True socialist colors: Hillary's renewed interest in the public option is a sign of her weakness

Hillary Clinton is every bit the socialist that Bernie Sanders is. She spends a lot of time trying to hide this fact, because she knows it will hurt her in the general, but a quick glance at their policy positions will reveal that there's really not much difference between the two Democrat candidates.

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So, when Bernie showed that he was capable of gaining some traction among the left-wing base, two things happened: The first was that Team Hillary's 'inevitability' was rattled. The second was that she started to trot out more of her left-wing nature in an effort to stymie her opponent's momentum. Maybe that's why, as Slate reports, she returned to her "public option" supporting ways of old...

Hillary Clinton is once again embracing the public option. As Politico noticed Monday, the presidential candidate has added a section to her website stating that she still supports the concept of creating a government-run health plan to compete against private insurers, which she also backed backed during her 2008 campaign. The public option was a deeply popular idea among progressives during the legislative battles over the Affordable Care Act in 2009 and 2010. Advocates argued it would lower costs and possibly serve as a bridge toward a single-payer system. The proposal also polled extremely well with the public. But it died rather brutally thanks to opposition from more conservative Senate Democrats, including Nebraska's Ben Nelson, and independent Joe Lieberman. (In its place, we got Obamacare's nonprofit health care co-ops, which seem to have been a flop so far.) Given liberals' infatuation with the public option, the most surprising thing about Clinton's move is that it didn't happen sooner.

Actually, it's not surprising at all, unless (like most of the writers at Slate) your memory is completely clouded by your ideology. The public option may have been popular with progressives - who want to destroy the private insurance industry - but it was never popular with anyone else. In fact, the public option was so toxic that even a Congress entirely controlled by Democrats couldn't ram the ACA down America's throat without stripping it from the bill. Since then, things haven't improved. ObamaCare is still an unpopular trainwreck, and campaigning in favor of expanding it with an already-rejected component will be tricky at best. The public option is still widely regarded as the next step on the single-payer path, and that's still a bridge to far for most voters. If Bernie hadn't forced Hillary to placate her party's radical fringe, she'd never speak of the public option during an election year. Her renewed interest in the single payer plan should be taken as a sign of her weakness with her base, not a sign of the plan's strength.

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