Lowry

By Rich Lowry

Syndicated Columnist

What happens when the supposed dictator won’t dictate? This is the conundrum confronted by the harshest critics of President Donald Trump who have gone from warning he is a budding despot to complaining he hasn’t done enough to impose his will during the coronavirus crisis.

They can’t believe that he didn’t urge sports leagues to cancel their seasons, call for school systems to close, or tell bars and restaurants to shutter before this wave of closures began.

As a New York Times report put it, Trump “has essentially become a bystander as school superintendents, sports commissioners, college presidents, governors and business owners across the country take it upon themselves to shut down much of American life.”

Ordinarily, tyrants aren’t bystanders. They don’t give other political players and civic institutions wide latitude to make their own decisions. They don’t have to be pushed to declare a national emergency unlocking various powers. They don’t have to be lobbied to call out the military to deal with a domestic problem.

Trump has now declared an emergency and issued national guidelines against gatherings of more than 10 people, but his initial instinct was to urge people to stay calm and carry on.

The problem with Trump’s mode of governance isn’t that he’s a would-be authoritarian. Rather, he has a highly personalized view of the presidency and an abiding belief that he can talk his way out of any difficulty — including, initially, a public-health crisis not susceptible to spin. This deeply flawed approach contributed to his early stumbles in the coronavirus response, but it doesn’t make him a falangist.

What we’re likely to find is that Trump ends up leading a characteristically American effort against the outbreak. As Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute points out, we usually fumble around in the early stages of a national crisis before bringing to bear massive resources to wrestle it to the ground.

For better or worse, the Great Depression prompted the creation of the most far-reaching economic programs in our history after a period of passivity and drift. We responded to the perceived crisis of the Soviet Sputnik launch with the Apollo program that soaked up 4% of GDP. Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed New Orleans and initially FEMA, before we put an army general in charge of the relief.

The initial indications of a financial crisis in 2008 were greeted with denial and half-measures. Then, the federal government responded with a historic bailout of the banks and the Federal Reserve undertook an unprecedented program to pump liquidity into the economy.

The outlines of a similar response to the coronavirus are already evident. The move from relative normality to large parts of the country being shut down was remarkably swift — it happened in the space of about a week. Testing has been slow to come online, but is ramping up now. If hospitals are overwhelmed, we will see the rapid retrofitting of additional space. The Federal Reserve and the federal government are embarking on major stimulus and relief programs.

Such is our robust, multi-layered society and system of government that much of this doesn’t depend on the president, let alone a dictator.

Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.(c) 2020 by King Features Synd., Inc.

By Rich Lowry

Syndicated Columnist

Bernie Sanders may be on the verge of gaining an insurmountable lead in the Democratic nomination fight, but he’s not letting that get in the way of his socialist principles.

Asked in a “60 Minutes” interview about old statements praising Fidel Castro’s supposed achievements in health care and education, Sanders stayed true to himself.

“You know, when Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did?” he told interviewer Anderson Cooper. “He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it?”

No, literacy programs aren’t a bad thing, but they usually don’t require seizing power in a violent revolution, jailing and killing political opponents, seizing private property, or outlawing the free press.

Teaching children to read is something that happens in free societies, too. That Bernie continues to believe a literacy program is some kind of recommendation for a regime that has otherwise oppressed and immiserated its people for decades is a sign of his skewed view of what’s important and just for a polity.

Asked by Cooper about jailed Cuban dissidents, Sanders said he condemns that, but in any rational view, it’s the imprisoning of people for expressing unwelcome political views that is the foremost thing to know about the Cuban dictatorship, period, full stop.

The left has nonetheless always viewed Fidel Castro as some kind of social worker who happened to take and hold power — or “come to office,” as Sanders delicately puts it — via force. Back in 1989, Sanders wrote, “Cuba — the one country in the entire region that has no hunger, is educating all of its children and is providing high-quality, free health care — is hated with a passion by the Democrats as much as Republicans.”

