As she plummets in the polls, Fauxcahontas suddenly doesn't want to talk about 'Medicare for All'

Which is the real problem? Is it the gargantuan price tag? Is it the inevitability of middle class tax increases to pay for it?

Or is it the absolute certainty that it would plunge American health care into the same disastrous garbage we see in Canada and the UK?

Elizabeth Warren thought she was making a smart play in the Democratic primary by going big with her socialized medicine proposal. And you can see the strategic thinking: Democratic primary voters are much further left than the population in general, or even Democratic general election voters. The bolder you go with your liberal big-government ideas, the more the base should love you, right?

But it helps if you’ve actually thought through how your proposal would work. Warren didn’t do that. When challenged by other candidates on the price tag and how the money would be raised, she had no clue. It was one of the few times when a primary debate was a useful exercise, because over and over again Warren prevaricated on those questions.

Then she did something even worse: She answered them. Now everyone knew how the plan was designed to work. And the result of that, from Warren’s perspective, has not been good:

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For months, Warren has been running on a populist message of fighting Washington corruption and Wall Street greed. But her promise to expand government health insurance coverage without raising middle-class taxes is what has drawn the most attacks from rivals who say it is unrealistic and from some voters concerned it is too extreme.

Warren’s momentum has stalled in the month since she announced how she would finance and implement the system, a policy previously tied most closely to U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who is also in the race.

A Nov. 6-13 CBS News/YouGov poll put Warren in fourth place in Iowa, trailing Sanders, former Vice President Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. The same poll in mid-October had her tied for first with Biden.

So how is Fauxcahontas addressing her signature issue on the stump these days? She’s trying to avoid it. According to the Reuters report linked above, Warren will answer some questions about Medicare for All if she’s asked, but she does not bring it up on her own, preferring to now position herself as the “anti-corruption” candidate.

Some of her advisers are urging her to record “explainer” videos designed to help people better understand how Medicare for All works, because they’re convinced those who don’t like it really just don’t understand it.

But the way this issue has evolved doesn’t square with that. The more Warren reveals about her plan, the less people like it or her. For one thing, people don’t trust the cost estimates being tossed around. The Reuters story claims it would cost $20 trillion (presumably over a 10-year period), but boondoggles like this never cost as little as their sponsors claim, nor do they ever work as well as their sponsors claim.

And that leads us to the real irony of her new campaign theme. Warren wants us all to live with a health care system run by the government. And yet apparently government is bereft with all this corruption, such that running against it is now her new campaign theme. So why would we want a health care system run by a government so corrupt that oen of the leading presidential candidats has made running against it her (new) primary theme?

Oh! That’s right! Because President Fauxcahontas is going to get rid of the corruption! So that will be fine.

Then again, from the way the polls are going, she’s no longer one of the leading presidential candidates at all. She’s sinking like a stone because no one thinks her health care proposal will make health care better, and most people recognize government is indeed inherently corrupt. So we’d rather manage our health care on our own, thank you very much.

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It’s only a matter of time before Warren has to find yet another theme for her campaign, until she has to settle on a final theme, which will be the same as Kamala Harris’s final them:

Goodbye!