I have a question for Bernie Sanders' troops.
Your candidate says he will — or can — accomplish what most political observers have deemed impossible: enactment of single-payer health insurance. He says he will accomplish this admittedly worthy goal by mobilizing millions of the disadvantaged, the oppressed, the inspired and the heretofore politically disaffected. They will march on their local polling booths and execute a "political revolution" by elevating Sen. Sanders to the White House, whereupon President Sanders will set to work on enacting single-payer.
Let's say that happens, the whole Sanders presidency thing. Let's even say — and this is probably more unrealistic than the preceding assumption — that Democrats retake not only the Senate but also the House, where Speaker Pelosi would reign. Now let's ponder what that imagined future speaker had to say to reporters yesterday: "[Sanders is] talking about a single-payer, and that's not going to happen. I mean, does anybody in this room think that we're going to be discussing a single-payer? I've been for single-payer for 30 years, and it is a very popular idea in our country. But we have made a decision about where we're going on healthcare."
The direction to which Nancy Pelosi pointed was that of Obamacare. "Can it be improved upon?" she asked. "Everything can," she answered. Only on the realistically improvable would the House focus, she said. Pelosi then repeated the other healthcare-policy decision that she — as a progressive but nonetheless majority-protecting speaker — had already made: "It's no use having a conversation about something that's not going to happen" — by which she meant, of course, single-payer.
I'd venture that Nancy Pelosi could stare down Lyndon Johnson in one of his more determined moments. She is, as they say, one tough old broad. I doubt they come any tougher, and they certainly don't come any less resolute. Hence even the vaguest notion that a Speaker Pelosi — guarding her fresh, hard-won House majority; a majority won only by picking off a few wounded red districts — would in any way endanger that majority by advancing a lefty single-payer bill is nothing short of laughable.
So my question to Bernie's troops is this: How in God's name could President Sanders ever accomplish -- for that matter, even begin to accomplish -- what his own party (so to speak) has declared out of bounds?