**edited to acknowledge replies posted while preparing this**
Here's another commentary this morning from NPR about Bernie's potential problem with socialist stigma:
...most of what Sanders touts on the campaign trail was just boiler-plate Democratic party doctrine not long ago. Indeed, the Sanders phenomenon is a measure of how far the country has drifted to the right over the past few decades. Sure, Sanders has a portrait of Eugene Debs on his office wall, and when he was mayor of Burlington, Vt. he created a sister-city relationship with Managua, Nicaragua. But let’s take a look at his actual policy proposals:
Sanders supports a government-run national health insurance program, an idea first proposed by that notorious Bolshevik, Theodore Roosevelt, in 1912. Fellow traveler Harry Truman followed with his own universal healthcare proposal in 1945. And of course, Senator Ted Kennedy was pushing for a “Medicare for all”-type plan until his death in 2009.
Sanders wants to raise the top marginal tax rate to more than 50 percent, at least 10 points higher than Barack Obama proposed when he first ran for president in 2007. But the top marginal tax rate was 91 percent when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, throughout the 1950s. John F. Kennedy slashed that to 65 percent, still 25 points higher than it is today.
Sanders wants universal daycare and family leave. In 1971, the U.S. Congress passed the bipartisan Comprehensive Child Development Act, which would have created a national network of federally-funded subsidized child care centers. President Nixon vetoed the bill, but not before 24 Senate Republicans voted for “socialized childcare” — something inconceivable today.
Indeed, the Sanders phenomenon is a measure of how far the country has drifted to the right over the past few decades.
Meanwhile, paid family leave is standard policy at American corporations such as Google, Apple, and Netflix, which offer new mothers up to 22 months of paid time off. I guess we’re just a step away from nationalizing the internet.
Finally, Sanders has called for an end to homelessness, something president George W. Bush also endorsed when he appointed Philip Mangano as his homelessness czar in 2002. Mangano, meanwhile, got his inspiration from St. Francis of Assisi and the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, which wrote in 1988 that “Shelters cannot substitute for real housing for low-income families.” Who’s a godless communist now?
The point is that social policies that protect families, care for the needy and fairly share the nation’s wealth are not radical descents into Maoism. They are just rational, humane ideas that politicians of all ideological stripes should be able to embrace. And, once upon a time, they did.
http://cognoscenti.wbur.org/2015/08/13/the-stain-of-socialism-renee-loth
What do you think DU? Are the policies of our Democratic Socialist contender really just more traditionally Democratic than the rest of the Party today?
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