say more about the commenters’ interests and ideology. They don’t actually tell you much useful about political outcomes,” she said.

“This year’s primary is obviously a different dynamic than 2016, when there were only two Democrats, and much of that debate centered on electability-- and then the candidate presumed by the Democratic establishment to be most ‘electable’ lost,” Jean-Pierre said.

So far, Sanders has been focused on Democrats’ shared goal of defeating Trump, whom he’s called the most dangerous president in American history. But he’s also placed himself as a standard-bearer in today’s political environment.

“In 2016, this is where the political revolution took off,” Sanders said during a recent trip to New Hampshire, a state that he won by 22 percentage points. He said that he began the race far behind Clinton, campaigning on ideas “considered by establishment politicians and mainstream media to be ‘radical’ and ‘extreme.’”

Sanders says that now his ideas are supported by a majority of Americans, particularly Democrats and independents, as well as his rivals in the race.

Can The Corrupt Democratic Establishment Buy Off Bernie's Movement?

If Bernie loses the nomination, will he go the way of Howard Dean, who currently makes his living as pharmaceutical lobbyist and works as a commentator for MSNBC pushing Hillary. Has Dean lost the respect and admiration of his former followers? Well... well DFA (now Democracy for America but originally Dean For America) asked it's members to vote on an endorsement for president this year, Dean wrote an impassioned letter for his corrupt, conservative, lesser-of-two-evils candidate but something like 9 out of 10 DFA members ignored his letter and voted for Bernie, who DFA endorsed despite their founder's strong endorsement of Hillary. The movement he built waqs more than a cult of personality-- as is Bernie's revolution.

Democrats, Inc-- so the part of the Democratic Party unrelated to policy, values, principles, etc. is drooling over the Bernie wing and expecting Bernie to "turn it over" to them so they can start raising money from it. That's incredibly cluless since the underpining of that wing is built on opposition not to Republicans, Inc or even just conservatism, but on opposition to conservativism AND corruption, which describes the Democrats, Inc very nicely. if they're laboring under some delusion that Bernie and his team can just flip a switch and turn the passion behind the political revolution into cash flow for the Democratic machine, their stupidity is as strong as their greed.

Unless Hillary does something significant-- like dumping her wretched VP choice (Julian Castro) and picking someone like Elizabeth Warren, Jeff Merkley or Barbara Lee, if they're lucky, they'll get Bernie supporters to hold their noses and persuade themselves she's the lesser of two evils and it's worth voting for the lesser evil for all the old reasons we keep humoring Democrats, Inc, cycle after cycle after cycle. I suspect most Berne fans will do that just because the idea of a Trump or Cruz or Ryan is too horrible to contemplate. But $40 million/a month-- or even $4 million a month-- from the Bernie wing, maybe with Elizabeth Warren as the running mate and Hillary not renegging on all the policy positions Bernie forced her into over the last year. Maybe.

Although that wasn't how Gabriel Debenedetti and Darren Samuelson wrote about it for Politico Friday evening. "The fate of Sanders' golden catalog of donors and volunteers-- his email list-- is the talk of the Democratic Party," they reported. Operatives from Democrats, Inc "have already begun strategizing about how to access the list through informal conversations with people close to the Sanders campaign."

For those fighting for the issues Sanders has made the centerpiece of his campaign-- like campaign finance reform, the environment, and economic justice-- his list of several million fervent activists willing to volunteer and donate money, often repeatedly, is regarded as something of an electoral gold mine.

...Several Senate and House campaigns are respectfully hanging back and waiting to formally ask for access to the Sanders list as soon as he officially exits the race, according to multiple operatives involved with down-ballot 2016 races. Several sources said they’d prefer to reach out to the Sanders backers while they’re still engaged, and not several months down the road once the memories fade of the Vermont senator who has given Clinton a much more competitive race than she expected.

Indeed, Senate Democratic leaders like Minority Leader Harry Reid and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chairman Jon Tester have already been in talks with the Sanders camp over how to share his data when he’s ready.

“There’s efforts ongoing,” said Faiz Shakir, Reid’s digital director, pointing to Wisconsin Senate hopeful Russ Feingold as the kind of candidate-- a liberal in a state where Sanders campaigned extensively-- who lines up ideologically and would be eager to use the list.

“He’s built up an incredible list of passionate believers in bold, Democratic ideas,” added Shakir. “In order to remain impactful, relevant, and helpful to the party, I think you have to find a way to leverage the enthusiasm he’s generated after his campaign has concluded."

Sanders’ staffers won’t comment on the exact size of the list, but his campaign has said it has 2.2 million donors, and the New York-based firm eDataSource estimates that there are 5.2 million email addresses on it. The very fact that Sanders’ online fundraising prowess has become a focal point means that the question of what to do with the list is all the more complex.

“There’s this view among the Washington consultant class that these members are an ATM and you throw some words at them and they’ll give you money no matter what,” said Neil Sroka, a former Obama 2008 campaign aide now working as communications director of Democracy For America, which has endorsed Sanders. “Everyone in the Democratic Party is going to want Bernie Sanders’ seal of approval and a chance to share their message with the people on his email list."

