Hillary Clinton's webpage was recently
updated to clarify that Hillary Clinton will "continue to support a public option, and work to build on the Affordable Care Act to make it possible."
That hasn't exactly been her tone since she announced.
In fact, her campaign has been highly critical of the expense and the political feasibility of Bernie Sanders' plan to extend healthcare to every American.
It's just the latest in a series of policy positions that Hillary Clinton has wisely tweaked to make them more progressive.
But it's not Bernie Sanders himself who's forcing Hillary Clinton to become more and more progressive and to sound more and more like him and Elizabeth Warren.
Before the two candidates ever met on the debate stage, activists had already pressured Hillary Clinton to clearly oppose the Transpacific Partnership and the Keystone XL pipeline.
More recently she's come out in favor of protecting and strengthening social security, and now she's taken the first step towards supporting a single-payer system like Medicare-for-All by coming out in support of the public option for health insurance.
But this has very little to do with Bernie Sanders as a person.
It has everything to do with the fact that these are the types of bold proposals that the American people want from their leadership, despite the inside-the-beltway establishment "wisdom" that says that these types of bold proposals are politically "just too hard" to get done.
The same thing is happening on the Republican side.
For the same reasons that Hillary Clinton is sounding more and more like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz have been slowly making their platforms every bit as outlandish and bombastic as Donald Trump's.
And it's happening even though those candidates spent months trying to call Trump's proposals "cuckoo", because like it or not, Trump's proposals are popular with the Republican base.