Besides the moral obtuseness of arguments like this, the factual basis for such claims is dubious. Cuba was already doing well on measures of health care and education prior to the revolution.

Bernie’s perspective on Cuba is characteristic of his worldview that has a sympathy for America’s enemies, at least if they are communist or Islamist; that assumes the worst of the United States; and that opposes nearly all U.S. military interventions as misbegotten or malign (Sanders voted for the Afghanistan War after Sept. 11, and now regrets even that vote).

Electing Bernie Sanders would be almost indistinguishable from putting the late radical historian Howard Zinn, or the America-loathing linguist Noam Chomsky, or the tendentious left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore in charge of American foreign policy. The country would be in the hands of an opponent of its power with no faith in its goodness. Bernie would make Barack Obama’s overly solicitous attitude toward our enemies and Donald Trump’s bizarrely warm statements about foreign dictators look like American foreign-policy orthodoxy by comparison.

There is almost no enemy of the United States that wouldn’t be heartened by a Sanders victory, and see it as an opportunity to make gains at the expense of the United States and its allies. If his decades-long track record is any indication, Sanders would be inclined to make excuses for our adversaries and look on the bright side of their repression and rapine.

He’s doing it with the Cuban dictatorship to this day.

Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.

(c) 2020 by King Features Synd., Inc.

By Rich Lowry

Syndicated Columnist

The rich are different from you and me — they can buy themselves instant presidential campaigns.Former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg has elbowed himself into the Democratic nomination race solely on the basis of his fortune.

His campaign is high-handed as only a billionaire many times over could even contemplate. He entered late, is skipping the early contests and hasn’t participated in any of the debates to date (although that will change soon, thanks to the Democratic National Committee retrofitting its rules for Bloomberg).

It’s a free country, and with more than $50 billion to his name, Bloomberg can spend as much money as he likes on whatever suits his fancy. But Bloomberg 2020 is still an affront to small-d democratic sensibilities, a tribute not to his superior political skills or messaging compared with the other candidates, but to his access to an enormous personal bank account.

The level of his spending is truly astonishing — Croesus goes all-in on Super Tuesday. Bloomberg spent more than $300 million on various forms of advertising. He’s single-handedly changed the market for TV ads in many places. He spent $10 million on a Super Bowl spot, or about half of what Joe Biden raised in the entire fourth quarter.

This is the Bloomberg way. He spent a quarter of a billion dollars to become and stay New York mayor for three terms. He was eligible for his third term only because he got a term-limit law changed, with the support of charities that he happened to make generous donations to.

What’s wrong with all this, beyond the cynicism of thinking everything has a price tag? Maybe Bloomberg is right, that trying to go in and convince voters of your appeal at town hall events and meet-and-greets in places like Iowa and New Hampshire is for suckers.

But there is much to be said for grassroots politics. It forces candidates to take account, up close and personal, of what their voters believe and want. As president, Abraham Lincoln devoted serious time to meeting with random people who showed up to see him, in what he called “public opinion baths.”

The candidate who does countless of these early-state events must have the ability to inspire and impress, think on his feet, show endless patience and stamina. If he’s not up for it, or is a pretender, he will inevitably be exposed.

In comparison to the other candidates, Bloomberg is a Wizard of Oz candidate, shielded and inflated by his TV ads.

Another advantage of the traditional approach is that anyone can do it. Pete Buttigieg, the unknown mayor of a small Indiana town, finished strong in Iowa through sheer talent, tireless work and clever messaging.

All this said, perhaps Bloomberg will break all the rules and be the last man standing between Bernie Sanders and the cusp of the American presidency. Then, his spending might look to a lot of Democrats like a public service. There is also no denying that Bloomberg is a genuinely talented man.

Yet this style of campaigning shouldn’t be the norm. If Bloomberg succeeds, he will enrich many TV stations, consultants, pollsters and campaign workers, but impoverish our politics.

Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.(c) 2020 by King Features Synd., Inc.

By Rich Lowry

Syndicated Columnist

It’s easy to forget what the Senate impeachment trial is supposed to be about. It was not a fight over whether the Senate will call a couple of witnesses that the House couldn’t, or didn’t bother to, obtain on its own.

The underlying question was whether the United States Senate will impose the most severe sanction it has ever inflicted on any chief executive, voting to remove a president for the first time in the history of the country and doing it about 10 months from his reelection bid.

This is a truly radical step that, if it ever came about, would do more damage to the legitimacy of our political system than President Donald Trump’s underlying offense.

If Trump were actually convicted, the 2020 election would have proceeded under a cloud of illegitimacy. Tens of millions of Trump voters wouldn’t accept the result. They’d see it as an inside job to deny the incumbent president a chance to run for reelection, without a single voter having a direct say.

The GOP would be brought to its knees by internal bloodletting, a prospect that Democrats surely would welcome, especially given that it would deliver them the presidency. Republicans would be out for revenge, and instead of a halcyon return to normalcy, our politics would be even more poisonous than before.

Democrats argued that Trump should not have stayed in office because he’s such a threat to the integrity of our elections. But the portrayal of Trump’s Ukraine scheme as “election interference,” as the Democrats always said, was tendentious and inapt. If the Ukrainians had complied with the Trump team’s pressure to announce an investigation of the energy company Burisma, it wouldn’t have changed one vote in 2020, even if former Vice President Joe Biden eventually is the Democratic nominee.

The fact is that impeachment, as my colleague Ramesh Ponnuru points out, is a weak check on the presidency. It requires a supermajority of the country to remove a president and one of the political parties being willing to nullify the choice of its own voters for president and an election he won. Both the Trump and Clinton impeachments show that this is a hateful prospect for the president’s party.

The best case for what the Democrats were doing is that Republicans impeached Clinton in the 1990s with little or no hope for conviction in the Senate, and turnabout is fair play. But it’s time to conclude that this is a failed model of impeachment. It depends on a process that diverts the time and energy of the nation’s political institutions as if the survival of a presidency is at stake, even when everyone knows it isn’t.

Congress can hold hearings on a president’s conduct, subpoena witnesses and documents and fight the executive with full force if they aren’t produced, hold officials in contempt, withhold funding, deny the executive traditional forms of inter-branch comity and, if it wants to put down a long-lasting marker, censure the president.

But it needn’t drag the country through a melodrama based on the fiction that any president who hasn’t crashed to, say, a 25% approval rating is going to be removed by his own party — in other words, exactly what Adam Schiff and his managers were doing.

Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.(c) 2020 by King Features Synd., Inc.

By Rich Lowry

Syndicated Columnist

Donald Trump isn’t George W. Bush. T

hat should be obvious to everyone by now, but his critics and even some of his supporters immediately acted as if it were 2003 on the cusp of the Iraq War when Trump took out Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani.

Suddenly, the neocons had cachet again (Vox warned that “the Iraq War hawks are back”), and we were about to launch yet another endless war. Trump’s decision to kill Soleimani, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote, repeating a common refrain, “has brought the United States to the brink of a devastating new conflict in the Middle East.”

There’s no doubt that the operation against Soleimani carried risks, but it didn’t transform Trump into a conventional interventionist. In fact, taking out Soleimani was wholly consistent with the president’s approach to the world that can’t be plotted on a simple hawk/dove or neocon/isolationist axis. As a Jacksonian, Trump is none of the above, combining a willingness to whack our enemies with a distaste for ambitious foreign interventions.

The Jacksonian label is the famous construction of foreign-policy analyst Walter Russell Mead, who traces the tradition back to Andrew Jackson and the cultural influence of the American backwoods. Jacksonians are content to let the world sort itself out, except if they perceive a threat, in which case they react with great ferocity.

