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John Fetterman says he'll 'never understand' progressives who refuse to support Joe Biden
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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politics
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Paying attention to those crucial local elections: Biden and the Democratic Party leadership continually campaigned against progressive candidates in their primaries and publicly and intentionally insist on how important it is to them for the Republican Party to be strong.
So for many who don't support Biden it is about the Democratic Party effort to preserve the conservative coalition with the Manchin-Sinema corporate landscape.
For some it appears Biden and the Democratic Party's core leadership would sooner lose to Republicans than support, let alone champion, the progressive movement. And so they don't feel the need or compulsion to support Biden as a result.
And going further back in time some remember Obama's supermajority and trifecta amounting to very little progressive action whatsoever. So the idea of voting harder i hope of a better majority often rings hollow.
These are factors I would say are being weighed when judging whether Biden deserves support even before a primary.
Yeah, but that Obama super majority in the Senate lasted one year and it was a different time, when Democratic voters and the Democratic party was less liberal than it is now. Hell, compare Biden in his 2008 presidential campaign to his 2020 one. And just look at how much filibuster rules have changed since then.
Anyways, my main point is that you have to remind Biden and Manchin that they need you and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in the coalition too and that they're not going to get much done (like immigration reform) with the two "moderate" Republican senators left in the Senate (Collins and Murkowski).
And yeah, sure Biden and Pelosi and all of them (the Democratic Party apparatus) weighed against the progressive candidates in the primaries and still are. It's your job to beat them and show that the bulk of our 50%+1 coalition is behind the progressive rather than the moderate. It means fundraising to fight the corporate donors and volunteering for these campaigns, going from door to door to get people to turn out and vote for the progressive candidate in the primary.
And the reality is that without Manchin, we'd have never gotten KBJ, judicial and executive appointments, the provisions in the infrastructure bill and the inflation reduction act. Did Manchin-Sinema fuck us? Yeah, they did. We could have prevented the rise in childhood poverty we're seeing now if it weren't for those two. People would be a lot more excited for Biden and the Democrats. But it's our job to get a majority that doesn't need those two or those of their ilk in the system we have (and yes, change the system along the way, so that we can have things like popular referendum, etc.).
Those two? Shit, the senate vote in the last Congress to extend the child tax credit was 1-97. Warren didn't vote as a progressive leaving Bernie the lone vote in support. And that was the number one factor in reducing the problem.
It can be hard to maintain support for a one-sided coalition for too long. Eventually people start to break. Their support for Biden becomes just like Biden's support for his own public option plan: disappearing.
That's what I'm saying. If we only have a majority that depends on Manchin and Sinema, how are we supposed to pass the public option? How do you get a majority without them?
And the reality is that passing the public option isn't simple. Look at the institutional holders of three of the top insurance companies (United Health, Cigna, and Humana):
https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?symb=UNH&subView=institutional
https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?symb=CI&subView=institutional
https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?symb=HUM&subView=institutional
All those mutual funds hold a lot of people's pensions/retirement. So if you pass medicare for all, what do you do with those investors. It's not just rich fat cats, but also folks looking to retire.
I wish we'd have a real discussion beyond medicare is more comprehensive, cheaper (I don't think a lot of people realize that you still owe 20% of part A bills and have to pay a premium every month for part B, and still have to deal with paying for drugs as part of Part D, and that medicare gap is only available through private companies (forget medicare advantage), and patient friendly. We have to figure out how to handle the consequences of essentially nationalizing an entire industry.
And it's not just the insurance companies their investors that you have to battle here. You have to deal with big pharma who are doing everything possible to block medicare from using their market power to negotiate lower drug costs. And this whole private system leads to such ridiculous allocation of spending. You usually see big Pharma spending more money on SGA (https://www.fiercepharma.com/special-reports/top-10-pharma-drug-brand-ad-spenders-2022) than R&D. Yet they'll argue that getting drugs through the three stages of clinical trials is really expensive and justifies the prices they place on these drugs.
Of course if you get rid of that inefficiency, it's a whole bunch of advertisers and executives out of the job, and they ostensibly spend less money in the economy or find jobs in a different field. It's all a giant, interconnected web, and we're just trying to redistribute the composition of it.
I often point to the Kaiser Permanente poll on the popularity of Medicare for all. Sure people are for it. But then when you tell them that their private insurance would go away, favoribility drops to 30%. Can you imagine if you told them their pension funds or retirement is invested in health insurance companies or big pharma? See figure 9: https://www.kff.org/slideshow/public-opinion-on-single-payer-national-health-plans-and-expanding-access-to-medicare-coverage/
And I agree with you about feeling the coalition's one sided. But I think Biden is trying with his executive and judicial appointments which only have to go through the Senate. And you really have to walk that fine line between negotiating a better deal/agenda reflective of your needs/wants and not being taken for granted (something the progressive caucus in the House did a terrible job at in negotiating with Manchin) and letting the right extreme coalition run everything. And one of the ways to do that is to run your candidate in the primary (we focus too much on the presidential, when we should be looking at more local representatives too), working for them or volunteering for them, and engage in dialogue that reaches their ears about your demands if they want you to be part of that coalition.