Washington Post-What we learned from Bernie Sanders's town hall [View all]

[Gothmog]

I did not watch this town hall but I noticed this in the description of the concerns that the Washington Post had. How does one rely on voter revolutions as part of their plan to get legislation adopted?

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He isn’t going to grapple with the difficulties of legislating. This is a thorny topic for any presidential candidate, particularly Democrats who have ambitious policy agendas, because it requires admitting that things are going to be hard and that failure is a real possibility. Candidates would much prefer to assure you that if they’re elected, all their proposals will become law and everything will turn out wonderfully. The question of how you get your ideas through Congress is particularly important for Sanders, because his agenda is the most sweeping and the one that will run into the strongest resistance, not only from Republicans but from outside stakeholders as well.

Unfortunately, Sanders’s usual answer to such questions is unsatisfying, to say the least. He argues that we need a popular revolution so overwhelming that even Republican legislators will bow down before its power and vote for things they abhor with every fiber of their beings, such as single-payer health care.

That, of course, is just not going to happen. So what do you do then? We saw a taste of the problem during the town hall. A questioner asked about D.C. statehood, and Sanders said that he supports it. Unfortunately, the entire Republican Party believes that since the 700,000 residents of D.C. are mostly Democrats, they shouldn’t have representation in the federal government. Pressed on how what he would do to make it happen, he said, “Uh, everything that we possibly can,” going on to say, “I hope that my Republican colleagues do the right thing.” Which is a way of saying he doesn’t doesn’t have any ideas. That doesn’t make him different from most people, but getting Republicans to support the rest of his agenda is no more likely than getting them to agree to make D.C. a state.

I have some strong doubts about basing my vote on the hope of voter revolution