The children of political candidates are useful adornments in campaign literature and ads, and when they are older, as character witnesses on the campaign trail.
Rarely are they used as attack dogs, let alone armed with shameless talking points to try to dampen the rise of an inspirational political rival. But nothing is beneath Bill and Hillary Clinton. So they trotted out their daughter, Chelsea, to warn about the dastardly designs that Bernie Sanders has for ending Medicare as we know it.
It’s part of a hammer-and-tongs assault that should feel familiar to Republicans. It turns out that becoming the target of Medicare demagoguery isn’t just for Newt Gingrich or Paul Ryan anymore. No one has released an ad of Bernie Sanders pushing a senior citizen over a cliff yet, but if the Vermont senator continues his rise, just give it a couple of more weeks.
Chelsea Clinton charged that Sanders “wants to dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the [Children’s Health Insurance Program], dismantle Medicare, dismantle private insurance.” For those keeping score at home, that’s a lot of dismantling. Chelsea said she worried — the chain of reasoning was left fuzzy — that Sanders would somehow give Republicans “permission” to go back to the pre-Obamacare era and “strip millions and millions and millions of people of their health insurance.”
Frightened yet? What Sanders is proposing is so-called Medicare for all, a universal, single-payer health-care program that has been the goal of progressives for decades. For this, he is being savaged by a Hillary Clinton who in the early 1990s famously immolated herself in a doomed fight for her version of universal coverage.
The gravamen of her case against Sanders is that he is a socialist — and an enemy of the welfare state. He is advocating a further step in the Democratic crusade to expand the social safety net — and is a dangerous radical because of it. He is a threat to all that has been achieved by the Left — because he wants to achieve more.
