If President Donald Trump is defeated, the GOP is going to want to work with Democrats again, making an ambitious agenda possible. That, at least, is former Vice President Joe Biden’s theory of the case. “You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends,” he said in November. “Mark my words.”
Biden was mocked for these comments, and rightly so. There will be no Republican epiphany if Biden is elected, just as the fever didn’t break when Barack Obama was reelected. Biden came of political age in the Senate of the 1970s and ’80s, when the political parties were ideologically mixed and bipartisanship was common. He yearns for a political structure that no longer exists and hasn’t for some time.
But Biden isn’t alone in running on an unlikely theory of change. Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg are all running on a theory in which the force of their personality, or the strength of their movement, or the popularity of their agenda breaks the polarization that has gridlocked US politics.
But why is it that every presidential candidate needs a fantastical step between being elected president and turning their promises into policy? In many countries, this whole conversation would be puzzling. Parties run on agendas, and if they win, they implement those agendas, or at least a substantial part of them.
That’s not the case in America, where divided government is common, the filibuster forces supermajority levels of consensus in the Senate, electoral geography dilutes the power of popular majorities, and polarized parties make compromise impossible. Here, parties run on ambitious agendas and, when they win, typically find themselves foiled in their efforts to pass much of anything at all. Elections then devolve into bitter games of blame-shifting, in which the question isn’t how the public feels about what did happen but who the public holds responsible for what didn’t happen.
“There is a chasm between expectations and reality,” says Paul Pierson, a political scientist at UC Berkeley. “Many voters don’t know who controls the Senate, much less the role of the filibuster. Trump can talk about the ‘do-nothing Democrats’ while House bills gather dust in a corner of McConnell’s office! Voters are completely uninterested in process explanations. They don’t want to hear about how candidates can’t actually do things.”
Frances Lee, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, agrees. “Realism about these constraints is just not a compelling electoral message — neither for primary voters nor the general election. How are you going to tell activists that little legislation of any kind is going to get done without bipartisan support? How can you get voters to care about the outcome of an election if you’re telling them that even if you win, the opposing party will have a veto over most of the things they care about?”
You can’t. And successful politicians don’t. Epiphany politics is how candidates close the rhetorical gap between what the public wants to hear and what the president can actually do. But it doesn’t close the real gap between what the president can do and what the public wants done.
At CNN’s recent town hall, Bernie Sanders was asked how he’d win the Republican votes in the Senate necessary to pass his agenda. “You go to Mitch McConnell’s state of Kentucky, which is a state where a lot of people are struggling, and you say to those people, ‘Okay, this is my proposal,’” Sanders replied. “We’re going to lower the age of Medicare from 65 to 55, and we’re expanding it to cover, as I mentioned, dental care and home health care and eyeglasses and hearing aids.
“What percentage of the people do you think in Kentucky would support that proposal? My guess is 70 percent, 80 percent of the people. And my job then as president is to rally those people and tell their senators to support it. I think we can do that.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders at the New Hampshire Democratic debate.Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images
But there is no more evidence that Sanders can enlist Mitch McConnell’s voters than that Biden can coax an epiphany out of McConnell.
When deep blue Vermont sought to pass single-payer health care in 2014, the plan failed despite Sanders’s personal popularity in the state, a supportive Democratic governor, and big Democratic majorities in the legislature. Meanwhile, Sanders has had trouble convincing even his fellow Senate Democrats to sign on to his legislation. At Friday’s Democratic debate, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) dismissed Medicare-for-all as a legislative fantasy. “It is not real, Bernie, because two-thirds of the Democrats in the Senate are not on your bill and because it would kick 149 million Americans off their current health insurance in four years,” she said.
The Iowa caucuses, similarly, offered little evidence for the kind of political revolution necessary to intimidate Republican members of Congress into supporting democratic socialism. Iowans know Sanders well; he’s spent a tremendous amount of time and money selling them on his politics, and his team has spent years organizing up and down the state. Even so, though caucus turnout was higher than in 2016, it was far lower than in 2008, and the result was that Sanders and Buttigieg basically tied. There’s nothing in that outcome that suggests Sanders can change the political dynamics of Kentucky.
Warren and Buttigieg have their own version of epiphany politics: ambitiousplans to make American governance possible again by getting rid of the filibuster and passing a sweeping set of political reforms ranging from anti-corruption legislation to statehood for Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico to reshaping the Supreme Court to abolishing gerrymandering and the Electoral College.
Former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Elizabeth Warren at the debate.Joe Raedle/Getty Images
This strategy also requires an epiphany — in this case, from Senate Democrats, most of whom oppose getting rid of the filibuster because they fear someday being in the minority without it. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has said he regrets even the modest changes Democrats made to the rule in 2013.
Schumer isn’t alone in this. A majority of the Senate Democrats who ran or are running for president in 2020 — Booker, Klobuchar, Bennet, Harris, and even Sanders — either support the filibuster outright or hedge when asked. But so long as the filibuster remains in place, the rest of any political reform agenda is so much legislative vaporware.