The Democrats’ eagerness to get their hands on Sanders’ list took off after he sent emails for congressional hopefuls Lucy Flores of Nevada, Zephyr Teachout of New York, and Pramila Jayapal of Washington. While it’s still unclear exactly how much of a Bernie bump they all got, Las Vegas ABC affiliate KTNV reported earlier this week that Flores had already raised $428,000 in mostly small-dollar contributions. Sensitive to any implication that Sanders may lose the nomination to Clinton, the campaign has yet to offer any hints of its plans for the list.

...Some Sanders backers have higher ambitions for the list and cringe at the idea some of their fellow Democrats are eyeing it in pure dollars-and-cents terms.

Erich Pica, the head of Friends of the Earth Action, said such partisans don’t “understand what Bernie is creating, nor do they value, I think, the deep activist commitment that the Sanders campaign has been able to organize over the last year."

“It’d be a shame if the list and fundraising capacity was used for the short-term transactional nature of presidential politics,” he added. “There’s something greater there that needs to be used for generational change."

The question of how exactly Sanders organizes himself and his data after his presidential campaign ends also must be answered. He could create his own new organization — much like Dean did with Democracy for America in 2004 (its email list now exceeds 1 million) and Obama did with Organizing for America in 2009. Those close to Sanders expect him to take advantage of his email list in the future no matter what happens in the ongoing race. And given how the independent senator has responded in other high-profile political and policy fights, they expect him to ultimately play ball with Democrats.

“Bernie usually finds a way to be helpful at the end of the day,” Shakir said. “That’s always been the case, whether it was the Affordable Care Act, Dodd-Frank. There are places where he might have, initially, some concerns. At the end of the day, he’s found a way to be helpful. That’s his instinct, and my sense is he’d be similarly disposed on this, as well."

This has been made painfully more complicated because Schumer has explicitly threatened Bernie with loss of the Budget Committee chairmanship if he interferes with Schumer's corrupt conservative candidates in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. The Schumercrat in Ohio has already beaten the progressive and Tuesday will either find Schumer without a candidate or having to accept that Pennsylvanians don't take orders from a sleazy and despised New York ward healer. Florida's primary, pitting Bernie endorser Alan Grayson against Wall Street's (and therefore Schumer's) top choice of the cycle, Patrick Murphy, isn't until the very end of August. It will be interesting to see if Bernie even pays lip service to assisting the grotesque candidates who espouse the essence-- the way Murphy does-- of everything he has built his movement to oppose. Meanwhile, you can give directly to the Grayson campaign here:

2020-- Another Anti-Trump/Anti-Red Wave? Or An Actual Blue Wave Too This Time?

The Democratic tent-too-big Party didn't have anything much to offer voters in 2016 and millions of voters flocked to Trump. Two years later, many of those voters-- as well as some non-voters-- understand the scope of the catastrophe that Trump is. And they flocked to vote for Democrats running for Congress. Over 40 red seats flipped. I spent much of 2018 expelling why the coming wave was not a blue wave at all, but an anti-Trump wave, at best an anti-red wave. But "blue wave" is far too positive to a description. As a party, the Democrats still weren't offering anything to voters-- except "we're better than Trump." It was enough to flip those 40-some-odd seats. Could they have flipped more seats with the kind of positive message that actually would have inspired a blue wave? Absolutely. They could have picked up 60 seats instead of 40, or 70 seats... maybe 80.

Not random seats, seats with enough independent voters to swing elections-- like GA-07, where Republican incumbent Rob Woodall was reelected with just 50.1% of the vote, or MI-06, where GOP incumbent Fred Upton won with just 50.2% or TX-23, where Republican incumbent Will Hurd was elected with a paltry 49.2%. Republicans like Jaime Herrera Beutler (WA-03), Ann Wagner (MO-02), John Carter (TX-31), Michael McCaul (TX-10), Chris Collins (NY-27), Devin Nunes (CA-22), Rodney Davis (IL-13), Don Bacon (NE-02), John Katko (NY-24), Doug LaMalfa (CA-01), Vern Buchanan (FL-16), Brain Fitzpatrick (PA-01), George Holding (NC-02), Kenny Marchant (TX-24), Lee Zeldin (NY-01) wouldn't have stood a chance in a blue wave. All of them had stomach-churning close calls.

The Democrats may offer the same next year: nothing. Or, as Matt Yglesias, put it last week: Joe Biden is the Hillary Clinton of 2020. He's another Iraq War hawk, another Wall Street shill (the senator from MBNA), and another flip-flopper with terrible instincts who has wrong on every big issue. (Yesterday, in an e-mail from her campaign with the subject line "Joe Biden," Team Warren wrote "Elizabeth doesn’t host private fundraisers or take money from federally registered lobbyists or PACs. Instead, we’re building a broad grassroots movement where a lot of people chip in a little at a time to build something big... How did Joe Biden raise so much money in one day? Well, it helps that he hosted a swanky private fundraiser for wealthy donors at the home of the guy who runs Comcast's lobbying shop. Elizabeth is building a grassroots movement without holding any big-money private fundraisers where you can only talk to her if you write a big check first. Without taking a dime from federally registered lobbyists or PACs of any kind. It’s the right thing to do."

