The 2024 presidential race is taking shape. It looks like a choice between the sensible, the mad, and the missing. Joe Biden seems intent on running on his record, a sensible route for the incumbent. His major
challenger, the inescapable Donald Trump, is replay- ing his madcap candidacy – his program a mixture of resentment, racism, bluster, and victimization. What’s missing are the big challenges that America can’t avoid and can’t seem to face.
In this first term, Joe Biden has surely exceeded expectations. He has broken with the conservative era’s trickle-down economics and passed major initiatives to rebuild America’s decrepit infrastructure, revive manufacturing, and move away from our disastrous trade policies, and launch an industrial policy focused on renewable energy and energy efficiency.
He’s enjoyed record-low unemployment even as in- flation has plummeted and real wages have started to go up. He’s voiced his support for unions and equal justice under the law, even if his initiatives in those areas have been blocked by Republicans and a couple of renegade Democrats in the Senate. He will run as a competent leader who got things done.
Trump, who dominates the Republican field even as indictments rain down upon him, doesn’t really have an agenda – or rather, his agenda is himself – “I alone can fix it.” He promises, for example, to end the Ukraine war in 24 hours because he says he can. What he offers is grievance and theater. He rails against an America that is a wasteland three short years after he made it great again. For substance, he offers postures – sends troops to the border, gets tougher on the Chinese, doubles down on oil and coal, and rollback climate and environmental legislation.
What’s missing in this face-off is the necessary; the set of challenges that we can’t avoid but refuse to face. For example, America’s health care system fails us. It costs nearly twice as much per capita as the health systems of other advanced countries while providing worse care and far worse medical outcomes. Our life expectancy is declining, a stunning measure of its failure. Millions remain without health insurance. Many millions more struggle to afford the care that they need. Private equity barons are merging hospitals, purging nurses, and slashing services. Medicare is rapidly being privatized, even as costs soar and coverage declines.
When I ran for president in 1988, I called for a na- tional health care plan – Medicare for all.
Bernie Sanders repeated the call when he ran in 2016 and 2020. Congressional progressives led by Rep. Pramila Jayapal have introduced legislation and ,…
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