All this has left outside analysts skeptical that any Democrat will bring much in the way of dramatic change. In a recent note to investors, JPMorgan told restive traders not to fret over the Democrats’ ambitious agendas, putting the probability of the conditions necessary for single-payer or a wealth tax to pass “at less than 5%.”
Presidential campaigns are defined by a central question — how will you get all this done? — to which there is, in truth, no good answer.
Since most presidents fail to pass anything close to the program they run on, would-be successors need an answer for why their presidency will be different. Running on a realistic view of what’s possible doesn’t excite the base or match the scale of our problems — just ask Klobuchar, who’s offered the closest thing to a plausible agenda and has been lapped by candidates with more inspiring platforms.
“Candidates have to tell a story where things will be different next time,” says Lee. “Their epiphany stories may not be very persuasive, but the unvarnished truth is almost certainly worse from an electioneering perspective.”
The downside of epiphany politics is that it sets up both a candidate’s supporters and the country for disappointment. Former President Obama is personally beloved by Democrats, and passed more and more consequential domestic legislation than any president since Lyndon Johnson. But it was a fraction of what he promised, and the bills that did pass were shot through with compromises and concessions.
Arguments rage to this day among liberals about why Obama wasn’t able to pass a bigger stimulus, force through a public option, find the votes for cap and trade, reform the immigration system, and get Merrick Garland onto the Supreme Court. He promised hope and change, but not enough changed, and that robbed the activists he inspired of hope.
House Majority Leader John Boehner and President Barack Obama in 2014.Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images
Trump signed a big package of tax cuts into law, but his wall remains unbuilt, Obamacare is the law of the land, the opioid crisis is ravaging the Midwest, and the grand rebuilding of American infrastructure has been left to future presidents. Trump inherited and sustained a strong economy, and he’s performed a dramatic presidency through Twitter fights, scandal, and erratic behavior, but he’s been a legislative failure.
The gridlock at the center of the system resists efforts at political reform as easily as it resists the bills political reform is meant to enable. But that traps both parties in an endless cycle of epiphanic hopes and deep disappointments — so the frustration with failed political insiders gives way to a demand for political outsiders, and the failure of those outsiders creates demand for reactionaries and revolutionaries.
But what happens if they fail, too?
Epiphany politics delays a reckoning. It promises people the change they want, but it can’t deliver it. And so the public becomes more frustrated, the politics more bitter, and both sides more desperate. Here, then, is the epiphany we need: What American politics lacks isn’t good candidates but a functional political system. And so long as that problem goes unfixed, no candidate, in the end, will be good enough.
HALIFAX – Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston says it’s “disgraceful and demeaning” that a Halifax-area school would request that service members not wear military uniforms to its Remembrance Day ceremony.
Houston’s comments were part of a chorus of criticism levelled at the school — Sackville Heights Elementary — whose administration decided to back away from the plan after the outcry.
A November newsletter from the school in Middle Sackville, N.S., invited Armed Forces members to attend its ceremony but asked that all attendees arrive in civilian attire to “maintain a welcoming environment for all.”
Houston, who is currently running for re-election, accused the school’s leaders of “disgracing themselves while demeaning the people who protect our country” in a post on the social media platform X Thursday night.
“If the people behind this decision had a shred of the courage that our veterans have, this cowardly and insulting idea would have been rejected immediately,” Houston’s post read. There were also several calls for resignations within the school’s administration attached to Houston’s post.
In an email to families Thursday night, the school’s principal, Rachael Webster, apologized and welcomed military family members to attend “in the attire that makes them most comfortable.”
“I recognize this request has caused harm and I am deeply sorry,” Webster’s email read, adding later that the school has the “utmost respect for what the uniform represents.”
Webster said the initial request was out of concern for some students who come from countries experiencing conflict and who she said expressed discomfort with images of war, including military uniforms.
Her email said any students who have concerns about seeing Armed Forces members in uniform can be accommodated in a way that makes them feel safe, but she provided no further details in the message.
Webster did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
At a news conference Friday, Houston said he’s glad the initial request was reversed but said he is still concerned.
“I can’t actually fathom how a decision like that was made,” Houston told reporters Friday, adding that he grew up moving between military bases around the country while his father was in the Armed Forces.
“My story of growing up in a military family is not unique in our province. The tradition of service is something so many of us share,” he said.
“Saying ‘lest we forget’ is a solemn promise to the fallen. It’s our commitment to those that continue to serve and our commitment that we will pass on our respects to the next generation.”
Liberal Leader Zach Churchill also said he’s happy with the school’s decision to allow uniformed Armed Forces members to attend the ceremony, but he said he didn’t think it was fair to question the intentions of those behind the original decision.
“We need to have them (uniforms) on display at Remembrance Day,” he said. “Not only are we celebrating (veterans) … we’re also commemorating our dead who gave the greatest sacrifice for our country and for the freedoms we have.”
