Yet he doesn't inspire rage on the right like Obama does or as the triangulating Bill Clinton did before him. Now, during the Democratic primary this was undoubtedly in part a result of a political calculation that Sanders getting the nomination would be good for the GOP in the general election. The right would surely have hit him relentlessly if he'd ended up becoming the Democratic nominee. And they would have done so even though Sanders' singular focus on economic issues makes him more difficult to engage in the culture-war terms favored by the right.
In Trump's hands during a general-election contest, the term "socialism" would have gone far beyond economics to take on all kinds of cultural resonance. Yet the difference remains: Sanders doesn't provoke rage like Obama does. While some might point to race, I doubt those made apoplectic by a Black politician would be comparatively forgiving to a septuagenarian Jewish social democrat with a thick Brooklyn accent.
Something else is going on, and I think it's that the right accepts that Sanders just pushes his factional agenda from the socialist left and doesn't presume to speak from outside of or above the partisan fray. Obama, by contrast, doesn't know how to speak in any other rhetorical register than above and beyond the partisan fray. He invariably sounds reasonable, his tone fair-minded, objective. He speaks of the grand sweep of American history, renders Solomonic judgments, and looks down on the disputants on the field of battle, even as his proposals invariably advance the liberal-progressive side of the clashes taking place below him.
That is what drives — and has always driven — the right nuts about Obama. It's his supposed pretense to elevation, to speaking in dispassionate terms about "us," about what's morally righteous and true, and rendering sometimes severe moral judgments of his opponents.
He's a master of using a rhetoric of elevation to ennoble himself and his allies while casting implicit moral aspersions on his political foes, whom he portrays as self-evidently dishonorable, all the while sounding as if he's merely reciting the indisputable facts of the case. His tone at all times is that of a disapproving parent: You should be ashamed of yourselves. It's understandable that Republicans would dislike being talked to like this, especially when it proved so politically effective from to But the ferocity of the response cries out for a fuller explanation — and we find one in the distinction between the politics of democracy and the politics of populism.
The politics of democracy is a contest to win the greatest number of votes — a plurality; or even better, a bare majority; and best of all, an overwhelming majority. This aim is what drove politics in this country through most of the 20th century. In the primaries, candidates sought out the sweet spot within their own parties, whether through winning support from party insiders — or, with the reforms that began after , through winning the votes of party members in state primary and caucus elections.
But in the general election, the two sides competed to find the center of public opinion in the country as a whole. Each party's presidential ticket did this by making a pitch for the whole: This is how I see America. This is what I think of our ideals, our history, our actions in the past and present, and our destiny moving forward into the future.
The candidate who got the most people to endorse his comprehensive vision of the nation would win the presidency, with the victor usually earning a majority of the popular vote, and sometimes an overwhelming majority, as happened in , , and But he lacked the votes for a single-payer approach.
In the ACA, he settled on a weak mandate with a low monetary penalty for failure to comply, an expansion of Medicaid through the states, and subsidies so everyone could afford coverage on the private market, just as Newt Gingrich proposed so many years ago.
One might have imagined a round of conservative applause, but instead Republicans pivoted to attack mode. The issues were the constitutionality of the mandate that people buy insurance or face a penalty, and congressional expansion of state Medicaid coverage for poorer patients. Another key conservative principle is federalism — to retain a central role for the states. The ACA carved out an important role for the states in expanding the state-administered Medicaid program to provide health care for poor Americans.
To achieve universal coverage, the federal government needs to do it alone, with a simple federal entitlement, like Medicare.
The ACA case therefore set a strange precedent. The result is a lopsided reading of constitutional authority. The federal government has a weakened power to work with private businesses and with states to achieve universal coverage. Meanwhile, the federal government has a nearly invincible power to itself tax and spend. The battle was not yet over.
In , President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans eliminated the tax penalty for going without insurance. A judge in Texas then held that in doing so, Congress inadvertently repealed the entire ACA, including its subsidies, protections for preexisting conditions and expansion of Medicaid.
The judge theorized that a tax of zero is not a legal nullity, but rather an unconstitutional and fatal flaw that brings down the entire bill.
That case is the one now in the Supreme Court. We looked at presidential approval polling data from the first six months of presidencies dating back to George W. Consider that only around 3 in 10 Democrats strongly disapproved of Bush during the first six months of his presidency, but more than 6 in 10 Republicans have expressed strong disapproval of Biden over the first roughly five months of his time in office.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his abysmal overall approval rating , Trump had the most damning strong disapproval rating, on average, with 72 percent of Democrats saying they disapproved of his job as president. Read more. Members from the other party were once more willing to give a new president some benefit of the doubt early on — or at least, their opposition was not quite so baked in, as the figures for both Bush and Barack Obama suggest.
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