Elizabeth Warren, like Bernie, actually offers, reasons for a blue-wave. In fact, yesterday, reporting for BuzzFeed News, Ruby Cramer wrote that in hosting something like 4,700 simultaneous organizing events on Saturday, Faiz Shakir, Bernie's campaign manager "boldly predicted that their candidate would help bring 'a wave up and down the Democratic ballot' on Nov. 3, 2020... You're not only going to have Sen. Sanders winning the White House, you are going to see a wave-- a wave up and down the Democratic ballot. That is what we are fighting for."

Claire Sandberg, the campaign’s national organizing director, called the Saturday organizing event “historic”-- the “largest distributed day of action ever in a presidential campaign,” she said, referring to a model of “distributed organizing” that aims to build volunteer networks in areas without official campaign staff.

Sandberg, who also spoke at the pre-taped Boston event, said that house parties were scheduled to be held in all 50 states, including at hundreds of college campuses, as well as 30 other countries from Japan to Senegal.

"Many voices will attempt to diminish what we're building here together and argue that our movement has run its course,” Sandberg said. “The reality is that we grow larger every day.”

To ensure that the campaign is able to harness the energy they are confident Sanders still inspires-- and in a show of organization they lacked during his first presidential campaign-- officials have built a new online app called "Bern."

Through the app, aides said, volunteer leaders ("ambassadors for this campaign") will be encouraged to recruit other volunteers and identify new supporters. The app will also help volunteers help register people to vote, request a Democratic primary ballot, and remind people of voter registration deadlines in key states.

"A movement that grows is a movement that wins," Shakir said.

Sanders is scheduled to spend Saturday afternoon calling into various house parties, an aide said.

"We talk about us, not me. Because this is a very profound statement. What does it mean? It's not just a bumper sticker. What it means-- and I believe this as someone who's been involved in politics 13 years in the Senate, 16 years in the House-- is that no president, not the best intentioned, not the most honest person in the world, no one person can do it alone."

"And remember," Sanders said moments later, pumping his hand in the air. "It's not Bernie! It's us! Don't forget that: Us! Us! Us!"

Bernie Needs More Support From His Contemporaries-- His Campaign Is Working On It

Adrian Pantoja is a Professor of Politics at Pitzer College and a senior analyst for Latino Decisions. Over the weekend, they released some new polling of Latino voters in California, who overwhelmingly favor Bernie for president. Pantoja wrote that "one of the primary ways to win the hearts and minds of young Latinos is by campaigning on issues that matter most to them." Bernie seems to have accomplished that.

This table lists the top ten policy issues for young Latinos in California. Pantoja pointed out that the ten top issues are important for all respondents, regardless of age but, what is distinct among young Latino voters is that the ranking of these issues differs. "For example, access to affordable housing is the most pressing issue for young Latino voters, while lowering health care costs is the most pressing issue for older Latino voters. Protecting immigrant rights ranks second among younger Latinos, while this issue ranks fourth among older Latinos. The relative importance of immigration issues may be due to the fact that 52 percent of young Latinos say they have a family member or close friend who is undocumented, while only 24 percent of Latinos 50 years and older know someone in that situation. The policy issues of young Latino voters relative to older Latino voters are more alike than different." Bernie's task now is to win over more older voters, not just Latino seniors but seniors across the board.

Yesterday, Wall Street Journal reporter Eliza Collins took up the issue of Bernie's outreach to seniors. In Iowa, he was asking his most enthusiastic young followers to help him persuade their parents. "His campaign," she wrote "is coaching thousands of young supporters on how to talk to their parents and grandparents during the holidays.

“It’s up to us as students and young people to make the moral appeal to our older relatives to join us in voting for Bernie, because let’s face it: they won’t be around for as long to deal with the consequences of this election, but we will be,” reads a document titled “Students for Bernie: Family Persuasion Guide” that was sent out to nearly 3,000 students ahead of Thanksgiving. The campaign plans to do another push before the holidays later this month.

Aides to Mr. Sanders, 78 years old, say he can win the Democratic nomination for president in 2020 if he is able to turn out a diverse coalition of young and working-class people who don’t typically vote in the primaries.

But in recent months, these aides have also acknowledged that he needs to do better with older voters, a section of the electorate that has been more likely to go to the polls than their younger counterparts have been.

A Quinnipiac University poll released Tuesday showed Mr. Sanders with 52% of support among Democratic primary voters under age 35, but just 2% with those over 65. By contrast, former Vice President Joe Biden won the backing of 47% of voters over 65 in that poll. Wall Street Journal/NBC News polling shows a similar trend.

Mr. Sanders’s campaign manager Faiz Shakir said in an interview that the campaign has made more of an effort to focus on seniors in the past three months and hopes to peel off some voters who have been supporting other candidates.

Urging young supporters to talk to older relatives about Mr. Sanders is an unconventional strategy. The campaign is also taking some more traditional steps.

