I take with a grain of salt political predictions from the New York magazine; this one, as many do, begins with a click-bait “let’s scare the Dems!” headline. Polls, even the one used by the writer to prove his point, show Biden leading Trump by at least a few points in 4 of 6 ‘swing states’, dead-even in Michigan, and slightly behind in N.C. He’s also the one who attracts the most voters in the “center” among the Dem candidates, a fact pointed out in the linked article to “polls” but conveniently ignored in this NYM article. Probably didn’t fit the NY Magazine writer’s biased view. Check fivethirtyeight.com for more realistic polling conclusions and remember that polls change daily. The author claims Dem candidates are ceding the “center” to Trump, yet Biden has more or the same support as Trump. Typically more. And ignored is the rapid pace of changes everyday as more revelations emerge from the impeachment hearings that could lead more centrists, independents, and some disillusioned Trump voters to consider voting for a centrist such as Biden. He doesn’t promise to reach true progressive ideals by taking one big leap to reach the end. He realizes that every path has many steps and steps can’t simply be ‘skipped’, as some wish. He knows that the health insurance industry can’t just be “shut down” and put out of business in a wink of an eye-or in 4 years and the hundreds of thousands of people who’d lose their jobs IF it could even be done.

Change in such a huge part of the economy and in the way people receive their healthcare insurance can’t be forced onto people but taking it a step at a time will keep people from ever really noticing it. Allow private insurance to compete with a Public Option added to the ACA: they will either dramatically lower premiums and/or improve their products or simply go out of business. And no one can call that by the dreaded (among some) word “socialism”.