2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Why I DON'T support Bernie for President [View all]MessagingMatters
(3 posts)I think either Bernie or Hillary would be an excellent president. O'Malley, I don't know enough about him yet to know. Webb, although I admire his integrity, seems out of touch right now with a Democratic Party that is feeling its progressive oats.
That said, you raise some important concerns. Hearing Bernie frequently on Brunch with Bernie on the Thom Hartmann show, I always get the feeling that he spends much more time on the problems than the solutions. Likewise, listening to Bernie's recent speech at the Iowa State Fair, I liked his policy proposals (they could be characterized as promises), such as expanding Social Security, stopping the distribution of wealth to the top one percent, raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour and "Medicare for all" single payer healthcare, but kept thinking that almost all of them would require truly progressive votes from Congress, even beyond simply flipping both houses of Congress to Democratic majority, which itself is a mammoth undertaking. Unless Sanders spends more time explaining how his promises could possibly get enacted, and how his hoped-for "revolution" will take place, he runs the risk of raising many Democratic hopes, only to have them dashed in the near future.