2016 Postmortem

Nanjeanne

(4,961 posts) Wed Feb 17, 2016, 09:57 PM Feb 2016

Paul Krugman missed the magic unicorns in Hillary Clinton's platform

By Ryan Cooper
TheWeek

The Democratic primary, partisans of Hillary Clinton typically frame the contest as being between an unserious radical whose proposals won't work and can't pass (Bernie Sanders), and a pragmatic political trench warrior whose less-ambitious proposals are more likely to lead to improved outcomes in the long term.

There are two problems with this. First, there is little reason to think that less-ambitious proposals will be more likely to deliver the goods. Second, in many key areas, Clinton hasn't actually proposed anything at all.

That leaves the argument that Clinton's proposals are more realistic. On health care, how, exactly? Krugman doesn't say.

That might be because she has proposed nothing whatsoever that would seriously advance the state of American health care. Honestly, head over to her issues page and check out the section on health care. There's no plan of any kind to address ObamaCare's rather serious underinsurance problem, let alone bring insurance to the roughly 30 million people who still don't have it. There is some oblique acknowledgement of the problems, but no hint of what to do about it — rather reminiscent of Clinton campaign manager John Podesta's set of bullet points about how she would defeat ISIS, the first of which was "defeat ISIS in Syria and Iraq."

SNIP

If any candidate's ideas deserve the "magic unicorn" epithet, I'd say it's the one whose proposals don't actually exist.

SNIP

As Steve Randy Waldman points out, the entire point of political campaigns is to advance moral values and set priorities. I think the wonk class doesn't much like this. They would, perhaps unsurprisingly, prefer that politics proceed in a way that maximizes the importance of their hard-won knowledge. But the simple truth is that the vast majority of people don't pay attention to 2,000-page bills, or tortuous political negotiations, or independent multiple-regression analyses of policy proposals. Instead, they vote for people who seem closest to their values, and rely on them to figure out all that incomprehensible garbage. Experienced policy people are there for when you need someone to hammer out an actual bill. An important job, but a distinctly secondary one.

Now, people can support whomever them want. But let's not pretend like there is an open-and-shut policy case for Hillary Clinton. Her policy book is missing some very important pages.

Read the article for the whole Krugman meat:

http://theweek.com/articles/606266/paul-krugman-missed-magic-unicorns-hillary-clintons-platform