It’d be reasonable to say Pete claimed he was for universal, non-single-payer health care.
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No what?
I mean, it’s not like I spent a year of my life working for the guy and getting to know all his policies or anything. He had a different plan than Bernie. But his covered everyone, too. Hence:universal.
But it also wasn’t his number one priority. That was Democracy reform (a bunch of policies could be lumped under this heading). And now we’re finally talking about it for real and while it hurts to look back, it’s also good that people are realizing how important it should have always been.
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I’ll give Pete credit for some of the things he was talking about like judicial reform. I disagreed with a lot of the specific mechanics he was for, but at least he was talking about it.
As far as health care goes, I thought Pete’s plan was clearly inferior to Bernie’s, but it could have worked. Where me (and I imagine a lot of others here) really started to get pissed off with him was when he started attacking Bernie’s plan using right wing talking points.
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Yeah, it’s this
The problem with Pete was, I believe that he is sincere about the democracy reform stuff and if you could make him First Consul and have him just promulgate decrees about this then I would be all for it. But as we’ve seen in Biden’s term, one of the primary obstacles to a Democratic government achieving anything - institutional reform very much included - is the Democratic Party as currently constituted. And Pete was probably the absolute nut low in terms of being able to achieve change within the Democratic Party. He had no reputation within the party, no base of support among the movers and shakers in DC, no money, no grassroots support base to speak of, and - most importantly - no inclination to even try to make trouble. He’s a careerist party-machine type to his bones, as evidenced by eventually cutting some kind of deal for a minor Cabinet position.
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This. He was supposedly for a glidepath to M4A, right? Public option → M4A. But he also attacked M4A with “how will we pay for it?”
So, which was it? Was M4A a desirable outcome to work towards or a pie in the sky luxury we can’t afford?
Fetterman had a stroke, sounds like he’s still in the hospital. The election is in two days, it might be wide open now.
That sucks. How come cheeseburger boys like Trump never have strokes?
Buy the dip on Fetterman on Predictit?
Still at .97
Yeah, not much of a dip. Expected a little more from the reactionary crowd there.
Blood clots can’t find his brain.
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Sounds like it wasn’t that bad of one. Further strokes should be fairly preventable since it was an embolic stroke from afib through anticoagulation or ablation
well, what if some of the progressive wing wanted to have a carrerist who can actually do stuff, than an ideologue who can’t build a coalition for anyone besides themselves?
also DOT isn’t some minor cabinet position. i’m not even sure i’d call any cabinet position minor in importance. also, elaine chao made mcconnell what he is today. i’d be psyched for pete to do something good over there.
that’s fair, the boy king myth is a powerful drug. but i mean, the dem primary probably needed more people from pete cohort, as well as fewer 70 year olds. and not only represent without a shot at winning, but actually talk ideas and try to get the front runner candidate to take those ideas.
Right. It’s not that being a careerist is automatically bad, but you need allies, you need people who owe you favours, you need experience navigating the DC swamp. You can’t be mayor of South Bend and then show up in DC being like “I am going to tell you all what to do now”.
That’s in service of personal ambition, though. Like if you’re not going to do inside-the-system change, which I think Pete can’t, for the reasons above, then you have to do the Trump/Bernie thing and get up there and bully people and drag the whole party in your direction with sheer force of personal gravity. That’s antithetical to the whole way Pete wants to operate; he wants to be the next Obama, a Great Uniter, a compromiser. I have no faith that he has any tolerance at all for making party leadership mad at him. That’s risking personal ambition rather than ensuring it is advanced.
Would Pete have thrown Biden under the bus and joined Bernie if that was the way the wind was blowing?
It would have to be a situation where the DNC fell into line behind Bernie, which is a tough counterfactual to imagine. If Bernie was like a 2016 Trump, where the party leadership were only reluctantly dragged into line behind the nominee, then I think Pete would be standoffish, because he wouldn’t want to be persona non grata with the DNC in the event that Bernie loses the election.
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Of course not.
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