Some of us are old enough to remember what Bill Clinton chose for his campaign theme song in 1992, and old enough to remember seeing Fleetwood Mac perform "Don't Stop" at the Inaugural Gala (playing together for the first time since 1982—no wonder many of us seeing it believed this new president could do remarkable things). The current Clinton campaign would do well to remember the role that optimism and hope played not just in electing Bill Clinton, but in electing Barack Obama when he ran against Hillary Clinton in 2008.

But we've had another week, another round of Very Serious People trashing the Bernie Sanders single-payer plan. It's worth remembering, however, that some of these very same wonks, pre-Obamacare, were quite excited by the concept of single-payer. For example, Ezra Klein, who really piled on to Sanders, wrote a survey of healthcare systems:

So let us, in these pages, shut out the political world for a moment . . . and ask, simply: What should be done? To help answer that question, we will examine the best health-care systems in the world: those of Canada, France, Great Britain, Germany, and the U.S. Veterans Health Administration (VHA).

That survey was so well-received, Paul Krugman put it on his class syllabus at Princeton. Another of Sanders detractors, Matt Yglesias, has been demanding more specifics, when in 2007, he reviewed various healthcare reform plans from both parties and concluded essentially that the principles behind the competing plans were more important than the details: "these proposals are vague in some key respects, and nothing that’s proposed on the campaign trail is going to be enacted as is by Congress. But these plans show something about the values and priorities of the different parties."

Yet now, what's essentially the outline of a plan—and yes, it is hugely ambitious and no, it's not realistically viable in the short term—is being treated as if it were a legislative proposal about to be dropped on Congress by a Sanders administration. It's still a campaign document. A statement of "values and priorities." It's not being analyzed as if we had "shut out the political world." But it deserves to be to the extent that some form of single-payer healthcare is going to be the answer for the United States, as it's proven to be in the rest of the developed world. As such, this attempt to shut down serious discussion of it in this election is doing a disservice not just to Sanders, but to future efforts to get us to a sustainable system.

I get it. All of us who've been so bruised and battered over the past seven years fighting first for the kludgey, incomplete, and often disappointing Affordable Care Act, and then fighting to just keep the damned thing alive are cynical. But healthcare reform is not done in this country. While incrementalism is going to have to be the short-term approach in making Obamacare more responsive to the still-existing problems—individual and systemic costs, and a still-unacceptable number of people uninsured—incrementalism is not going to solve them.

Okay, the barrier is Congress. What do you do about that? You get a new Congress. How do you do that? By electing them. This is what the Clinton campaign should be keeping in mind.