Trump’s victory overturned the reigning Republican foreign-policy consensus, but it didn’t herald a lurch to isolationism pure and simple.

Even when Trump sounded most hostile to U.S. commitments and alliances abroad in 2016, he promised, in one of his most Jacksonian sentiments, to “bomb the s—” out of ISIS. No matter how much Trump disdained being in the Middle East, it wouldn’t be possible to follow through on this threat without military assets, an intelligence network and allies on the ground. Once elected, Trump did, sure enough, bomb the s— out of ISIS.

Killing Soleimani is keeping with this general orientation rather than a departure from it. In fact, the whole thing is shot through with Jacksonian attitudes.

Trump’s red line to Iran didn’t have to do with our values or shipping lanes. It reflected the most basic imperative of a nation protecting its own: Don’t harm Americans.

When a rocket attack by an Iranian-supported militia killed an American contractor and injured other Americans at a base in Iraq, Trump’s response was also characteristically Jacksonian: a stunning, bolt-out-of-the-blue droning of an enemy commander who was thought to be safely out of bounds, designed to create the maximum deterrent bang for the buck.

For his most loyal backers, the killing of Soleimani is likelier to add to the legend of Donald Trump instead of give them pause. In their view, here is President Trump once again doing what no other president would do, taking an inordinate amount of criticism for it, often from a perpetually hysterical press corps, and having it work out (so far).

The Jacksonian impulse alone is not enough to solve the complex foreign-policy problem presented by Iran. But it can be useful in a contest of intimidation and escalation. The killing of Soleimani isn’t a deep-state or neocon project, rather an unmistakable expression of Trump’s distinctive worldview.

Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.(c) 2020 by King Features Synd., Inc.

By Rich Lowry

Syndicated Columnist

In the torrent of idiotic commentary unleashed by the killing of Qassem Soleimani, Colin Kaepernick’s deserves a place of honor.

The NFL washout and Nike persona who makes sure the company doesn’t produce any overly patriotic sneakers tweeted, “There is nothing new about American terrorist attacks against Black and Brown people for the expansion of American imperialism.”

For Kaepernick, Soleimani is just another dark-skinned man brutalized by the United States. The Iranian terror master was, in effect, driving while nonwhite and paid the ultimate price. For all we know, the operator of the MQ-9 Reaper drone that took him out was making a white-supremacy hand signal while unleashing this racist attack.

This interpretation of events takes identity politics to a whole new level, defining the blood-drenched hit man for a terroristic, profoundly anti-Semitic, deeply intolerant theocracy as a victim, based on his skin color alone.

Obviously, no one will mistake Colin Kaepernick for an original thinker; he’s only repeating things he’s read or been told, in a slightly more lurid form. His worldview is disproportionately represented in academia and on the left, which objects to calling Soleimani a monster (hence, Elizabeth Warren’s pathetic backtracking after forthrightly condemning Soleimani in her initial statement).

It is certainly true that racism has had a large hand in U.S. foreign policy through much of our history. We drove Native Americans from their lands, in part based on racial animus. Thomas Jefferson refused to recognize an independent Haiti after a successful slave revolt, for fear it would fuel insurrections here. The American South coveted lands in Latin America prior to the Civil War, seeking more territory for slavery. After World War I, Woodrow Wilson opposed a racial equality proposal made by Japan at the Paris Peace Conference.

All of this, and more, are stains on our nation’s history, but to consider racism the chief principle of a rapacious U.S. foreign policy is reductive, malicious, dishonest and incredibly stupid.

The U.S. engaged in titanic struggles in the 20th century against Imperial Germany, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, none of which were brown or black. Enormous resources of blood and treasure were poured into stopping these truly imperialist powers from subjecting foreign peoples to their rule.

The United States opposed European colonialism, and its biggest wars since World War II were fought shoulder to shoulder with Asian people in Korea and Vietnam who didn’t want to be overrun by rival Asians allied with totalitarian powers.