A six-figure digital ad buy in Iowa includes one spot targeting senior voters [up top]. The ad features Mr. Sanders speaking at a town hall in Des Moines about expanding Social Security benefits and capping the cost of prescription-drug prices.

Aides to Mr. Sanders also say the $8 million they have put into TV advertisements in the states that have early primaries will help them reach seniors because they are placing the ads during shows that are popular with older audiences.

Mr. Sanders’s campaign is airing most spots during the local news and network morning shows, according to data from political-ad tracker Kantar/CMAG. It is also buying time during the sitcom The Big Bang Theory, daytime talk programs The Ellen DeGeneres Show and Dr. Phil and the game show Family Feud.

According to the Sanders campaign, 20% of the events he hosted in November were senior-focused. On the campaign trail, Mr. Sanders often says that Medicare for All, a signature policy, would cover home health care, hearing aids and eyeglasses. He rails against pharmaceutical companies ratcheting up the cost of prescription drugs.

Winning older voters could be particularly key in Iowa and New Hampshire, states with older populations and the first two to vote in the nominating contest. Sixty-four percent of Democratic caucus-goers in Iowa in 2016 were over age 45. Fifty-nine percent of New Hampshire Democratic primary voters were in that age group, according to entrance and exit polling.

Mr. Sanders has been visiting both states to try to shore up his support, and he has won over some senior voters.

Judy Plank, a 76-year-old retiree from Le Mars, Iowa, said she liked Mr. Sanders because his age meant he had a wealth of political experience and because she has long supported the same issues he has.

“We’re contemporaries, he’s a year older but we won’t let that bother any of us,” she said at a rally in November. She thought her peers who didn’t like him were just scared of new ideas, “and then they’re mad at him because they’re scared,” she said.

Many candidates-- though not the conservative ones, like Sttaus Quo Joe, Mayo Pete and Bloomberg-- have embraced Bernie's proposal for expanding Social Security, The Right To A Secure Retirement. There are 4 key components to his plan:

• Expand Social Security benefits for all recipients and protect pensions.
• Guarantee home and community based long-term care services.
• Protect our most vulnerable seniors by quadrupling funding for the Older Americans Act and expanding other programs seniors rely on.
• Expand and train the direct care workforce we need.

Slashing drug prices is another piece of this that has widespread appeal to seniors, especially since Trump's bullshit promises in 2016 have amounted to nothing at all. In fact, the cost of medicine has increased. Bernie wrote that "In the United States, we pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. This year alone the price of major prescription drugs have increased more than five times the rate of inflation with price hikes as high as 875 percent. While about one out of five Americans cannot afford to pay for the medicine prescribed by their doctors,10 big drug companies made $69 billion in profits last year and the top 25 CEOs in the pharmaceutical industry received $440 million in compensation in 2017. Seniors take an average of 4.5 drugs every month. For a senior taking brand name medications, the yearly price of those medications was more than $30,000 in 2017, more than most seniors’ annual income. Nearly a quarter of seniors with prescriptions have a hard time affording their medicine. Under Medicare for All, we will stop the pharmaceutical industry from ripping off seniors by making sure that no one in America pays over $200 a year for the medicine they need by capping what Americans pay for prescription drugs. This is exactly what exists in countries like the United Kingdom, Sweden and New Zealand.  Under this plan, seniors will never experience another donut hole where they are forced to pay thousands of dollars for the life-saving medicine they need. We will also take bold action to take on the pharmaceutical industry by:

• Requiring Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices while maintaining access to all FDA-approved medications.
• Cut drug prices by 50% by making sure the U.S. pays no more for prescription drugs than other major countries.
• Allow patients, pharmacists and wholesalers to purchase lower-cost drugs from Canada and other countries.
• Exercise federal march-in rights to manufacture drugs produced at taxpayer expense.
• Require companies to disclose the costs of clinical drug trials.

"At a time when about half of American households over the age of 55 have no retirement savings and one out of five seniors are trying to live on less than $13,500 a year, our job is not to cut Social Security," wrote Bernie, who has been saying this for decades. "Our job is to expand Social Security so that everyone in this country can retire with the dignity they have earned and everyone with a disability can live with the security they need. Social Security is the most successful government program in our nation’s history. Before Social Security was signed into law, nearly half of seniors lived in poverty. Today, while much too high, the poverty rate for seniors is down to 9.2 percent. Through good times and bad, Social Security has paid every nickel owed to every eligible American-- on time and without delay.  That is an extraordinary accomplishment. Despite what you may have heard from those who want to cut back on Social Security, let’s be clear: Social Security is not “going broke.” Social Security has a $2.9 trillion surplus and can pay every benefit owed to every eligible American for the next 16 years.   Although Social Security’s finances are strong, Congress must strengthen and expand it for generations to come. How do we do that? Simple. At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, the wealthiest Americans in this country must pay their fair share into the system. Today, a billionaire pays the same amount of money into Social Security as someone who makes $132,900 a year because the Social Security payroll tax is capped.

