This tweet turned out to be a fascinating Rorschach test. People were sure they heard quite a few things in it that simply are not there:

“centrist”
“shift to the center”
“wait for compromise”
“letting people suffer”

Not in the tweet, y’all. https://twitter.com/inthehands/status/1296288263179661312

To be clear, what I’m talking about is the political equivalent of racing to get your friend to the hospital when you discover a road is washed out, and instead of high-tailing it to find a detour, you yell about how that road shouldn’t be closed.

It’s a perpetual problem of political newcomers that they see _a_ solution — perhaps feasible, perhaps wild fantasy — and latch on to that one solution at the expense of the goal they’re trying to achieve. I’ve been there. I think we all have.

The current poster child for this mode of thinking (here come the hate tweets) is M4A. I wish we could have it. Could work! It’s popular!

But until now, it’s utterly impossible in the Senate. That road is washed out. Here’s hoping for 2021, but right now, we need a detour.

The thing is, there’s half a dozen other approaches — some small, some large — that could also help us get health care to more, even all, of the people who desperately need it. Universal public insurance for private service is just one of several models that work elsewhere.

And I’ll take _any_ model that gets people health care — any route to the hospital that saves my friend in the seat. If one route is more feasible than other, fine. I know what my goal is.

This is what I mean by clarity about goals, flexibility about the paths to them.

“Centrism,” at least in Angry Reply lingo, is about being content to leave problems half-fixed while people suffer.

Relentlessly looking for new paths to the same goal? Taking partial wins even though you're NOT content with them? That’s not “centrism.” That’s “effectiveness.”