It’s why I’ll never pay for this. There’s something off about the self absorbed Politico - like flimsiness of the reporting.
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What has changed? TPM has always been a center-left blog, and Josh has never strayed from his lane or taken any brave positions outside the establishment viewpoint. Hell, he supported the Iraq War.
He does a good job framing issues (notably, SS privatization) and occasionally breaks real stories (U.S. Attorney firings), but TPM is also chock-full of click-bait and fluff.
That TPM would skew towards supporting Clinton over Sanders in its reporting is no great surprise.
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I think it’s just the “Friend or Foe” headline. The piece itself is balanced.
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As an unabashed Bernie supporter, I agree. The article addresses a reasonable question “How Much Credit Does Bernie Sanders Deserve For Obamacare?” – a question which was already out there and many readers may have been interested in. And the article offers what seems to me to be a very substantive, thoughtful balanced discussion of the question.
As the article notes. whether he “helped write” the ACA or not depends on how narrowly you define “helped write,” but it seems to me that almost no one reading this article would come away with the impression that Bernie did not play an important role in shaping the ACA, and in particular a key role in the increased funding for Community Health Centers that was eventually included in the bill.
I think it was a fine article, and one that redounds to Bernie’s benefit in that it not only confirms his important role. it highlights both his idealism (in pushing for single payer / public option at the outset) and his pragmatism (in shifting his focus to what he could get included given the political realities, and in helping get the final bill passed) and shows that being a forceful idealist doesn’t preclude also being a smart pragmatist when the situation calls for it.
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Perhaps Bernie Sanders is to the Affordable Care Act what Al Gore is to the Internet.
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Yes. How dare they write an article that doesn’t say Sanders walks on water and is 100% responsible for every single accomplishment of the Obama administration. Clinton’s too. /snark
Seriously, you are going way over the top in what is becoming a stereotypical Sanders supporter response. The article clearly says that Sanders was involved and championed some very key pieces of the legislature. He was also trying to push items that were not salable to rest of Congress.
Your question regarding being a friend or foe of Obamacare is actually more fair than you care to admit. Clearly, Sanders was and is for a single payer system. He has stated over and over again, including last night, that he wants to eliminate paying premiums to private health insurance companies. Which means eliminating private health insurance companies. Since Obamacare is largely about regulating those very same health insurance companies and basically institutionalizes their existence, of course he would be against it. His plan is not to use ACA as a foundation to move towards single payer…he talks very plainly about instituting a single payer system from scratch…which would necessitate removing Obamacare.
The issue here is that your idealistic views of Sanders don’t coincide with the fact that even sometimes Sanders has to be pragmatic. And this was one of those cases. Single payer was not going to happen,so he worked to get some things installed in Obamacare that improved it. Which is actually a good thing, and what you should be blowing your trumpet about.
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Both the headline and the article are complete Clinton Trash.
Bernie Sanders is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.
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Finally, the rare case where the neologism “frenemy” might actually be appropriate! 
Seriously though, in the end he was clearly more “friend” than “foe.” This was most clearly demonstrated when:
Sanders withdrew the 2009 bill after Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) initiated a procedural move requiring the Senate clerk to read all 767 pages of the amendment — which would have taken eight to 10 hours — and, thereby, halt the Senate health-care debate.
In other words, when push came to shove, Bernie withdrew his single payer bill rather than risk having the ACA thwarted by Coburn’s procedural move. So, when it counted, Bernie showed himself to be much more ACA friend than ACA foe. And as the article notes, from that point forward he was not only a casual “friend” to the ACA, but, according to most accounts, helped shape several important provisions, and was an important ally in getting the overall bill passed.
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How much more progressive? to enable states like his own to try single payer and find out it doesn’t work too well in a single state? Expanding community health centers also took place under Bush.
Why should he be trying to take credit now for a system he also decries as deficient. I’m beginning to dislike him more and more the longer he continues his campaign.
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He exercised influence over the legislation while it was being written. And that’s about the way a President might engage in that process.
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Perhaps because that reflects his actual position? And because he believes most Democrats are smart enough to see that there is nothing contradictory between believing a program represented important progress and is something to be proud of, and knowing at the same time that the program still falls well short of the ultimate goal (affordable universal coverage), and believing a different approach will be needed to achieve that ultimate goal?
Of course one can argue whether he’s right that single payer is the only way (or just the best way) to get to that goal, but there is nothing contradictory about (1) recognizing the very real benefits the ACA has brought to millions of Americans (something Bernie points out in pretty much every speech and every interview that touches on the subject), and (2) recognizing that the ACA is, in many ways still “deficient” in that tens of millions of Americans are still without coverage and millions more still have their access to care significantly impeded due to high deductibles and co-pays.
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Jeff Bingaman represented New Mexico, not Arizona.
Yep. And yesterday there was a piece with the headline along the lines of “Is it time for Clinton to panic?”
The article’s conclusion: no.
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First, I’d like to give a shout out to Tierney Sneed for great work on this article.
Secondly, I’d like to thank Senator Bernie Sanders for his relentless push for the best. The ACA was a great big step forward – and I’m thankful for all of the Democrats and their staff who put in all the time and effort to get where we are today.
Did Sen. Sanders have a heavy hand in the direction the ACA ultimately took? It appears so. Did Sen. Sanders work diligently for what he thought was best? Again, it appears so. Did Sen. Sanders have a hand in every detail, the minutia of the actual bill? – Like nearly every one else, no. If Sen. Sanders hadn’t been such a “gadfly,” it sounds like the eventual law wouldn’t have had such a great impact in the regions of our nation that had little to no care at all. Again, thank you, Sen. Sanders, for the good fight.
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The reason for his comments is that Hillary Clinton and her backers are trying to attack him regarding “wanting to destroy” Obamacare. Instead, he will be building upon it in many ways.
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Is anyone else amused by the staffers who argue in one breath that he wasn’t really involved in the process and then in the next breath that they would have preferred for him to be less-involved?
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In reply to the many reasonable statements regarding the article’s content, I don’t disagree. It is the discord between the headlines written by the editorial director and the content of the articles that bothers me. I sometimes feel, as I do all too frequently on other sites, that I’ve been had.
Stepping back, TPM is in a difficult position of having to compete in a land of click-bait such as HuffPo, Daily Beast, Politico - there are dozens.
I empathize to some extent with Josh’s position. He is trying to walk a fine line between, first surviving, then perhaps turning TPM into a profitable venture. And he more than deserves it. He has done a fine job of spiffing up the site over the past several years from its original, just report the news format, but the stale stories and assorted click-bait in the right sidebar and below are all too reminiscent of these other sites.
I can easily ignore that stuff, but, as one commenter similarly said, when the headlines end in questions, it’s not reporting the news but searching for a controversy.
Not sure what the answer is. I sense there is less of Josh in TPM content oversight than there used to be because of managing the operation. I respect his opinion and have no problem expressing mine in a respectful manner when I disagree.
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There seems to be a fairly significant set of Sanders supporters who resemble teabaggers in being resistant to logic, convinced that everything including the old and new media is a giant pro-Hillary conspiracy, susceptible to hoax memes, going off on social media attacks on critics, etc. Not really what I expected.
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You talk about the Hive a lot in your comments but don’t have a Prime marker, and you don’t have many comments. Care to reveal your sockpuppet(s)?
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The real question is whether you can make more progress in the system we have confronting it or cooperating within it.
Put another way, what if compromise had been reached before Sen. Kennedy died?
The real political sin in all of this was what was given up in a vain attempt to obtain bipartisan window-dressing. At a minimum that wasted a ton of time.