Here's the plan that should have him in the number one spot among seniors, just as he is among Americans under 40:

• First, we will make sure that Social Security will pay every benefit owed to every eligible American for the next 52 years.
• Second, we will expand benefits across-the-board including a $1,300 a year benefit increase for seniors with incomes of $16,000 a year or less.
• Third, we will lift millions of seniors out of poverty by increasing the minimum benefits paid to low-income workers when they retire.
• Fourth, we will increase cost-of-living adjustments to keep up with the rising cost of health care and prescription drugs by establishing a Consumer Price Index for the Elderly.

Is the Senate's health care bill a landmark achievement? Or is it so bad, it should be killed?

"Those on the left dissatisfied with the Senate bill should focus their efforts over the next few weeks on getting as many fixes into it as they can."

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his Washington Post column today,

"Democrats: Stop screaming and pass health reform"

by Ken

To the end, large groups of people who would have had to grasp that our health care delivery system is in crisis -- on the verge of bankrupting us without providing adequate health care to the overwhelming majority of Americans -- chose not to get it.

On the NYT website, there's a piece from yesterday, "No Change in Coverage Numbers in Dropping of Public Option," under the standing head, "Prescriptions: Making Sense of the Health Care Debate," in which writer David M. Herszenhorn, while doing a dance of joy over the demise of the public option, essentially kicks and screams, "I will not under any circumstances attempt to understand any aspect of the health care debate, and nobody can make me." It's a piece of such perfectly sublime stupidity that I think this Herszenhorn is a fellow to watch. He should be shooting up the NYT hierarchy.

I avoided writing about the subject of health care reform for a long time, because I knew the complexity of the subject put it way beyond my understanding. When I finally weighed in, in July, it was because it seemed awfully clear that most of the people yammering about health care -- including the heavy hitters in Congress -- were farther out of it than I was.

What I could see, though, was a conceptual sleight of hand that was either embarrassingly inadvertent or slickly convenient. All the yammering, as far as i could see, was aimed at the admittedly serious question of the shockingly large number of Americans who have no health insurance coverage. But that's not a matter of "health care reform," it's "health care coverage extension." Important, but a different issue, though undoubtedly related.

So when Max Baucus, who as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee then was one of the key players, said he saw no need for a public option, according to what he believes, there wasn't any such need. Because he was saying almost exactly the same thing that the Last Standing Senator, Ben Nelson, has been saying to the end. At a Saturday news conference Little Ben laid it out: "“I believe in the free market system as the foundation of our economy and as the primary focus that should drive our health care system and our debate. That’s why I opposed the public option and yet supported the market exchanges.”

The only problem is that to say this, you have to be either a shit-sucking imbecile or a criminal conspirator with the insurance-industry swindlers who have been sucking the financial life out of Americans and watching them get sick and go bankrupt or die (or both). Because yes, the uninsured are a problem, but they are not the problem, which again is that the system -- produced by Senator Ben's cherished free market -- is broken and is a medical and financial death trap for Americans who are insured as well as those who aren't.

I don't remember whether it was coincidence or a natural sequence of events that emboldened me to speak out finally at the very time that Howard Dean's Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform, written with Igor Volsky and Faiz Shakir, was published. If nothing else, what I heard from Dr. Dean sure reinforced my feeling that I wasn't the one who was crazy.

"Don't pretend you're going to do health-insurance reform unless you're really going to change the system," he said. To Keith Olbermann he explained, "This is a battle between the insurance companies and the American people." In the book he explained how real health care reform not only was financially achievable but could be essentially self-financing.

I even offered my own proposed Health Care Legislation Rule: "From now on, no one should be allowed to participate in any way in the drafting of health care legislation without proving that they have read Dr. Dean's book. Proof that they've understood it would be nice too, but that may be beyond the reach of proof."

Of course none of that percolated into the "debate" we kept hearing, or really filtered in in any way. So really the "debate" was about apples vs. photocopied pictures of candied orange slices. And in the end we've got this monster bill that a lot of our friends are telling us we've got to swallow hard and accept. (On the other hand, over at Firedoglake, Jane Hamsher's got a petition going to kill it, with a formidable list of ten reasons why the American people "will revolt" when they "find out what's actually" in it. In today's Post, Ezra Klein tries to prove her list is a scare tactic that misrepresents that facts of the matter.)

The insurance companies had every reason to be pleased by this, and that pleasure didn't come cheap, considering how much money they spent to achieve this outcome. It was worth it to them, self-evidently, because real reform was going to cost them a large chunk of the profits they've been reaping while America gets sicker, physically and fiscally.

Huge sums were spent on public-opinion influencing mechanisms like advertising campaigns, including buying up pol-whores like former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, who had been slotted in as President-elect Obama's point man on health care reform in his intended job as secretary of health and human services, if not for his little tax problem. Can you imagine of he'd actually been confirmable? Well, I guess the outcome would have been pretty much the same, since we can now see that the Obama administration always intended to seek a solution that was acceptable to, if not actually hammered out by, the insurance industry. (Looking back, it's clearer than ever how little consideration the incoming Obama administration would have given to the recommendation made by some of us, that Dr. Dean be tapped for the job that Tom Daschle had crapped out of.)

