Sanders’ shadow
In Colorado, Bernie Sanders isn’t just acting as a surrogate for Hillary Clinton. He’s also holding separate events to keep his movement and its issues alive in a state he won handily in the June Democratic primary. Now he is urging his followers to support a ballot measure to establish the nation’s first universal health care system. It will probably be defeated, yet his backers, who have settled for a bird in the hand this year, are certain they own the future.
joyann Ruscha, who was political director for the Sanders campaign in Colorado and a Sanders delegate at the Democratic National Convention, recalls bursting into tears when the senator moved that Clinton be nominated by acclamation.
“I’d known for weeks, months, that she would win,” Ruscha says. “But it’s like being in a relationship, breaking up and then seeing that person again. You think you’re OK but you’re not.”
After the election, Sanders’s supporters are looking forward to seeing their guru ascend the ranks of Senate leaders, with far more influence than he had as a maverick throughout most of his career.
The idea of changing the system from within, however, carries the risk that
the dreamers and revolutionaries will get used to compromise — the kind of baby steps Clinton is offering the Sanders base.
Colorado’s Amendment 69, also known as Colorado Care, is an interesting test case.
It would set up a nonprofit organization with all Colorado residents as members. The organization would collect 10 percent of all incomes to provide universal health coverage. Colorado Care proponents say it would be as extensive as a current Platinum plan under obamacare, covering 90 percent of medical costs without any deductibles. An elected board of 21 trustees would run the organization, deciding whether to ask for higher contributions if necessary, or expand or cut coverage.
If I lived in Colorado, Amendment 69 would get my vote, and not just be- cause the required contribution, at about $532 per month on the median household income, is lower than two 40-year-old Colorado adults currently have to pay in obamacare premiums for skimpier coverage.
Polls show, though, that Coloradans will probably reject Amendment 69. Even millennials will vote against it, albeit by a thinner margin.
I don’t quite share the optimism of Sanders supporters who have now flocked to Clinton: It’s hard to say how authentic her leftward shift is. Will her compromises teach those who have “felt the Bern” to settle for less and perhaps eventually for little change at all? I think they might.