|
(As y'all can see, J and I have been at this a little bit on the home front.)
Hillary can't execute her platform and probably doesn't even intend to. Her platform is put out there as a political building block.
To attempt her medical plan would be to re-ignite the fierce left-right divide, to re-focus and re-energize the opposition exactly as her first shot at it in 1993 did.
Remember how, two years after the Clinton election, the Republicans announced a clear, philosophical promise to the public and re-took control of Congress?
That was largely the result of a vaguely-lefty medical plan; so now she wants to present a firmly lefty medical plan in her first year in office? I doubt it!
Part of the game is thinking a few chess moves ahead. The pro takes advantage of their base with Big Promises; for example, the righty will suggest, we'll end abortion. But once elected, they don't get their way, because the operational politics are more powerful: if we end abortion, the pro-choicers will become ultra-motivated and cause us to lose elections. The end result: ban partial-birth abortions, something that effects almost ZERO actual people, but keeps the pro-life foaming-at-the mouthers content enough to believe some actual change happened, and to believe their big donations were not in vain.
The only way to affect actual change is to motivate and convince 75% of the people, not 49% or even 51% of the people. That is how a President gets political will: if the people believe in him or her. Right now, P. Bush is in such dire political straits that he could not solve a problem that the majority of people believe in (social security insolvency), even after proposing a rather lefty solution (a highly progressive structure more painful for the rich). He can hardly stake a position at all, because once he does the rest of the pols make political hay by staking positions at the polar opposite.
|