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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: December 2009

Taking Strategic Differences Seriously

This item by Ed Kilgore was first published on December 17, 2009.
In a post yesterday, I argued that some intra-progressive fights reflect ideological differences, particularly over the role of private-sector entities in pursuing progressive policy goals, that need to be taken more seriously, in part because failing to acknowledge them often makes such fights nasty exercises in name-calling and character attacks.
There’s another broad area where differences of opinion often originate, and that must be understood as well: differing political strategies.
Two Examples of Strategic Disconnect
Consider two examples: Democratic political operatives and progressive “issue” advocates.
Many full-time political operatives undoubtedly have a personal ideology, or more generally, a reason for being a Democrat. Some have the opportunity to reflect those views in primary campaigns, or in where and on whose behalf they practice their craft. But by and large, when a general election comes along, it’s all about Ds and Rs and Us and Them, and this orientation tends to color how they feel between elections. Anything that promotes the election of a maximum number of Democrats–any kind of Democrat–to public office is more or less the Prime Objective. There are obviously major differences of opinion about how to achieve this result, short-term or long-term, and ideology play a role there as well. But the bottom line is probably best expressed by an old ditty from the presidential campaign of 1892, when Grover Cleveland’s comeback election marked the end of a period of fierce partisan competition and very little ideological differentiation between the parties:
Grover! Grover!
Four more years of Grover!
Out they go, in we go,
Then we’ll be in clover!

Not much deep thinking there, eh?
At the other end of the spectrum, there are “issue” advocates who are involved in politics not out of some broad commitment to a progressive coalition but out of concern for a particular cause, often arising from or rising to the level of personal identity. The relationship of issue advocates to a political party is by definition conditional and instrumental: I support you if you advance my cause, or at least smite the enemies of my cause. Such relationships were much, much weaker in the many decades prior to the Great Ideological Sorting-Out of the two major parties that culminated in the 1990s. As recently as the 1960s and 1970s, supporters and opponents of civil rights for African-Americans, women’s rights, antiwar movements, environmentalism, and to some extent even labor rights, were found abundantly in both parties. So progressive issue advocates might be Democrats, Republicans, or independents, but were often functionally independent in their basic relationship to political parties.
Nowadays, when a politician’s position on, say, Union Card Check is a generally reliable predictor of his or her position on abortion or climate change, progressive issue advocates are obviously constrained, and must focus on maximizing influence within the Democratic Party alone. That can be done in noncontroversial ways, such as grassroots organizing, petitions, the cultivation of favored candidates and elected officials, and of course efforts to promote or modify legislation or executive actions. But in the end, issue advocates are largely prisoners of a polarized political system, and must rely in the extreme on threats to sit out elections or even defect from the coalition. That’s where some LGBT activists, some civil libertarians, and some antiwar activists, seem to be right now.
To those whose commitment to the Democratic Party is less conditional, such threats often look selfish, destructive, or even childish. But they are perfectly rational, if sometimes short-sighted: if you are engaged in politics for a cause, that cause’s prospects have to be paramount, and absent the occasional threat to defect, your cause and its advocates can be taken for granted, which is the death-knell of political influence.
But what if a variety of “cause” advocates reach this point of frustration simultanously? Then you can have a genuine “revolt,” which some Democrats fear or hope is in the process of happening out of progressive unhappiness with Barack Obama and the congressional Democratic Party on issues ranging from civil liberties and health care to LGBT rights, Afghanistan, and the financial system.


Left-Right Convergence?