NDP Leader Claudia Chender said that while Remembrance Day is an important occasion to honour veterans and current service members’ sacrifices, she said she hopes Houston wasn’t taking advantage of the decision to “play politics with this solemn occasion for his own political gain.”
“I hope Tim Houston reached out to the principal of the school before making a public statement,” she said in a statement.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 8, 2024.
REGINA – Saskatchewan Opposition NDP Leader Carla Beck says she wants to prove to residents her party is the government in waiting as she heads into the incoming legislative session.
Beck held her first caucus meeting with 27 members, nearly double than what she had before the Oct. 28 election but short of the 31 required to form a majority in the 61-seat legislature.
She says her priorities will be health care and cost-of-living issues.
Beck says people need affordability help right now and will press Premier Scott Moe’s Saskatchewan Party government to cut the gas tax and the provincial sales tax on children’s clothing and some grocery items.
Beck’s NDP is Saskatchewan’s largest Opposition in nearly two decades after sweeping Regina and winning all but one seat in Saskatoon.
The Saskatchewan Party won 34 seats, retaining its hold on all of the rural ridings and smaller cities.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 8, 2024.
HALIFAX – Nova Scotia‘s growing population was the subject of debate on Day 12 of the provincial election campaign, with Liberal Leader Zach Churchill arguing immigration levels must be reduced until the province can provide enough housing and health-care services.
Churchill said Thursday a plan by the incumbent Progressive Conservatives to double the province’s population to two million people by the year 2060 is unrealistic and unsustainable.
“That’s a big leap and it’s making life harder for people who live here, (including ) young people looking for a place to live and seniors looking to downsize,” he told a news conference at his campaign headquarters in Halifax.
Anticipating that his call for less immigration might provoke protests from the immigrant community, Churchill was careful to note that he is among the third generation of a family that moved to Nova Scotia from Lebanon.
“I know the value of immigration, the importance of it to our province. We have been built on the backs of an immigrant population. But we just need to do it in a responsible way.”
The Liberal leader said Tim Houston’s Tories, who are seeking a second term in office, have made a mistake by exceeding immigration targets set by the province’s Department of Labour and Immigration. Churchill said a Liberal government would abide by the department’s targets.
In the most recent fiscal year, the government welcomed almost 12,000 immigrants through its nominee program, exceeding the department’s limit by more than 4,000, he said. The numbers aren’t huge, but the increase won’t help ease the province’s shortages in housing and doctors, and the increased strain on its infrastructure, including roads, schools and cellphone networks, Churchill said.
“(The Immigration Department) has done the hard work on this,” he said. “They know where the labour gaps are, and they know what growth is sustainable.”
In response, Houston said his commitment to double the population was a “stretch goal.” And he said the province had long struggled with a declining population before that trend was recently reversed.
“The only immigration that can come into this province at this time is if they are a skilled trade worker or a health-care worker,” Houston said. “The population has grown by two per cent a year, actually quite similar growth to what we experienced under the Liberal government before us.”
Still, Houston said he’s heard Nova Scotians’ concerns about population growth, and he then pivoted to criticize Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for trying to send 6,000 asylum seekers to Nova Scotia, an assertion the federal government has denied.
Churchill said Houston’s claim about asylum seekers was shameful.
“It’s smoke and mirrors,” the Liberal leader said. “He is overshooting his own department’s numbers for sustainable population growth and yet he is trying to blame this on asylum seekers … who aren’t even here.”
In September, federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller said there is no plan to send any asylum seekers to the province without compensation or the consent of the premier. He said the 6,000 number was an “aspirational” figure based on models that reflect each province’s population.
In Halifax, NDP Leader Claudia Chender said it’s clear Nova Scotia needs more doctors, nurses and skilled trades people.
“Immigration has been and always will be a part of the Nova Scotia story, but we need to build as we grow,” Chender said. “This is why we have been pushing the Houston government to build more affordable housing.”
Chender was in a Halifax cafe on Thursday when she promised her party would remove the province’s portion of the harmonized sales tax from all grocery, cellphone and internet bills if elected to govern on Nov. 26. The tax would also be removed from the sale and installation of heat pumps.
“Our focus is on helping people to afford their lives,” Chender told reporters. “We know there are certain things that you can’t live without: food, internet and a phone …. So we know this will have the single biggest impact.”
The party estimates the measure would save the average Nova Scotia family about $1,300 a year.
“That’s a lot more than a one or two per cent HST cut,” Chender said, referring to the Progressive Conservative pledge to reduce the tax by one percentage point and the Liberal promise to trim it by two percentage points.
Elsewhere on the campaign trail, Houston announced that a Progressive Conservative government would make parking free at all Nova Scotia hospitals and health-care centres. The promise was also made by the Liberals in their election platform released Monday.
“Free parking may not seem like a big deal to some, but … the parking, especially for people working at the facilities, can add up to hundreds of dollars,” the premier told a news conference at his campaign headquarters in Halifax.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 7, 2024.
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