In the more immediate, post-9/11 period, we toppled the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. These were interventions motivated by national interest, but also optimistic and idealistic to a fault. Viewing these conflicts through a racial prism requires ignoring that the Taliban and Saddam overwhelmingly killed, tortured and repressed other non-white people.

The same is obviously true of Qassem Soleimani. He has prodigious amounts of American blood on his hands (of Americans of all races and creeds), but he mainly killed other people in the Middle East — Syrians opposed to Bashar Assad, Iraqis protesting Iranian influence, anyone who got in the way of the Iranian imperial project.

His end is a boon to humanity, which should be obvious to anyone who’s not drunk on ideology or racial obsessions.

Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.(c) 2020 by King Features Synd., Inc.

By Rich Lowry

Syndicated Columnist

Never before has a boon to public health been met with such hysteria and ingratitude.

Vaping is almost all upside in comparison with traditional smoking, a wanton destroyer of health and lives, and yet the nation is in the grips of a panic about e-cigarettes. In a rarity for the Trump era, the anti-vaping sentiment jumps traditional geographic and political bounds, running from the Oval Office to San Francisco, from President Donald Trump to his most fervent enemies.

Trump has announced a proposed Food and Drug Administration ban on flavored e-cigarettes, while the San Francisco Board of Supervisors banned the sale of vaping products at retail outlets. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo imposed a ban on flavored e-cigarettes on an “emergency” basis. “Vaping is dangerous, period,” Cuomo pronounced, citing, like the president, teenage use in particular.

Actually, there’s little evidence that vaping, as a general matter, is hazardous, especially when compared with traditional cigarettes, whose smokers inhale a witch’s brew of carcinogens and carbon monoxide. Smoking accounts for 30% of all cancer deaths, and 18% of all deaths.

A credible estimate is that e-cigarettes, which involve inhaling a nicotine-infused vapor rather than smoke, are about 95% less harmful than cigarettes.

The vaping-related illnesses that have recently garnered headlines and prompted the regulatory actions appear not to implicate standard vaping, but rather the use of black-market liquids containing THC, the active ingredient in cannabis. We could make the risky products involved illegal, if they weren’t already illegal.

The problem with the flavor bans — and especially a San Francisco-style outright ban — is its effect on adult e-cigarette users. About 11 million adults vape, and some percentage of them are former smokers or would be smoking in the absence of e-cigarettes.

A robust study in the United Kingdom found that vaping is twice as effective as other common nicotine replacements in getting smokers to quit. The flavors, according to surveys of users, are a big draw for smokers quitting traditional cigarettes. It’s manifestly absurd to ban vaping products and leave cigarettes, including flavored cigarettes, on the market.

Another source of the current panic is that teen vaping is way up, but there’s nothing to suggest that this increase in vaping is encouraging real teen smoking, which has fallen below 6%. Everyone would prefer that teens not develop a vaping habit, but this presents nothing close to the health issue presented by combustible cigarettes.

By all means, let’s crack down on retailers who are selling products to minors. But exaggerating the harms of vaping and prohibiting the products is a formula for giving back some of the gains against traditional smoking. The libertarian publication Reason points to one study that, insanely, shows more people beginning to consider e-cigarettes as dangerous as regular cigarettes.

The U.K. has adopted a much more sensible approach that welcomes e-cigarettes as an important harm-reduction measure. A couple of National Health Service hospitals have even allowed vape shops on their premises.

That would cause a hue and cry in the United States, where we can’t agree on anything except, apparently, our irrational hostility to a product that is an alternative to a terrible scourge.

Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.(c) 2020 by King Features Synd., Inc.

By Rich Lowry

Syndicated Columnist

The economy is in robust good health, but our social fabric isn’t.

By two basic measures of social vitality, births and deaths, American society is faltering. Both the fertility rate and life expectancy are declining, in a sign that people feel less secure and, in some cases, have no hope at all.

