Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan delivers a wrathful stinkeye—reminiscent of Johnny Lawrence in the Karate Kid—during the Democratic debate.
“There you go again.”
Everybody knows that epic line from Ronald Reagan during his 1980 debate with President Jimmy Carter, but few remember what he was casually laughing-off as crazy talk: Carter had just brought up that Reagan had started his political career campaigning against Medicare and dared to suggest that Medicare would be in danger if Reagan were elected President.
In reality, Carter was right—in the years before Medicare passed, Reagan decried it as capital S “Socialism” and gravely warned that if it wasn’t stopped, “we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.”
In less than twenty years, the Gipper had gone from rejecting Medicare as a socialist plot to essentially saying, “Apple pie? Who doesn’t love apple pie? Of course, I love apple pie.”
Now comes Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and a campaign pledge to make Medicare for All and with it comes the familiar ominous warnings that Medicare originally faced. Except now the objections aren’t coming from John Birch Society Republicans, but fellow Democratic candidates running for President.
The four Horsemen of the Pale, Stale, and Male—former Governor John Hickenlooper, Montana Governor Steve Bullock, Congressman Tim Ryan, and former Congressman John Delaney—all were conveniently on the same debate stage last night with Sanders and Warren in the middle, seemingly back-to-back in a defensive posture, smacking down one inane attack from the four naysayers after another.
Following up on the first debate and ads, where he has declared “Socialism is not the answer,” former Colorado Governor John Hicklenhooper was asked if he was directing that line of attack on Bernie Sanders. He said that indeed he was because the “radical changes” Sanders was proposing would “FedEx the election to Donald Trump.”
Former Maryland Congressman Delaney struck a similar note, saying, “Medicare for all, free everything and impossible promises that will turn off independent voters and get Trump re-elected.”
Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan had an aggressive glare reminiscent of Johnny Lawrence in the Karate Kid—except, instead of Danny LaRusso, it was Ryan’s wrathful stinkeye that Warren and Sanders were feeling the entire night. Fittingly, it was Sanders landing the big counterpunch of the night—“I wrote the damn bill!”—on an insolent Ryan’s jaw.
A bizarre framing of questions, along with four of the ten candidates working hard to appeal to Trump voters, framed Sanders and Warren as far left.
Not to be outdone, Warren delivered her own roundhouse to Delaney: “You know, I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for President of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for.” That got the biggest applause of the night.
To make matters worse, the CNN moderators seemed to be reading the from the same script as the Unfab Four, even winning praise from Fox News’s preeminent rightwing carnival barker, Laura Ingraham.
Following the race-baiting “raise your hand if you want to give free health care to undocumented immigrants” gimmick of the first NBC debate, this one had CNN’s Dana Bash ask, “Senator Sanders, you want to provide undocumented immigrants free health care and free college. Why won’t this drive even more people to come to the U.S. illegally?”
And then to Montana Governor Steve Bullock, “Governor Bullock, about two-thirds of Democratic voters and many of your rivals here for the nomination, support giving health insurance to undocumented immigrants. You haven’t gone that far. Why not?” And then on to Congressman Tim Ryan: “Are Senator Sanders’s proposals going to incentivize undocumented immigrants to come into this country illegally?”
Congressman Ryan answered, “Yes. And right now, if you want to come into the country, you should at least ring the doorbell.”
All in all, this bizarre framing of questions, along with four of the ten candidates working hard to appeal to Trump voters, framed Sanders and Warren as far left. This seemed to benefit the remaining four: Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana; former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke, U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, and even new-age channeling author Marianne Williamson. (And, by extension, the guy who wasn’t on the stage: Former Vice President Joe Biden.)
To his credit, though, Mayor Pete called out the “socialist!” tenor of debate and the misguided calculus of appealing to Trump voters: “It is time to stop worrying about what the Republicans will say. Look, if it’s true that if we embrace a far-left agenda they’re going to say we’re a bunch of crazy socialists. If we embrace a conservative agenda, you know what they’re going to do? They’re going to say we’re a bunch of crazy socialists. So let’s just stand up for the right policy, go out there and defend it.”
Somewhere, Harry Truman was nodding. In 1950, he tried to pass his own national health care plan and was called a socialist as well. His pushback then is even more relevant today. Referencing New Deal achievements like Social Security and rural electrification, Truman declared: “For the last seventeen years they have called every new Democratic measure ‘socialism’ or ‘communism’ and they have made constant predictions of doom and disaster.”
Fittingly, when Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law in 1965, he traveled to Independence, Missouri, with Truman as the enthusiastic host of the bill signing.
Who knew that two guys typically considered “conservative” Democrats were actually socialists?
Here we go again.