Three WaPo Columnists Assess

Let’s look at the observations of three Washington Post columnists on the state of the race for the Democratic nomination for president. Let’s start with Helaine Olen. She begins by quoting (and castigating) Lloyd Blankfein:

Lloyd Blankfein has got a problem with Bernie Sanders.

“I might find it harder to vote for Bernie than for Trump,” Blankfein, the 65-year-old former chief executive of Goldman Sachs, told the Financial Times last week. Asked about Trump’s “autocratic” leanings, Blankfein didn’t answer, pointing instead to Trump’s economic accomplishments.

Blankfein is hardly alone in his reluctance. Politico reports Wall Street is in a collective “freakout” about the septuagenarian socialist’s ascendance to Democratic Party front-runner following his overwhelming victory in the Nevada caucuses this past weekend.

But Blankfein’s beef with Sanders is petty and personal: He doesn’t like it when Sanders bashes billionaires like himself, or when he proposes things like a wealth tax. Like many in the financial sector, Blankfein so hates to see billionaires criticized that he would apparently consider voting for President Trump instead — a man who has mistreated so many people and groups, and who has challenged our democracy in frightening ways.

I could go on against Blankfein’s morally challenged tripe. But instead, I think he should hear from Gloria Pharr, Linda Overbey and Michael Collins. I first interviewed these Nevada voters last spring, and I spoke with the three of them again over the weekend.

After describing the three Sanders supporters and why they’ll vote for Sanders. That’s characterized by Ms. Olen (or the WaPo editors, whoever wrote the headline on her column) as “Democratic voters rallying around Sanders”. A bold assertion about a candidate who hasn’t won a majority of the vote in any of the caucuses or primaries in which he has participated so far this cycle. Maybe that will change.

A more skeptical David Von Drehle suggests we take Sen. Sanders neither literally nor seriously, repurposing Salena Zito’s famous remark about Trump supporters:

How seriously can you take a man who styles himself a great champion of social justice yet makes his career not in his home city of New York, nor in his first adult home of Chicago, but in Vermont, one of the smallest and whitest states in America? How literally can take you a man who volunteers to reengineer the entire U.S. economy when his sole managerial experience is as mayor of a city too small to fill the seats at Yankee Stadium?

Sanders is a gestural candidate. Supporting him is a way of pointing in the general direction of a certain kind of change. He’s not interested in the details. After a half-century of promoting single-payer health care, here’s how far he has come in figuring it out:

“Well, I can’t — you know, I can’t rattle off to you every nickel and every dime. But we have accounted for — you — you talked about Medicare-for-all. We have options out there that will pay for it.”

That was the senator’s reply to Anderson Cooper during a recent “60 Minutes” interview.

What’s striking about that is not his failure to account for every nickel and dime. It’s that a good answer exists yet Sanders didn’t give it. The United States already pays for health care through private insurance, public insurance, state and local subsidies, hospital write-offs, out-of-pocket expenses, charitable donations and so on. All told, that adds up to more than $3.5 trillion per year. That’s a lot of nickels and dimes — and a good down payment on Medicare-for-all.

I’m not saying that single-payer health care is a good idea — that’s for voters to decide. I’m saying that Sanders spends more time denouncing than explaining. It’s as though he wants the public to believe that his plan will be crushingly expensive; he’s gesturing to his voters that he’s ready to drain the bank vaults.

while Henry Olsen is more analytical:

Establishment Democrats are deeply afraid of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) becoming their party’s presidential nominee. They may be right to be concerned, but they are still thinking politics is between left and right. Sanders, like Trump, understands that the new politics emerging worldwide is more about ins vs. outs.

Sanders’s politics may be socialist, but his appeal is that of an outsider. He tells the people dissatisfied with America that tinkering around the edges isn’t enough; the country need radical change. The fact that he has never been a Democrat is, for his supporters, cause to trust him. There’s a reason the PAC spun out of his losing 2016 effort is called “Our Revolution.”

The establishment is, by definition, a collection of insiders. They benefit from the current system and favor only incremental change, not revolution. They may support some of the same goals as Sandernistas, but they aren’t fundamentally angry about America itself. That’s one reason they find it so difficult to respond to Sanders’s challenge. It’s also a reason blasting Sanders as extreme or unelectable won’t make his army smaller.

The one thing I would urge those who long for immediate, transformative change to consider is whether such revolutions have ever helped the “outs” at the expense of the “ins”. A quick review would tell them that they never have. They have always promoted the interests of one group of elites against those of another. That’s true of everything from the French Revolution to the Russian Revolution to the Cuban Revolution. That uniform that Castro affected was just for show. He was actually as elite as Batista. Moreso, probably. And Chavez’s daughter is now a billionaire, presumably living in Europe somewhere.