{"id":15059,"date":"2015-05-06T17:08:33","date_gmt":"2015-05-06T21:08:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2015\/05\/06\/15059.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T19:10:13","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T00:10:13","slug":"saying-that-bernie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2015\/05\/06\/saying-that-bernie\/","title":{"rendered":"Saying that (for Bernie!)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I have been noticing a bunch of friends on various social media platforms acting excited about Bernie Sanders<\/a> running for President of the United States of America. Excellent! I’m a big fan of Senator Sanders, have been for years. He’s been one of the folk in the legislature who have policy positions fairly close to mine, and we don’t have all that many of those. I liked him in the House, where gadflies really belong, and I have liked him in the Senate, where he has adapted his gadfly role surprisingly well. Go Bernie! I totally support his run for President! I’m happy so many other people do!\n

Having said that… I suspect that the Bernie social-media surge is a lot like the various Republican surges last cycle: people hear a bunch of great things about an unusual candidate who seems to embody and support a bunch of people’s ideas about the world, and get all excited. Eventually, those people hear more stuff about the candidate, including the negative stuff, including the stuff that the candidate supports that does not<\/i> coincide with their own views, and support fades back to little or nothing. There is no way—no way<\/i>—that Bernie Sanders will be the nominee of my Party, this cycle or any cycle. Al Gore is a likelier bet.\n

Having said that… Jon Bernstein is, I think, right in his note<\/a> arguing that a Bernie Sanders campaign can have substantial effects on a putative Hilary Clinton administration. If supporters of Senator Sanders compel former-Senator Clinton to say<\/i> that she will, for instance, cut federal aid to for-profit colleges, or support union card-check elections, or commit to not raising the Social Security retirement age, she will say it, as all of those are mainstream policy positions within my Party. And despite the conventional wisdom, making candidates say<\/i> they will do a particular thing makes it much more likely that the officeholder will do<\/i> that thing, or at least attempt it. No guarantees, but it helps. It makes a difference when the Other Party’s likely candidates make promises to their base in response to the surges of Michelle Bachmann or Ben Carson; it makes a difference when My Party’s candidates make promises to me in response to a surge for Bernie Sanders. So surge away, supporters of Bernie! Surge like the wind!\n

Having said that… I don’t want to be a jerk about this, but as much as Senator Sanders holds policy positions that are closer to my preferred ones than Hillary Clinton does, I don’t think that Senator Sanders would be very good at what Mr. Bernstein calls presidenting<\/a>, that is, the actual daily job of choosing advisors and managers and delegating tasks to them, balancing priorities, cultivating and maintaining relationships within the various branches of government, evaluating all of the information available to the President of the United States, and basically just getting things done. Maybe I’m wrong! But over the last three administrations, I have increasingly gone off the idea that I care about how exactly Our Only President agrees with me on policy issues, and become increasingly concerned about how Our Only President does the job of presidenting. I think that Hillary Clinton would be quite good at most<\/I> of the job of presidenting, and I don’t think that there would be enough difference between them on actual enacted policy that it would make up for the gap. In other words, if right now I had to choose whether I would rather have Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders as the next President of the United States… I would choose Hillary Clinton.\n

Having said that… the whole make-her-promise aspect to the Bernie Surge only works if all of us in the surge maintain that yes, we really want Bernie Sanders to be President of the United States. If we admit<\/i> that it’s just about pressure, it won’t be any pressure at all. So I should shut up about my opinion that Hilary Clinton would be a better President than Bernie Sanders—tactically, that’s a terrible thing to say. True, but terrible.\n

Having said that… do y’all really think that some significant percentage of voters support the federal government breaking up JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley? A deficit-supported trillion-dollar infrastructure program? Abolishing private health insurance? The federal government paying to shut down old power plants? Federal money for fiber-optic broadband for the poor? Returning to the old restrictions on ownership of media outlets? Fully-funded Universal Head Start? I don’t even know if some large percentage of voters would support the Access to Contraception for Women Servicemembers and Dependents Act of 2014<\/a>. To be clear: Your Humble Blogger supports every one of those policy positions. I would be thrilled to learn that they were popular positions. Electing Bernie Sanders—voting for Bernie Sanders in the primaries—is not the route to making those positions more popular. It might be the eventual result<\/i> of it, were it to happen, but not the path to it.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger says it, and having said it\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15059"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15059\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16513,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15059\/revisions\/16513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}