STEVEN RATTNER: Why ‘Medicare for All’ Will Sink the Democrats.

Privately, many moderate Democratic senators are harshly critical of Sanders’s tactics. “It’s radioactive for me,” one Democrat facing re-election in 2018 told me.

But publicly, even Democratic senators who have declined to endorse Medicare for All have done so in measured terms to avoid antagonizing the progressives.

“The first thing has to be to protect the health care people have now and stabilize markets,” said Debbie Stabenow of Michigan.

Instead of Medicare for All, we Democrats should be focused on “Better Jobs for All” — big ideas for addressing our most pressing economic challenge. That is: the wage stagnation that has left too many Americans behind, particularly white working-class men.

That’s not an easy problem to solve, but we know the solutions revolve around people-centric initiatives like improving education, providing more training and retraining and increasing worker mobility.

To buttress those programs, it’s time to move ahead with rebuilding our infrastructure and restoring government investment spending on research and development.

In doing so, let’s not forget that only about a quarter of voters consider themselves liberals; the balance self-identify as moderates or conservatives.

Our model of democratic capitalism has stood us well for more than two centuries; now is not the time to embrace the kinds of ideas, often involving deep government economic intervention, that have often fallen short elsewhere, notably in much of Europe.

Usually even moderate Democrats seem eager to hold up Europe as an example for us to emulate. There must be something in the polling winds.