I don't think either mac or joe are morons, but I'll add one thing. Imo, old school liberals are dead in the water when it comes to stuff like forcing a liveable wage. It does drive up costs. And let's not even mention unionizing, which Obama promised the SEIU after Slick did too, and then stiffed them. Not an all bad thing, but try running a subway franchise.
Obamacare is an example of the dead end reasoning of traditional liberals. They took a basic idea of raising a pile of money by taxing health care providers and insurers, and then turning around and using that money to let people without access to healthcare (or at least healthcare that the providers actually got paid for giving) to buy ... wait for it .... healthcare.
But in their zeal for top town management, they overengineered the thing to remove consumer choice and decided the govt should force everyone to buy in, even though just offering a tax credit to buy minimal coverage would have been in everyone's self interest. They just can't trust people to do the right thing.
Some THINKING conservatives criticized the approach because in essence it protects a non-competitive marketplace. For example, try finding out how much a knee replacement will really cost at three different hospitals with three different provider networks. Or, will you ever find a ranking of HMO's or insurers similar to that you find in consumer magazines rating mutual funds? Of course not. For them, it was about if we want to reform a market, let's actually reform it. The tax issue wasn't really a factor in markets. But the tax itself was not inherently anti-competitive or destructive to the market. Rather, it was let's find the true, lowest cost of healthcare and then figure out how to pay for it.
And then you have the brain dead amongst the gop, and I won't even call the TPM or the Kochs conservative. The insurance and healthcare industries were not totally hostile to the notion of raising a pile of money. Wal-Mart wasn't totally hostile to paying more SO LONG AS THEIR COMPETITORS had to pay too.
But, no. We in the gop are poisoned by a moneyed few, and a group that is just plain mad, so that any effort by the fed govt to increase individuals' power to enter into marketplaces like healthcare education must be opposed. Any effort at improving infrastructure is inherently an overreach. Even though none of that flew in the face of Reaganomics or neoliberalism.
But given all that, I'm not really crying wolf over either party. Hillary is not as liberal as Obama, and she's certainly got more real world experience. I doubt Elizabeth Warren is really that out of touch with working people or small biz either. Her wrath seems more reserved for Wall St and tax shannigans by multinationals.
As for the gop, if the recent primary showed anything, it showed that the TPM is verging on falling off the cliff. It's not so much "JFC they can't even win in Miss," because they probably could. But try running a racist whacadoodle like that outside Miss, Ala and SC. And Boehner seems content to gain the Senate by not addressing immigration, even though most of us see a very dark cloud for 2016.