We are attuned to headline-grabbing economic statistics — GDP growth, the unemployment rate, wages — as monthly and quarterly metrics of American well-being, but they aren’t as telling as these more fundamental indicators.

To put it bluntly, contemporary America is characterized by less pro-creation and more self-destruction. This suggests something is profoundly wrong with the state of the union, although it doesn’t receive the attention and the debate it deserves.

The fertility rate in 2018 dropped for the fourth straight year. It has hit a record low, and has fallen 15% since 2007. With the recovery after the Great Recession, the rate bumped up a little in 2014 before receding again.

Part of the story is a steep drop over the years in teenage pregnancy, a welcome and long-sought development. Women in their 20s have also been having fewer children, though. The trend is toward women delaying having children and having fewer of them.

As demographer Lyman Stone notes, the survey data tends to show that women still want kids, in fact perhaps more children than before. But later-in-life childbearing is inherently more difficult, and student debt, high housing costs and intense parental investment in children make having kids more burdensome (or at least feel that way).

While we now have fewer births, the death rate is increasing. A new study published in JAMA notes that after stalling out in 2010, life expectancy in the country has been declining since 2014, down from 78.9 years to 78.6 in 2017.

The U.S. has been losing ground to other countries in life expectancy since the 1980s. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, it now has the lowest life expectancy among comparable advanced nations. The decline isn’t hitting older Americans, who are still making improvements, but is cutting down people in the prime of their life, ages 25-64. “The odds,” Lyman Stone writes, “that a 32-year-old will die in a given year rose by almost 25% between 2012-14 and 2015-17. American adulthood has suddenly become more lethal than it has been in decades.”

Drug overdoses are a major driver (midlife mortality from drug overdoses has increased almost 400% over the past 20 years), with liver disease and suicide also contributing.

In 2017, an astonishing 150,000 Americans died from drug or alcohol abuse and suicide, more than U.S. combat deaths in World War I, the Korean War and the Vietnam War combined. Evidence suggests that the increased mortality is concentrated among persons with lower levels of educations and income.

If we can get a handle on the opioid crisis, it will make an enormous difference, but the trends in life expectancy and fertility ought to occasion soul-searching. How is it that a society as technologically advanced and affluent as ours can’t provide a more inviting environment for childbearing or the supports to keep people from doing themselves grievous harm?

Even if there are no ready policy answers, the question must be asked.

Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.(c) 2019 by King Features Synd., Inc.

By Rich Lowry

Syndicated Columnist

Nancy Pelosi said she undertook impeachment “prayerfully,” and apparently what she was praying was that she could get it over with as soon as possible.

The House is preparing to send a flagrantly incomplete factual record to the Senate as the basis of an effort to remove a sitting president for the first time in our history.

Pelosi has affected a posture of heavy-heartedness since the outset of the process, saying that “there’s no joy in this” and urging a somber spirit as Democrats pursue the facts wherever they may take them — so long as that’s not too far into an election year.

In substantive terms, the Democrats had a good set of public hearings before Adam Schiff’s intelligence committee in recent weeks — with one gaping hole. They didn’t have anyone with first-hand knowledge of Trump’s directives on Ukraine or his state of mind. The closest was EU ambassador Gordon Sondland, who, still, could only “presume” a quid pro quo over the defense aid.

There are people who probably don’t have to presume, and Sondland named some of them: Trump’s personal counsel Rudy Giuliani, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. They all were closer to this than Sondland, yet Democrats are happy to make the guy from the outer bounds of the inner circle their “star witness” and forgo the inner circle. To get the more central witnesses requires litigation since they all have at least colorable claims of privilege. The Democrats don’t want to wait for the courts.

