Sanders message sounds fresh and new and exciting
to young people.
To many older, equally progressive but battle worn Democrats, it sounds sadly familiar.
There are at least two reasons he has much less support among older voters: George McGovern and Walter Mondale. Older voters in the party learned a very bitter lesson, as a result of two elections that we lost by 49 states to 1.
A very idealistic Senator from a small state, George McGovern had a lot in common with Bernie Sanders. He spoke out against the Vietnam war, as Bernie spoke out against Iraq. And he was for universal healthcare and other strong social programs, including a guaranteed minimum standard of living. And he had millions of young, passionate supporters.
Walter Mondale was also very progressive and, like Bernie, very honest with the voters. He explained that he had a plan to reduce the deficit and invest in the future that would result in slightly higher middle class taxes, but that the investments made would result in the best educated generation in history. He also warned the voters that Reagan had a secret plan to raise taxes that would shift the burden off high income taxpayers and onto the middle class – which is exactly what it did.
But it didn’t matter. The voters chose the candidate who falsely promised not to raise their taxes – not the honest one who acknowledged that taxes would rise.
“The lesson battle-hardened Democrats of that era learned was that they could never again openly call for tax increases on middle-income households.”
Now Bernie thinks we can ignore that lesson, and he’s backed by millions of fervent believers who think everything’s different now.
Many of the rest of us have to hope we’re not watching history repeat itself.
49 states to one. It was a sickening experience, both times. And it could happen again.
http://archive.argusleader.com/article/20121021/MCGOVERN/121021003/The-1972-campaign-slide-defeat
The term “McGovern liberal,” emanated from that ’72 campaign largely because of what McGovern campaigned for: ending the war, cutting defense spending, guaranteeing a certain standard of living in return for welfare reform, and universal health care.
“McGovern did have a very liberal oriented platform at that time,” said Bob Burns, a former political science professor at South Dakota State University.
In shorthand, it can be retold in the attack lines from then-Vice President Spiro Agnew, who would attack the South Dakota senator as the candidate of “amnesty, abortion and acid.”
Nixon’s campaign, with Agnew often leading the way, portrayed McGovern as a dangerous leftist, whose policies would leave America more vulnerable to the Soviet threat, more encumbered by a growing state influence at home, and more likely to tread softly around the drug cultural and sexual revolution of the young people who supported him.
http://blogs.reuters.com/reihan-salam/2012/09/06/obama-and-the-ghost-of-walter-mondale/
Rather than make the most anodyne, ultra-cautious, poll-tested argument he and his team could conjure up, he told the truth as he understood it. “Mr. Reagan will raise your taxes,” he told the assembled delegates. “And so will I.”
Mondale lambasted Reagan for his secret tax plan that would “sock it to average-income families” and “leave his rich friends alone,” just as critics of the Romney-Ryan ticket have alleged that the GOP’s conspicuously vague tax reform ideas would almost certainly mean shifting the tax burden downward.
Yet the really interesting part of Mondale’s tax plan that year is that it didn’t just raise taxes on America’s highest-earning households. In an era of relatively high inflation, during which “bracket creep” was a big concern for middle-income families, he called for limiting the indexing of tax brackets for roughly half of all households, a step that raised most of the revenue he hoped to generate from individual taxpayers. There were, to be sure, steeper tax increases for high-income households, but Mondale maintained that all non-poor families should chip in to tackle yawning deficits and to make the investments he believed were necessary to foster “the best-educated, best-trained generation in American history.”
That fall, of course, Mondale suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of a sunny, upbeat Ronald Reagan, who, as it turned out, really did raise taxes in his second term.
SNIP
The lesson battle-hardened Democrats of that era learned was that they could never again openly call for tax increases on middle-income households. Bill Clinton, at the time the conspicuously young governor of Arkansas, took the lesson to heart when he pledged during his 1992 presidential run to cut taxes on middle-income households and to raise them on households earning over $250,000. The Clinton administration did succeed in persuading a Democratic Congress to raise the two top marginal tax rates on ordinary income as part of its 1993 budget deal. In his second term, however, President Clinton agreed to a deep cut in capital gains taxes backed by a Republican Congress in 1997, a move that helped fuel the investment boom of that era. Clinton had successfully reinvented the Democrats, GOP protestations notwithstanding, as a low-tax party.
Recognizing the success of Clinton’s tax pledge, then-candidate Barack Obama made the same promise, even using the same $250,000 threshold, despite the fact that $250,000 in 1992 would have been worth roughly $380,000 in 2008. The bigger difference between 1992 and 2008 was that the Bush-era tax cuts meant that there was far less scope for cutting the taxes paid by middle-income households.
The tax overhauls of the Clinton and Bush years had made the federal income tax highly progressive. To be sure, factoring in payroll taxes and state and local taxes makes the overall U.S. tax burden considerably less progressive. But the tax systems in most affluent democracies are actually slightly regressive, as they rely more heavily on national consumption taxes to fund universal social programs. The central virtue of these tax systems is that they undermine work incentives less than progressive tax systems that rely heavily on high marginal tax rates.
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will leave us, the 99%'rs, with a big ass chunk more of money in our pockets. not to mention a much better healthcare system than we have now. I can't read most of what you post most times and this is one of those times but I have to ask did you even mention the savings that will come from that tax increase? I'm curious if you're being truthful in this op or not.
just in case you weren't aware of this a lie is a lie whether its an outright lie or a lie of omission. Which is it
I full expect that this will be alerted on but what the hey, if its hidden I'll still have three more chances before a time out 
