As a follow up to my previous post on Clinton’s narrow win in Iowa (and responding to the recent Sanders win in New Hampshire),  I actually went to Bernie Sander’s website and took at look at his policy platform. I was half expecting to find it completely crazy but frankly, overall I thought it rang pretty true to the mainstream progressive cause in the United States. Sure,there were a few ‘Socialist’-y proposals that I outright felt was not the right solution for the US (especially his call for a single payer healthcare system), but there were many more things that I agreed with. Moreover, they didn’t feel watered-down compromises. Here’s my take on some of the key issues he raised:

• Addressing the growing inequality gap (Grade: B)- This was the first item on his agenda and for many Americans, I do think this is one of the top concerns. I liked that his plan to address this was multi-faceted, incorporating closing tax loopholes for the wealthy and corporations, enacting a massive infrastructure investment to get America up to speed to today’s technologies as well as to create jobs, and increasing access to education at all levels. I also noted that Sanders proposes reversing free-trade policies such as NAFTA to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US, effectively saying that the US should leverage access to its huge consumer market more to bring jobs back to the US – something that Donald Trump has also mentioned repeatedly on his campaign. I have more tepid feelings about some of his other proposals here – for example, strengthening unions and dramatically increasing the minimum wage (I prefer interventions that would increase the wage by improving the quality of our labor force – e.g., education and training).
• Reducing the influence of the wealthy on the political process (Grade: A) – Both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton come right out and say that they would work to overturn Citizens United (presumably through the appointment of the new Supreme Court justices). But here too, the language and tone are so different! The Sanders page on this appears to be written by the candidate himself and you can feel the sadness and alarm of how corporate money is making American democracy look more and more like an oligarchy. The Clinton page on this issue makes many of the same policy proposals but somehow fails to capture the alarm that many ordinary Americans feel about how the super-wealthy and big business seem to be driving the political process.
• Climate change (Grade: B) – While Clinton’s policy stance is that she will do what it takes to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris climate conference, Sanders unsurprisingly goes further. What’s refreshing is that he incorporates both regulatory and market-based tools, such as accelerating the gas efficiency requirements on cars and imposing a carbon tax. He has some crazy stuff in there too, like proposing to ban future fossil leases on public lands.
• Medicare for all (Grade: D) – Here is one that I can’t see at all – a single payer for all healthcare in the United States. Not only is there no way in hell that it would ever pass through Congress, but I would argue there are a lot of downsides and few upsides to a single payer system over a well-regulated market of health insurers.

There are many other issues that the Sanders website touches on that I will not delve into right now, from immigration to veterans to LGBT issues. Some topics that were missing for me included:

• Improving education for disadvantaged children: On this topic I believe greater accountability, more transparency regarding performance and a bigger role for high-performing charter organizations are what’s needed. It’s an especially important lever to counter growing inequality and an ossifying social hierarchy in the United States. However, with unionized K12 teachers being a crucial voter for both campaigns, it’s may be not surprising that this is not on the list.
• Gun control: I guess is one liberal issue that he appears to be on the other side on. I get that he’s from a rural state but he has no answer for the epidemic in gun violence in America.

Stepping back, I had some reflections contrasting the Sander’s policy portion of his website with the parallel section of Hillary Clinton’s website. First off, I hated the fact that on the Clinton website the issues were listed in alphabetical order, not in order of what the campaign thought was important. It felt like another example of a lack of vision and prioritization. Second, the list of issues felt like it was generated from some kind of cluster analysis of a marketing survey to hundreds of thousands of potential votes, spitting out the nodes of concern of likely votes which was then spit out on this page (in alphabetical order). There’s nothing wrong with surveys to understand what your constituents want but alas, your constituents also want to know what you want, that you’ve internalized what’s important to them, that you are human… just listing back the issues that your political advisors say you should talk about does not do this. Lastly, and relatedly, the Clinton’s material just feels too impersonal. It feels like it was written by some campaign interns and not sufficiently reviewed and revised. Each piece of the Sander’s policy platform looks and feels like he himself wrote it, that if you elected him President you know who he is and what he cares about at his core (even if you don’t agree with all of it). From reading the Clinton website, you worry that if and when she becomes President, she won’t know what she promised during her campaign or worse, she doesn’t care about that so much since she left it to someone else to write what was supposed to be THE source of her policy positions for this campaign.

Ok, enough on that. What about Bernie’s ability to carry it out though? Some have said he’s all crazy talk and not enough action. That Hillary’s the one who can actually work with Congress and achieve realistic, if incremental, goals. Maybe there’s some truth in that (for example see this article) but that’s for a future blog post.