Quote of the day (Editor’s emphasis added):

” Many progressives have what they believe to be a knock-down answer to nervous Nellies who fret that talking about desegregation busing, decriminalizing illegal entry into the United States, banning assault weapons, and replacing private health insurance will kill them at the polls in 2020: Donald Trump is president.
If Trump is president, the thinking goes, it’s the ultimate proof of “lol nothing matters” politics. And if anything does matter, it’s riling up your base to go to war, not trimming and tucking to persuade precious swing voters. The old rules no longer apply, or perhaps they were never true at all.
Activists are pressing candidates to take aggressively progressive stands on broad issues like Medicare-for-all but also narrower ones like including undocumented immigrants in health care plans and providing relief from graduate school debt.
This is, however, precisely the wrong lesson to learn from the Trump era.
It’s true that Trump is president, but it’s not true that Trump ran and won as an ideological extremist. He paired extremely offensive rhetoric on racial issues with positioning on key economic policy topics that led him to be perceived by the electorate as a whole as the most moderate GOP nominee in generations. His campaign was almost paint-by-numbers pragmatic moderation. He ditched a couple of unpopular GOP positions that were much cherished by party elites, like cutting Medicare benefits, delivered victory, and is beloved by the rank and file for it. ” – Matthew Yglesias

Yglesias provides documentation justifying my headline and the selected quotation, which begins his piece. I’ll add that Democrats flipped the House in 2018 by presenting a clear contrast with Donald Trump’s Republican Party, not by reaching to the left edge of the Democratic Party.*

Fearless editor’s fretting: Elizabeth Warren is far and away my favorite United States Senator. I’d like to vote for her for president. Warren’s stance on Medicare for All (rather than Pete Buttigieg’s Medicare for All Who Want It) and the elimination of private insurance strikes me as a huge political miscalculation – and, independently, as bad public policy** – for someone who wishes to turn Trump out of office in November 2020.

I’ve voted for Kamala Harris in several statewide elections. She is high on my list of prospective Democratic nominees. Harris has twice endorsed the elimination of private insurance and twice walked it back the next day. This, much more than her past hedging (“We should have that conversation“), sows doubts about whether her tool chest of political skills – while impressive – is stocked with everything she needs to run a high stakes national campaign against Trump. She’s very good when she’s well scripted (though perhaps the script isn’t always reliable). And I’m not yet convinced that she’s “quick on her feet.”

* Taxing the rich is popular. I’m ready to take that stride to the left. Taking away someone’s health insurance is highly unpopular, for reasons – I’d argue – that are sound. See the note below.

** In my view, this policy shift is a heavy lift, which cries out for an incremental approach as we figure out in stages how to do it right and how to ameliorate the unwanted consequences. Furthermore, without a Democratic lock on the White House, the Congress, and the Supreme Court, the risk of Republicans sabotaging things during the transition (as they’ve done with ACA and Warren’s CFPB) are far too high. If the shift to Medicare for All Who Want It is done well, this will serve to reassure the public on the wisdom of a more radical change.