With polling indicating that support for a universal healthcare system in the US is growing, a number of progressive activists have declared the issue will be a “litmus test” for Democrats, threatening candidates who don’t support Sanders’s “single-payer” plan with a primary challenge.
Warren rejects that kind of aggressive approach. “I don’t believe in litmus tests for Democrats,” she told reporters after the event. “I’m not voting anybody off the island.”
[...] “The political energy has migrated to the polar extremes on both sides and it has left a large swath of the population feeling homeless,” said Will Marshall, one of the leading intellectual architects of the neoliberal “New Democrat” movement embraced by Bill Clinton and Al Gore in the 1990s.
Worried that pragmatism will be relegated to the past, Marshall formed New Democracy, an organization that aims to “expand the party’s appeal across middle America and make Democrats competitive everywhere”. The group is looking to fight back against progressives’ attacks on their brand of market-friendly liberalism.
“When you’re in the minority party, you can’t bet everything on one theory or voter group. You’ve got to expand in every direction,” Marshall said. “We need to win in a bunch of places and there isn’t one single message.”
The ideological rift in the party is not new, but tensions between the liberals dreaming of healthcare reform and the moderates trying to win re-election in states where Trump dominated has only grown since the election.
At a conference earlier this month, Warren declared progressives the “heart and soul of today’s Democratic party” and promised the party would not retreat to the centrist economic policies that dominated party orthodoxy for more than two decades.
Will Marshall seems an idiot, or worse, a wolf in wolf's clothing. A GOP attitude belongs in the GOP, so Will, take Tom Perez over there with you, please. And take the Podesta brothers too, since they're wholly in it for the gelt.
______________UPDATE_______________
Then there are snakes in snake skins, hiding snake deeds in the weeds.
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| usnews.com picked this image to go with its report. Not me. Not me this time flagging the tiebreaker in the grass.. |