So yes, the insurance industry had to really open its wallet this past year. But a shocking amount of amount of its investment, as Howie has reported here at length, was already ongoing: pouring money directly into the coffers of public officials, not least the very members of the House and Senate who would get to decide which health care problem they cared to address -- and who, amazingly, decided by and large that there wasn't any kind of health care crisis that they could see, just this pesky technical issue of a few uninsured Americans. Okay, maybe 40 million, but they were either illegal aliens (um, no) or healthy young people who chose not to have insurance (well, yes, some of them, but that's really not the problem we're talking about).

Even more shockingly, the mighty infotainment news media never saw any kind of story in the massive bribes the insurance industry had paid those see-no-evil Congressfolks. How was it possible that Joe Lieberman could show his face in public to speak on the subject and not be asked, as the first question, about all the money he and the lovely Hadassah, an insurance-industry whore, had collected from the industry he was insisting had to be given a free ride?

Well, I guess it was possible because they were all in on it. Certainly it was no surprise to progressives who always understood that candidate, then president-elect, then President Obama didn't see a health care crisis either, just the glitch of those uninsured folks which could be used as an opportunity to mandate the transfer of zillions more dollars into the coffers of -- who else? -- the insurance companies. Well, the drug companies too, but the president took them out of play early on with a side deal that insured that the subject of exorbitant drug prices, surely a crucial element of the actual health care crisis, would never come up for discussion.

I respect people like Paul Krugman and E. J. Dionne Jr. (though with more reservations -- we'll come back to him) who insist that even the Senate version of health care "reform" (notice how all of official Washington has officially forgotten, with a House-Senate conference yet to hammer out a compromise package, that there actually is a House bill in play, also crappy but just possibly something on which it might be possible to build -- except to snarl warnings not to even think of including any of it in the final bill) is worth fighting for and then building on, as if this system is capable of building on anything.

As I hinted above, I want to be careful not to mischaracterize E. J. Dionne Jr.'s feelings about the Senate bill, about which he has few illusions. He understands, though, how we got boxed into it, and stresses that we have to start fighting now if we hope to have any influence in the next round. After making the recommendation to surly progressives I've quoted at the top of this post, he writes:

And they can do something else: Start organizing for the next health-care fight. Enactment of a single bill will not mark the end of the struggle. It will open a series of new opportunities. It's a lot easier to improve a system premised on the idea that everyone should have health coverage than to create such a system in the first place. Better to take a victory and build on it -- to accept this plan as a "starter home," in Sen. Tom Harkin's apt metaphor -- than to label victory as defeat.

Successful political movements prosper on the confidence that they can sustain themselves over time so they can finish tomorrow what they start today. At this moment, rage is understandable, but hope is what's necessary.

Man has a point. I started this post with the phrase "to the end," and I guess E.J. is right, this isn't the end. Even if it sure feels like it.

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Howard Dean says: "Don't pretend you're going to do health-insurance reform unless you're really going to change the system"

KenInNY's proposed Health Care Legislation Rule: From now on, no one should be allowed to participate in any way in the drafting of health care legislation without proving that they have read Dr. Dean's book. Proof that they've understood it would be nice too, but that may be beyond the reach of proof.

"This is a battle between the insurance companies and the American people."

-- Howard Dean, talking to Keith Olbermann about the battle
for health care reform last night on Countdown

by Ken

When Keith asked Governor Dean about the consequences for the Democrats if -- especially now that they have the magic "60th" vote of Sen. Al Franken -- they can't produce meaningful progressive health care reform, he said, "We're going to lose seats in 2010 if we don't pass what the president said was 'change you can believe in.'"

The governor made clear that he doesn't expect Republican support, and for that matter doesn't look for more votes than the Senate majority that would be required doing health care reform as a budget reconciliation matter. And so, for him, "The issue is not so much the Blue Dogs running the show. The issue is people not having enough nerve, you know not having enough spine, to do the right thing."

And what is the right thing? As it happens, wearing his doctor's coat, Dr. Dean has written a book, with Igor Volsky and Faiz Shakir: Howard Dean's Prescription for REAL Healthcare Reform. And for the occasion he's done a terrific interview for Esquire.

It comes at an excellent moment in the "debate." I've been worrying for some time that we were going to pay a steep price for the failure to bring out in the open its murky underpinning. The best way to explain what I mean is to offer two propositions about American health care:

(1) Some 47 million Americans have no insurance coverage at all, and consequently at best uncertain access to the health care system. This is a shock and a disgrace, and something needs to be done about it.

(2) The American system of delivering and paying for health care is so disastrously inefficient that it not only provides inadequate care but is on the verge of bankrupting us. Not only our physical but our fiscal well-being demand that we do something about it.

Both of these propositions seem to me unimpeachably correct. Is there anyone reading this who disagrees with either? But they aren't at all the same proposition, and it's possible to devise a plan to "do something" about one which does little or nothing about the other.

