I see that James Talarico is doing something that Kamala did not

[Bluetus]

66. I am sure the truth lies somewhere in that region. Politics can be very ugly

and politicians try to present a favorable picture to the public and their supporters.

The bigger point, however, is about mandates. We can debate just how passionate Obama was about getting the profit motive out of our HC system. I am willing to believe that he wanted to do that, but concluded it wasn't possible, so he tried to get what he could. I am not trying to second-guess that part of the ordeal.

My interest is WAAAAY upstream of that. If you want a strong mandate, then you have to sell the idea hard, and long in advance of the moment of truth. That did not happen. Obama played it safe. McCain was imploding and Obama didn't want to give McCain and Palin any ammo to work with. That is the nature of politics. If Obama had run hard on the public option, then there would have been loads of Big Pharma and Big Insurance flooding the zone against Obama.

For the mandate thing to work, you must latch on to a very popular idea that the public feels so strongly about that the corporate money cannot overcome. Another way of saying that is our system is now totally slanted toward what the biggest corporations want. That works for Trump because he was always going to give the richest and most powerful everything they wanted anyway, so they aren't going to oppose him ever.