This is such a trip, “Silver’s data shows that Clinton-skeptical Bernie supporters in 2016 were not progressives who opposed Clinton from the left, ..., Sanders may have been a protest vote against a woman closely identified with progressive social causes.” https://twitter.com/JoyAnnReid/status/1248644389385142272

Sanders supporters looked at 2016 and they were like “people like socialism!” But actually, people just hate women.

Progressives’ visceral hate of Clinton and love of Bernie has always mystified me. Besides the obvious, I guess a lot of progressives were too young to remember Hillary being First Lady.

The first time I heard of the idea of universal healthcare I was in 7th grade, and an 8th grader made a presentation about it. It completely blew my mind. It seemed definitely impossible. When I came home and told my parents about it ...

... they said, “wait until you hear about pensions and unemployment insurance!” Dizzying.

Then, about 3 years later we got a new president whose wife made getting universal health care her “First Lady project”.

The news was filled with “why I never!” Takes. First Lady projects were supposed to be cultural, not policy. They were supposed to be non-controversial, not aggressively progressive.

And First Ladies were Definitely not supposed to be explicitly involved in policy or politics. If you don’t remember this time - let me tell you. People were PISSED. SUPER PISSED. To have to deal with the presidents WIFE outside of a state dinner.

What I saw was a woman who was taking the sliver of opportunity she had to try to force a major, positive, pro-human, pro-social policy. She was like a political MacGyver. She didn’t let the fact that people were mad at her stop her.

It didn’t work out in while she was 1st lady, but Obama passed Obama care and I don’t think that would have been possible if Hillary hadn’t tried and failed earlier.

So then Bernie came along and people were like “Bernie wants to pass universal health care” and I was like “ok, so what? So does Hillary. That is not special, plus Bernie is a man.”

At the time that Hillary was trying to use the seat of First Lady to pass policy,

Bernie had a traditional, “legitimate” seat from which to push universal health care. I have no memory of him working on it, or of him at all of course before 2016.

Anyway, I believe in our lifetimes we will have universal heath care, but I am much less sure that people are going to be able to vote for a woman for president. Too much evidence that ppl will desperately vote for anything but a woman.