I've had the feeling that well-meaning proponents of reform have been deliberately fudging the distinction, knowing that there are different constituencies lying in wait to attack proposals aimed at each. In particular, I think advocates have been hoping they could pretend to be addressing the less controversial problem of bringing coverage to the uninsured and secretly stick in some stuff to address the "system sucks" problem without causing the uproar that would follow an announced intent to overhaul the whole damned system.

Sure enough, Dr. Dean makes this very point in the interview! "Ninety-nine percent of the discussions among reporters, policy wonks, and politicians focus on the uninsured -- which is, frankly, why nothing is passed. They don't focus on the majority of Americans who have health insurance that doesn't work." And right there he's opened up the can of worms that I think a lot of people were hoping wouldn't have to be opened. But of course merely extending coverage to the 47 million isn't health care reform. That's maybe health care extension.

Remember when Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus was widely reported to have changed his position, suddenly indicating a willingness to consider the inclusion of a public plan? He insisted that he hadn't changed his position, and if you looked at what he was saying, he hadn't. He had simply acknowledged that if a public plan was necessary to bring about coverage of the 47 million, he was prepared to look into it -- provided it didn't in any way undercut the position of the insurance companies providing coverage to the rest of the public. That, it went without saying as far as the senator was concerned, would be unacceptable, because in his mind the only problem being addressed was that of the uninsured. He insisted that 85 percent of the people who have insurance are happy with it, and therefore his first principle throughout the drafting process would be that the existing system not be tampered with.

Shouldn't that have been headline news? Or at least talked about? What the senator was saying was that he rejects my second proposition totally. See, I didn't say that no one disagrees with it, just that I doubted very much whether anyone who's reading this disagrees with it. And I'll tell you some other people who disagree with the proposition that the system sucks and something has to be done about it: (1) the insurance companies, (2) the drug companies.

One person who agrees is Howard Dean, who explains to John H. Richardson in Esquire that that's why he insists a plan isn't reform without a public option. " It's not. It's a waste of time. Don't pretend you're going to do health-insurance reform unless you're really going to change the system. The discussions in the Senate have not been about changing the system."

Misplaced concern for the insurance companies he describes as "one of the many problems the Senate is now having."

They are focused on anything but the American people. But the insurance companies will be fine. It won't happen overnight, and they'll make plenty of money. But this is not a matter of making the insurance companies happy. This is a matter of making the 72 percent of the people who want a public option happy, including the 50 percent of Republicans who want a public option.

As far as I'm concerned, every proposal that includes a "trigger" for the public option is also intentionally ignoring the distinction between my two propositions. Because there's no place for a trigger if you define the problem as "The system sucks and has to be fixed." A trigger is only a talking point in the extension-of-coverage discussion, and anyone who advances the notion that inclusion or omission of a trigger could be what saves or sinks health care either doesn't understand the basic issues being discussed or is being intentionally deceptive.

Why is it not surprising to find Master Rahm Emanuel, a man apparently devoid of any principle beyond what suits his personal interests, emerging as the leader of the "intentionally deceptive" party?

The time to stand up and shout was when Senator Baucus acknowledged that his driving principle in "reforming" the health care system is that most of it not be changed because of that bogus 85 percent satisfaction rate among those with insurance. Oh, I'm sure the insurance companies can produce some crap survey that was rigged to produce those results. But those results aren't worth the computing time it took to manufacture them.

Which is not to say that nobody is satisfied. I'm sure that high-ranking executives whose companies pay for their super-deluxe coveage are thrilled. I'm sure that members of Congress, with their swell plan, are pretty happy. Beyond that, though, I suspect there are two huge, overlapping categories:

* people who cling tenaciously to what they have, for fear that what they could wind up with will be worse. There is, of course, no shortage of demagogues working the circuit trying to scare the dickens out of those people. As Dr. Dean says, "The Republicans just make things up out of whole cloth. Nothing they say about health care is true. It's all just nonsense and fears and what-ifs. It doesn't happen."

* people who don't know how inadequate their coverage is because they haven't yet been sick enough to expose its inadequacy, especially now that the insurance companies' leading business strategy has expanded from simply denying coverage in individual cases to lopping off the coverage of people who are presumptuous enough to try to use their insurance. You know, sick people. Why should sick people be their problem? (Just because they chose to go into the health insurance business? How unfair.)

What's more, those insurance-company "studies" almost surely don't reflect satisfaction with the cost of insurance -- except, again, in the cases of people like those corporate honchos and members of Congress whose cushy packages come all paid for. The rest of us live in terror of next year's leap in insurance premiums.

[Click to enlarge]

From the many years that Dr. Dean has been dealing with these health care delivery issues, as a physician and as governor of Vermont and now as a concerned citizen ("It was one of the reasons I ran for president," he tells John Richardson in Esquire), he has obviously spent a lot of time thrashing out the economic issues. To him there's nothing mysterious about why a public option is so important for health care: "The private sector can't manage costs. Health care is one of the few places -- defense is another -- that the government works more efficiently and more effectively than the private sector. That's just a fact."

And why is the private health care system so inefficient?

