Political Murder

#Election2020: Who’s got policies? Who’s got platitudes?

Posted on April 23, 2019     Leave a Comment

With some 19 Democratic presidential candidates and counting, it’s hard to keep track of who stands for what: which candidates have developed policy expertise and proposals on which issues, and which ones sound good but still keep talking in generalities.

For most candidates, there’s no shortage of policy positions. A Think Progress piece argues that the focus of this election (so far, at least) has been policy, policy, policy.

So just how do a swelling numbers of Democrats convince an inattentive citizenry to turn away from other distractions and pay attention to their political palaver?

Short answer: Nearly all of them are staking out early policy positions on a wide range of issues to burnish a self-flattering political image, before the full-scale campaign onslaught begins in earnest. …

These early-season policy ideas are the introductory gambits for candidates to test out on the hustings and in media interviews. Their early campaign messages are aimed to draw support from narrow, targeted slices of the Democratic electorate, in hopes of building a groundswell of broader, national support for their nascent campaigns.

Maybe in the long run, those policy details won’t matter. Maybe the majority of Democratic primary voters instead will turn toward a candidate who offers a feeling of comfort or “likeability.” Or the quickest candidate, or the sharpest, or the brightest, or the most honest. Or even the one who passes the proverbial test of “someone you could have a beer with.” And Democratic voters have been clear about one thing: They want to nominate the candidate who would best be able to beat Donald Trump.

Unfortunately, there’s little evidence that we can evaluate who that candidate is right now, despite early opinion polls or the amount of money raised. We can see who’s getting the most media attention, airtime, and Sunday morning talk show invitations. But the media can be fickle: Just ask former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke.

Candidates’ positives and negatives right now are meaningless. Any candidate with high approvals will see those numbers take a nosedive when the right-wing attack machine — whether that’s charges about “socialism,” Donald Trump’s ridiculous tweets and demeaning nicknames, Fox News slander and innuendo, or outright lies spread by conspiracy theorists — starts peddling falsehoods and negative stories about Democratic candidates. Mainstream media will pick those up and repeat them verbatim with little context or explanation.

But here’s what the emphasis on policy does: It takes issues that are important to Democratic voters and forces them into the forefront. For the most part, candidates agree on these issues. All of the Democratic candidates are talking about health care. All are talking about climate change, whether they’re backing the Green New Deal or other specific policies. All are talking about immigration, gun reform, and jobs. All are talking about evening the playing field for poor families and increasing taxes for the super-rich.

Here are some of the policies that candidates have espoused so far. This is by no means a comprehensive list — and it doesn’t include every candidate. But it offers a shorthand breakdown on what different Democrats would set as priorities in the White House.

Some of the most well-thought-out policies are coming from the women candidates. Even better, they’re endorsing each other’s proposals.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren is quickly establishing herself (and has been described) as the queen of policy. When she speaks to voters, she offers a wide list of ideas, stressing government intervention into areas where private markets have failed. Those ideas include the federal government building affordable housing, paying for child care, enforcing antitrust laws, and breaking up big companies, including tech giants. The mainstream media might not be giving her much love, but she’s getting plenty of attention explaining those policies to Iowa voters.

One of her early proposals that remains popular with Democrats is to impose a wealth tax on those with fortunes worth over $50 million. The tax on the “ultra-millionaires” is explained at Vox:

Warren’s proposal, of course, is for a progressive wealth tax in which the 2 percent rate does not apply to the first $50 million and the 3 percent rate only kicks in when you have more than $1 billion, so nobody would actually be taxed that much. The operation of the tax would, however, exert a dramatic gravitational pull on large fortunes and tend to pull them down to the tax thresholds.

That’s especially true because the mere existence of the wealth tax would, on the margin, encourage wealthy individuals to dissipate their fortunes on charitable giving and lavish consumption. If you try to horde wealth the government is going to tax it, so you might as well spend it.

California Sen. Kamala Harris wants to expand the earned income tax credit with her LIFT the Middle Class Act and to give all American public school teachers a raise. She’s proposing that the federal government spend $315 billion to increase teacher salaries over 10 years. A story from Vox explains why it could be a popular winner:

Education is rarely a major issue during presidential campaigns. But Harris’s plan could tap into a wave of energy and enthusiasm from teachers strikes around the country in the past two years, most recently in Los Angeles and Denver but also in traditionally red states, such as West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona.

Those strikes have attracted public sympathy as well as solidarity from Harris and her fellow 2020 contenders. Two-thirds of Americans support teachers’ right to strike for better pay and benefits, according to a recent USA Today/Ipsos poll, and six in 10 believe teachers are not compensated fairly.

Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar has a plan on an issue that Trump conveniently forgets about every time there’s an “infrastructure week.” Her $1 trillion proposal would go way beyond the roads and bridges usually discussed when candidates discuss infrastructure. Here’s an explanation from Vox on how it would work:

The central element in Klobuchar’s proposal is a $650 billion increase in federal spending on infrastructure programs.

She specifies rural broadband, municipal waterworks, energy efficiency retrofits, school construction, airports, seaports, inland waterways, and mass transit as all worthy of increased funding, along with — of course — highways and bridges.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has successfully pushed his Medicare for All legislation into the Democratic mainstream, and it has some of his Democratic rivals as co-sponsors. His latest version spells out what would be covered in a generous benefit package, even as it offers few specifics on how to pay for it. According to an explanation from Vox:

The biggest difference between this plan and the version Sanders introduced in 2017 is the addition of a long-term care benefit that would cover care for Americans with disability at home or in community settings. This benefit was also added into the House version of the Medicare-for-all bill earlier this year.

The plan is significantly more generous than the single-payer plans run by America’s peer countries. The Canadian health care system, for example, does not cover vision or dental care, prescription drugs, rehabilitative services, or home health services. Instead, two-thirds of Canadians take out private insurance policies to cover these benefits. …

What’s more, the Sanders plan does not subject consumers to any out-of-pocket spending on health aside from prescriptions drugs. This means there would be no charge when you go to the doctor, no copayments when you visit the emergency room. All those services would be covered fully by the universal Medicare plan.

There’s no question that the approach is growing in popularity, even earning some cheers from the audience at Sanders’ Fox News town hall. The immediate economic downside is for insurance companies; the more talk about a single-payer system, the worse the stock prices are for those insurers.

Beto O’Rourke is taking some heat for not having enough policy ideas. A Politico piece with the headline, “The big idea? Beto doesn’t have one,” explains that he’s still in listening mode.

It’s not that O’Rourke doesn’t have positions. He does, and in the month since announcing his presidential campaign, he has expressed many of them with specificity. He has robust ideas about immigration, including a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants. He has lauded the “Green New Deal” and called for a new Voting Rights Act. He was an early champion of legalizing marijuana — and co-wrote a book about it. He wants universal pre-K education, and he has touted a bill by Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) to dramatically expand Medicare coverage while maintaining a role for private health insurance. …

But none of those positions is unique to O’Rourke. And with his relatively meager legislative record — and a belief that he can transcend ideological lanes within the Democratic Party — O’Rourke appears unclear about where he fits on the policy spectrum.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for “listening tours” to see what voters are saying. But if you’ve announced your candidacy for the most powerful office in the world, you should be a tad more sure of what you stand for.

South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg is another candidate who is still finding his issue footing. He is beloved by the media and by the crowds that turn out to hear him, he’s got a killer biography and background, and he’s great on TV. He has, in the headline of a Los Angeles Times piece, “everything except policies on major issues.”