{"id":1316422,"date":"2019-11-04T19:56:00","date_gmt":"2019-11-05T02:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.postindependent.com\/polman-column-how-to-lose-the-2020-election-by-elizabeth-warren\/"},"modified":"2019-11-04T19:56:00","modified_gmt":"2019-11-05T02:56:00","slug":"polman-column-how-to-lose-the-2020-election-by-elizabeth-warren","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/local-news\/polman-column-how-to-lose-the-2020-election-by-elizabeth-warren\/","title":{"rendered":"Polman column: How to lose the 2020 election, by Elizabeth Warren"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Speaking in 1910, former two-term president Theodore Roosevelt offered some practical advice that Elizabeth Warren and today\u2019s progressive Democrats would be wise to heed. Although they probably won\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Teddy said: \u201cThe citizen must have high ideals, and yet he must be able to achieve them in practical fashion. No permanent good comes from aspirations so lofty that they have grown fantastic and have become impossible to realize. The impractical visionary is far less often the guide and precursor than he is the embittered foe of the real reformer who, with stumblings and shortcomings, yet does in some shape, in practical fashion, give effect to the hopes and desires of those who strive for better things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Warren, the impractical visionary, has now told us how she purports to pay for her high-ideals plan to erase private health coverage and move everyone to government care. She says that middle class Americans won\u2019t be hit with higher taxes, whereas Bernie Sanders, on her left flank, says they most certainly will \u2014 and he welcomes that.<\/p>\n

Bottom line: \u201cMedicare for All\u201d is the biggest gift that impractical liberals could possibly give to Donald Trump and his band of demagogues. There\u2019s no better way for Democrats to blow one of the most critical presidential elections in history.<\/p>\n

Government health care \u2014 we\u2019ll go with the acronym MFA \u2014 is a lofty and even laudable aspiration, but in reality it\u2019s a suicidal political loser. Warren says that anyone who knocks her plan is merely reciting \u201cRepublican talking points,\u201d but, rest assured, if she were to win the nomination and campaign on this issue, she\u2019d give Trump more than he needs to talk about.<\/p>\n

You know how the GOP has long caricatured the Democrats as \u201ctax and spend liberals\u201d? Warren\u2019s health care crusade, which endeavors to reshape roughly 20 percent of the economy, checks that GOP box like no other. You know how Trump is trying to caricature all Democrats as \u201csocialists?\u201d Warren\u2019s crusade plays right into his small hands, because it is socialistic.<\/p>\n

If you don\u2019t think Republicans will make mincemeat of MFA in 2020, you\u2019ll need to get up to speed on the politics of the past 30 years. Fairly or not, a huge percentage of the voters hate liberals, and a program designed to take away private health coverage is virtually guaranteed to swell the ranks of the haters. Which is why Nancy Pelosi \u2014 who, like Teddy Roosevelt, knows a few things about what\u2019s achievable in politics \u2014 told reporters last Friday that while MFA may be catnip for liberals, it won\u2019t pull in the moderate voters who swing the Electoral College one year from now.<\/p>\n

As Pelosi well knows \u2014 because she designed the strategy \u2014 Democrats took the House last November in a historic blue wave not by campaigning for pie-in the-sky MFA, but by assailing the Trump GOP\u2019s ongoing efforts to cripple or kill Obamacare. The Democratic message, in the swing suburbs that built the blue wave, was that Obamacare needs to be protected and incrementally improved. That practical message bores Warren and Sanders and their liberal dreamers, but that message would win in 2020.<\/p>\n

The irony \u2014 and potential tragedy \u2014 is that Warren is going full tilt with a plan that will never pass Congress. If she were somehow elected president with a new Republican Senate, MFA is dead. If she entered office with a recaptured Democrats Senate, MFA is dead \u2014 because moderate Democrats would balk, and it wouldn\u2019t get the requisite 60 votes to hurdle a Republican filibuster. It\u2019s a shame she can\u2019t commit candor and admit this, but the game right now is to woo idealistic liberals in Iowa and New Hampshire.<\/p>\n

Warren and her allies contend that MFA will massively gin up turnout on the left, and blunt the need for centrist swing voters. Again, here\u2019s reality: Running up the turnout in guaranteed blue states on the two coasts won\u2019t clinch the Electoral College. The race will still be decided in a handful of states \u2014 Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida \u2014 and it just so happens that Warren is barely competitive with Trump in those states, despite his impending impeachment.<\/p>\n

Leave it to the Democrats to dream so big that they risk losing to a committer of impeachable acts. This nation can\u2019t afford such risks right now. As Teddy Roosevelt warned, the impractical visionary is \u201cforever the enemy of the possible good.\u201d<\/p>\n

Copyright 2019 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com<\/a><\/p>\n

via:: Post Independent<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Speaking in 1910, former two-term president Theodore Roosevelt offered some practical advice that Elizabeth Warren and today\u2019s progressive Democrats would be wise to heed. Although they probably won\u2019t. Teddy said: \u201cThe citizen must have high ideals, and yet he must be able to achieve them in practical fashion. No permanent good comes from aspirations so […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[160],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1316422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-local-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-09-06 14:51:07","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSKE Ski Country","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1316422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1316422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1316422\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1316422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1316422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1316422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}