Who won the Sanders-Clinton healthcare debate?

[Adam Griffin]

The people on this board, of all people, should have the common sense to understand just what the next one to two decades is going to look like in terms of the "difficulty of [xxxx] being passed" argument. A lot of people are pointing to the fact that a public option couldn't be injected into the healthcare law when it was actually politically relevant and popular, so how is it going to be passed now? Likewise, people are pointing out that Sanders' ideas are wholly unpopular with the current government, and therefore, how is it going to be passed now?

What everybody making these arguments seems to not mention is that it is going to be downright impossible to pass anything that any Democrat proposes, unless it is a wholly-owned idea of the GOP (and even then, look at examples like ACA). We have 100-year lows in the House and in state chambers across the country. Reapportionment has killed us for a generation, possibly. The Senate at best will probably tie after the 2016 election. Do people think that because Clinton talks about reaching across the aisle (like Obama did and does) that she is going to get a better reception? The person who arguably draws more lightning and anger than any other public official in the country?

Nothing, legislatively-speaking, is going to get done by anybody - for a decade at least. Those who say specifically that Sanders ideas are silly because they'll never get passed need to be saying the same thing about Clinton's ideas. Whether there's a lot of daylight in between the two or not is rather irrelevant; they're both in the same hemisphere of politics. That means any of those ideas are non-starters for the GOP congress and state legislatures. Vote for who you like and where your ideology falls: it's all that is really going to matter from the perspective of Democratic legislation for the next decade.