The minimum requirement of a historic impeachment case, only the fourth in our history, would seem to be a complete account of the facts. Schiff used to say as much: “We have to flesh out all of the facts for the American people. The seriousness of the matter and the danger to our country demands nothing less.” Now, the seriousness and the danger are demanding that Democrats rush things along so the president can be impeached by the end of the year.

No matter how often Democrats say, “Let’s honor the Constitution,” their actions say, “Let’s check the box.”

Democrats have had the difficulty from the beginning of trying to build an edifice of impeachment and removal atop the narrow foundation of the Ukraine episode, and now they aren’t even going to finish the edifice, content with what they could complete in a two-month investigation largely reliant on the testimony of people who weren’t around for the main events (former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch) or were out of the loop (former Trump Russia adviser Fiona Hill).

With every day that passes it becomes a little more absurd to say Trump should be impeached and removed when the public can make its own verdict in the election. Besides, Democrats know that impeachment is going nowhere in the Senate, so why bother locking down the case to make it worthy of the gravity of the process?

They might as well go with what they have, a partisan impeachment pursued on a political timetable. During Bill Clinton’s impeachment, it was his defenders who were saying, “Let’s move on.” Now, it’s Trump’s pursuers, who prayerfully and sorrowfully want to get impeachment over with.

Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.(c) 2019 by King Features Synd., Inc.

By Rich Lowry

Syndicated Columnist

The clear loser of the Democratic primary is “Medicare for All.”

First, it demonstrated the unreliability of Kamala Harris out of the gate, when she endorsed it before quickly backing off. Now, it has blunted the momentum of Elizabeth Warren, made a mockery of her claim to be an uber-wonk and shredded her implicit appeal to Bernie Sanders supporters as an equally committed left-winger without the baggage.

Under pressure for weeks for details related to her version of the proposal, Warren has now backed all the way down to promising to pass Medicare for All by the end of the third year of her presidency.

This is an implicit concession that she won’t do it at all. No presidential candidate ever pledges to do something important in Year 3. That’s when, if history is any guide, a president has suffered a midterm drubbing and lost all legislative momentum. Warren wants us to believe that this would be the opportune time for her to pass perhaps the most sweepingly intrusive government measure in American history.

Warren’s fundamental mistake was to believe, like almost all the Democrats early in the race, that she had to chase Bernie Sanders around the track, which inevitably involved backing his signature health care proposal. But it became immediately evident that it’s one thing to promise to eliminate all private health insurance if you are a self-declared socialist; it’s quite another if you imagine yourself anything short of that.

As soon as another erstwhile Bernie band-wagoner, Harris, uttered out loud that she’d end private health insurance, it created a controversy that she was clearly uncomfortable with. As a way to wiggle out of it, she came up with her own plan.

Warren lasted longer. Her undoing was that her resolute unwillingness to say that she’d raise middle-class taxes to pay for the program undermined her self-image as a woman with a “plan for that.” She had to jerry-rig a financing program built on such outlandishly rosy assumptions about costs and revenues that even her journalistic cheerleaders have been skeptical. As she continued to take fire, Warren announced her “transition” plan, effectively saying the program is not a first-term priority.

In so doing, she has managed to bring on herself the worst of both worlds. Democratic purists will be disappointed in her, and Sanders voters feel confirmed in any doubts they already had about her commitment.

It should have been foreseeable that proposing a ruinously expensive, enormously coercive health program would present political problems. Even Democratic primary voters aren’t fully sold on a Medicare for All plan that eliminates all private insurance.

Sanders has gotten away with it because socialism is his brand and conviction. He hand-waves away questions on the specifics — what do they matter, when the revolution will make all things possible?

In contrast, Warren let the critics get into her head, just as she did over her purported Native American heritage, and stumbled into a messy, self-destructive response, just as she did with her DNA test last year. Democrats have to be wondering, over and above her struggles with Medicare for All, if this is really who they want to send up against the endlessly combative and needling Donald Trump next year.

Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.(c) 2019 by King Features Synd., Inc.