Because there is no feedback in the private health-care system. When I was practicing medicine, nobody with substernal chest pain ever got off my examining table and said, "The guy down the street does it for $2,000 cheaper, I'll see you later." That's why we've had 40 years of costs that increase between two and three times the rate of inflation every single year. It's breaking our economic system. People are yelling and screaming about jobs going to China, but they're not yelling and screaming about jobs going to Canada. But they are. Because the right-wingers can scream and yell about rationing if they want, but economically their system works much better than ours does.

And speaking of "rationing," this is another of those issues that the Republican liars are fond of obfuscating. "We have rationing today," Dr. Dean points out.

I'll tell you who rations. It's the private insurance groups. This ridiculous nonsense that the right-wingers are talking about, that public insurance will put a bureaucrat between you and the doctor — that goes on every day in the system we have. But only in the private sector. It doesn't happen in the public sector. I have never had, in my 10 years of practicing medicine, a Medicare bureaucrat call me up and say, "You can't do this and you can't do that." But that used to happen every day with the private insurance companies. You'd beg to have your patient have this drug or that procedure.

The health care debate has at times nearly ground to a halt over the subject of cost, but again, there seems to be no way of making people understand -- especially while the Republicans and right-wing Democrats are in "high lie" mode (though in fairness it's entirely possible that they don't understand either) -- that the way the Congressional Budget Office is mandated to evaluate costs and savings is uniquely ill-suited to the way they occur, or can occur, in health care. One point that intrigues John Richardson is Dr. Dean's claim that the $1.5 trillion a reform plan would cost is "already in the system." The good doctor is only too happy to explain:

Let's take somebody who works who doesn't have insurance. They get sick. They end up going to the hospital, and the hospital has to treat them. It's called uncompensated care, and it just gets shifted to taxes or higher premiums. There are hundreds of billions of dollars right now that you're already paying. Next, let's say that 65 million people leave the private sector and go to the public sector. That's new money that the federal government has got to figure out how to put in the system. But those 65 million people are not paid anymore by business, so you're freeing the business community from all that responsibility -- which was exactly the point I was making in the story of General Motors investing in Canada. In Canada, the business sector has no responsibility. Do they pay higher taxes? Yes, they do. But their taxes do not go up two or three times the rate of inflation, as health-care costs have in America.

Back when President-elect Obama was assembling his cabinet, an idea that made a heck of a lot of sense to us was that of Dr. Dean for secretary of health and human services. It seemed a great fit before the president-elect slotted his tax-cheating corporate-stooge crony Tom Daschle in for the job, and it seemed like an even better fit once that plan went kerplooey.

Now, of course, we have six months' worth of evidence why Dr. Dean not only would have been unwelcome in, but would have difficulty working in, that corporate-crony environment. From the outside, though, he could be the administration's most potent weapon for "REAL health care reform," assuming the administration really wants it.

IS BLANCHE LINCOLN FEELING THE HEAT FROM
OUR CAMPAIGN FOR HEALTH CARE CHOICE?

Greg Sargent reported this afternoon (links in the original):

The Plum Line Greg Sargent's blog

Under Pressure, Blanche Lincoln Shifts on Public Plan

Looks like pressure from the left might be getting results, albeit limited ones, in the case of “centrist” Dem Senator Blanche Lincoln, who has been resisting any commitment to backing a public health care option.

Lincoln, who’s getting hammered by ads demanding she commit to the public option, has now shifted towards supporting one, at least in rhetorical terms. In a piece for today’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, she says health care reform should include a public plan or a non-profit substitute.

Here’s the key graf from Lincoln (the piece is subscription only):

Health care reform must build upon what works and improve inefficiencies. Individuals should be able to choose from a range of quality health insurance plans. Options should include private plans as well as a quality, affordable public plan or non-profit plan that can accomplish the same goals as those of a public plan.

The assertion that reform “should” have a public plan or non-profit substitute is a shift from her previous position, which was only that she was “evaluating” a public plan or a substitute.

Lincoln’s position had made her a top target of the left. The Blue America PAC, which is headed by liberal bloggers Howie Klein, Digby, dday, Jane Hamsher and John Amato, raised money for ads targeting Lincoln in her home state of Arkansas, pushing her to commit to a public option.

To be sure, Lincoln left herself wiggle room. The non-profit substitute for a public plan could take many forms, and the idea is viewed in some quarters as a potential ruse to avoid creating a strong public option. But Lincoln clearly seems to be shifting on the question.

PLEASE HELP US KEEP THE PRESSURE ON

Have you seen the three spots Blue America's Campaign for Health Care Choice has produced to help her Arkansas constituents understand how remote she is from their interests? You can see all three here, including the one that was voted to run first. And of course if you can see your way clear to pitch in, contributions of any amount will add up.


MEANWHILE SEN. MARY LANDRIEU IS ALSO THE
SUBJECT OF A PROGRESSIVE "EDUCATION" CAMPAIGN

MoveOn, Democracy for America, and Change Congress are continuing their campaign to bring a similar awareness to the Louisiana constituents of another public-option skeptic, insurance-industry stooge Sen. Mary Landrieu,.



If you have more to give, I'm sure they can use your help.

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