As the saying goes, you campaign in poetry, but govern in prose. Both the balance and the sequence are important. If you can’t master the poetry part, you turn into Hillary Clinton: an uninspiring candidate with a laundry list of modest ideas who can’t win an election. If, on the other hand, you can’t deal in prose, you wind up like today’s GOP; having made unrealistic, contradictory, and essentially dishonest promises to the electorate, you have no idea of how to keep them once in power, and you accomplish very little.
The key for the Democrats in 2020, therefore, is to nominate someone with sound and politically possible ideas who can nonetheless inspire the voting public. What would such a platform look like? Here are some ideas:
1. Medicare for More: Obamacare has helped with the cost of health insurance and co-pays, but not nearly enough for many middle- and working-class people. An actuarily sound program permitting people to buy into Medicare, with higher subsidies, could help a lot. As I’ve noted before, Medicare for More doesn’t create the same political objections as single-payer, it is based on an existing and popular program, and it doesn’t have the same impacts on the budget. It has a reasonable chance of passage.
2. Increase the EITC: A working class tax cut would have some support from the GOP, and would help to reduce inequality.
3. A modest increase in the minimum wage: The EITC is a better way of improving the lives of struggling workers than the minimum wage, since it doesn’t require any interference with the market, but a modest increase, based on the available data, wouldn’t cost jobs, and would be popular.
4. Greater antitrust enforcement: Stagnant wages may be tied in some cases to an increase in market power on the part of a handful of firms.
The first two could be paid for by increasing the corporate tax from 21 to 25 percent, and by getting rid of the egregious pass-through entity deduction that serves no obvious economic purpose. It would not require the complete repeal of the Trump tax cut.
If you think this list is too modest, remember one other thing: one of the benefits of having such an obnoxious president is that it should be possible to inspire the base in a colorful way without having an irresponsible platform.