OPINION:
Sen. Bernie Sanders announced his campaign for president on “This Morning” on CBS — and within minutes, he was already raising eyebrows about his ability to stick with the truth.
It’s not good to kick off a campaign already branded a liar.
Most politicians usually get a few weeks’ grace period before they achieve that label.
Sanders, apparently, wants to get ahead of the competition.
While discussing Sanders’ Medicare for All idea, CBS host John Dickerson said, Mediaite noted: “You’re offering something that the polling shows people can get very spooked very quickly about.”
Sanders blamed the big mean insurance companies for the spread of false information.
“That’s because we’re going to be taking on the insurance companies and the drug companies who are going to spend a whole lot of money distorting what we believe in,” Sanders said.
Now comes the WTfreak moment.
Sanders said the insurance companies would generate fear by telling the public that his Medicare for All plan would obliterate their current work-based health care plans and cut into their freedoms to choose. And that’s not true, he said.
“You’re going to have the same exact doctor,” Sanders said. “You’re going to have more freedom of choice under our proposal than you have under the current proposals.”
Hmm. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor?
That rings a bell.
From Mediaite: “Under Sanders’s plan … every American’s health insurance would be replaced by Medicare, which means that some people would definitely lose their doctors because not all doctors accept Medicare. There’s also no telling how such a law would affect Medicare participation, meaning that even some current Medicare patients could be forced to switch doctors.”
Even left-leaning media types have to wonder where Sanders is going with this.
Because it seems, to even the most casual of political watchers, that he’s handing both Republicans and the scores of Democrats seeking the high White House office an easy bumper-sticker moment — an oh-too-easy campaign advertising slogan. The first of the Donald Trump challengers to bite the dust?
Indeed. Sanders’s legacy could very well be “Shortest Presidential Run in U.S. History.”
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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