How Change Actually Happens | 34justice

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman recently echoed the argument of too many pundits, elected officials and some of my good friends that Bernie Sanders is too radical and his goals too idealistic to be electable, or, even, to enjoy legislative success if he is.

They’re wrong.

I remember a conversation I had about seven years ago with an erstwhile friend of mine who was consulting with the Obama White House on health care. He told me that they were using focus groups to determine what health care proposals they could sell to the American public. That seemed backwards to me. I asked him why they didn’t first determine what the best proposal was, and then use the focus groups to figure out how to best sell it to the American public.

He quickly dismissed my question. His argument: I just didn’t understand how politics work (never mind that I had spent years working in Congress and elsewhere in public policy). Like Krugman, he believed in accepting the terms of a debate rather than in reframing issues, as Bernie does. -Debbie Spielberg