Collapsing at Your Doorstep – Air France
For all my effort to defend the ‘trigger’ on the public option last week…recent news makes me far more skeptical.
Obama gave his big speech and immediately afterward Olympia Snowe (she who more less controls the fate of this thing) came out declaring that Obama should take the public option ‘off the table’ in order to build consensus. That is not encouraging sign. What’s more, Susan Collins (the other possible Republican pickup from Maine) explicitly opposed the public option.
If the trigger seems unlikely to even help garner the support of these two, then maybe it’s not such a useful compromise after all. Which makes me a bit more sympathetic to the ‘damn the torpedoes, and let’s pass a good bill without ’em’ approach. Of course, there’s still the matter of the conservative Democrats who might vote against a bill with a strong public option.
But that’s one case where I think the final decisions are going to play out a lot more favorably. Being the one Democrat who FILIBUSTERED to kill health care reform is not going to turn out well. You’ll more or less be cast out of the good will of the Democratic Party forever, and there’s a good chance that when the Republican wave hits (thanks to the ‘weakness’ of the Democrats a la 1994) that you’ll get swept up by it to, even though you were the one RESPONSIBLE for it.
After all, it’s not like the public option is some insane leftist policy that the public hates. It’s ‘unpopular’ in Congress because it threatens insurance companies – who are immensely powerful. But despite all the demonization efforts, the option still has pretty solid public support (better than 50/50, depending on how the question is phrased).
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While I’m on the subject, there’s another issue that’s raised by all this talk of: well, maybe I could support the public option but there’s just not enough support out there. Or even better: I could support the trigger but it would end up just being a formality, a backdoor means of ensuring the public option gets phased in. The crazy thing is that people making these statements are precisely the people who could decide to change the calculus. If Snowe and Collins vote for a public option then there is bipartisan support for it. And if they want a weaker public option, then vote for a weaker public option. This is not complicated stuff.
Jon Chait takes on this ridiculousness quite well:
I find it odd that reporters interviewing Senators allow them to avoid taking positions by acting like pundits rather than participants. I wonder if this tactic could be applied by regular people in other facets of life:
My wife: Do you want to go out to dinner?
Me: I don’t think there’s enough of a consensus on a restaurant.
Her: Well, why don’t you suggest a place you’d like to go?
Me: We’d just go to a Japanese restaurant, and I hate Japanese.
I’m going to try this.
Matt Yglesias makes another smart point about this, namely that this kind of meta-analysis excuses the relevant parties from ever having to actually JUSTIFY their insane positions. Why exactly are moderates (on either side of the aisle) opposed to the public option? If they’re worried it will take over the market, isn’t that an admission that it will work and keep down costs (supposedly their biggest concern)? If they’re worried it will hurt insurance companies, well, shouldn’t they be forced to defend that (rather unpopular) position in the cold light of day?
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Final thought on all this. I’ve written a number of times about my general support for the Obama strategy of post-partisanship (or grassroots bipartisanship, to borrow a term), based on the idea that he is pursuing the concept of genuine engagement rather than a faux sense of bipartisanship for its own sake.
Some of the talk about the need for a ‘bipartisan’ health care bill illustrates just how frustrating it is to see those two ideas conflated. Many folks have suggested that there is some sort of deep-seated flaw in a bill that fails to gain a significant number of votes from the opposition party.
Why this would be true, I have no clue. Two reasons why this is a ludicrous way of judging a bill.
1) The Democrats have won two consecutive landslide elections. They have 60 seats. All of those Rockefeller Republicans who might have joined in got voted out of office – many of them in races that featured a strong debate about health care reform. Why on earth would it be better for Lincoln Chafee to still be in the Senate supporting the bill when Sheldon Whitehouse can do it?
If health care reform passes, then 60% of the representatives in the Senate will have supported it. Almost by definition that has to be considered ‘bipartisan.’ Parties that can’t manage 2/5 representation are bordering on not being major parties.
2) Bipartisan as represented by the letter next to the names of people who vote for a bill is simply not that significant. It is blindingly obvious that the Republican Party has made a strategic calculation that they simply cannot gain by supporting any sort of health care reform. It is not in their interests to give Obama a win, so they are not going to.
And yet, most people would presumably still believe that health care reform is probably a good idea. If these two facts are true, then the thing that needs to give is the mindless adulation of this particular notion of bipartisanship (bipartisanship for its own sake, as the end goal of policymaking). Instead, it would be far better to remember that bipartisanship is a means to an end; in its best sense it is a way of strengthening policymaking.
Ed Kilgore makes this point well:
Moreover, the “wedge” Obama is seeking to create between Republicans and independents is reflected in his formulation–generally ignored by Allen and VandeHei–that he’s trying to utilize “the best ideas of both parties” even when he’s not getting cooperation from the other side. His whole health care scheme relies on a competitive private-insurance-based system for universal coverage. Many of his proposals for “bending the curve” on health care spending and for Medicare reforms were once championed by Republicans. Yes, of course, Republicans quickly abandon and even repudiate these themes once Obama picks them up, but after a while, people begin to notice the pattern. And that’s both real and honest.
It’s frustrating that this is so rarely explained in coverage of the issue.