This item by Ed Kilgore was first published on December 16, 2009.
The latest intra-progressive dustup over health care reform displays a couple of pretty important potential fault lines within the American center-left. One has to do with political strategy, and the role of the Democratic Party and the presidency in promoting progressive policy goals and social movements. I’ll be writing about that subject extensively in the coming days.
But the other potential fault line is ideological, and is sometimes hard to discern because it extends across a variety of issues. To put it simply, and perhaps over-simply, on a variety of fronts (most notably financial restructuring and health care reform, but arguably on climate change as well), the Obama administration has chosen the strategy of deploying regulated and subsidized private sector entities to achieve progressive policy results. This approach was a hallmark of the so-called Clintonian, “New Democrat” movement, and the broader international movement sometimes referred to as “the Third Way,” which often defended the use of private means for public ends. (It’s also arguably central to the American liberal tradition going back to Woodrow Wilson, and is even evident in parts of the New Deal and Great Society initiatives alongside elements of the “social democratic” tradition, which is characterized by support for publicly operated programs in key areas).
To be clear, this is not the same as the conservative “privatization” strategy, which simply devolves public responsibilities to private entities without much in the way of regulation. In education policy, to cite one example, New Democrats (and the Obama administration) have championed charter public schools, which are highly regulated but privately operated schools that receive public funds in exchange for successful performance of publicly-defined tasks. Conservatives have typically called for private-school vouchers, which simply shift public funds to private schools more or less unconditionally, on the theory that they know best how to educate children.
Now clear as this distinction seems to “New Democrats,” there are a considerable number of progressives who think it’s largely a distinction without a difference, in education policy and elsewhere. And we are seeing that fundamental divergence on opinion on other, more prominent issues right now. On the financial front, the Obama administration reflexively pursued a strategy of regulation and subsidies for the financial sector, without modifying the fundamental nature of financial institutions, even as critics on the left argued for nationalization (at least temporarily) of key financial functions. At the more popular level, critics of TARP from the left joined critics of TARP from the right in deploring “bailouts” of failed financial institutions, even though the two groups of critics held vastly different views of the right alternative course of action.
Similarly in the health care reform debate, the Obama administration pursued legislation that utilized regulated and subsidized private for-profit health insurers to achieve universal health coverage. This approach was inherently flawed to “single-payer” advocates on the left, who strongly believe that private for-profit health insurers are the main problem in the U.S. health care system. The difference was for a long time papered over by the cleverly devised “public option,” which was acceptable to many New Democrat types as a way of ensuring robust competition among private insurers, and which became crucial to single-payer advocates who viewed it as a way to gradually introduce a superior, publicly-operated form of health insurance to those not covered by existing public programs like Medicare and Medicaid. (That’s why the effort to substitute a Medicare buy-in for the public option, which Joe Lieberman killed this week, received such a strong positive response from many progressives whose ultimate goal is an expansion of Medicare-style coverage to all Americans).
Now that the public option compromise is apparently no longer on the table, and there’s no Medicare buy-in to offer single-payer advocates an alternative path to the kind of system they favor, it’s hardly surprising that some progressives have gone into open opposition, and are using the kind of outraged and categorical language deployed by Marcy Wheeler yesterday. As with the financial issue, there’s now a tactical alliance between conservative critics of “ObamaCare,” who view the regulation and subsidization of private health insurers as “socialism,” and progressive critics of the legislation who view the same features as representing “neo-feudalism.”
To put it more bluntly, on a widening range of issues, Obama’s critics to the right say he’s engineering a government takeover of the private sector, while his critics to the left accuse him of promoting a corporate takeover of the public sector. They can’t both be right, of course, and these critics would take the country in completely different directions if given a chance. But the tactical convergence is there if they choose to pursue it.
For those of us whose primary interest is progressive unity and political success for the Democratic Party, it’s very tempting to downplay or even ignore this potential fault-line and the left-right convergence it makes possible. It’s also easy to dismiss critics-from-the-left of Obama as people primarily interested in long-range movement-building rather than short-term political success; that’s true for some of them. But sorting out these differences in ideology and perspective is, in my opinion, essential to the progressive political project. And with a rejuvenated and increasingly radical Right’s hounds baying and sniffing at the doors of the Capitol, we don’t have the time or energy to spare in dialogues of the deaf wherein we call each other names while getting ready for the elections of 2010 and 2012.
UPDATE: In discussing this post with several friends, I recognize I should be very clear about my motives here. I am not trying to promote an ideological fight within the Democratic Party or the progressive coalition, and don’t want to exaggerate ideological differences, either. But ideology, however muddled, is part of what makes most politically active people tick. And if we don’t talk about it–and about differences in strategic thinking as well, which will be the subject of future discussions here–then all we are left with to explain our differences on this issue or that is questions of character. And anyone paying attention must recognize there’s far too much of that going on. “Progressive pragmatists”–the camp with which I most often personally identify, as it happens–often treat “the Left” condescendingly as immature and impractical people who don’t understand how things get done. Meanwhile, people on “the Left” often treat “pragmatists” as either politically gutless or personally corrupt. This is what happens when you don’t take seriously other people’s ideological and strategic underpinnings; whatever you gain in ignoring or minimizing differences in perspective or point of view is lost in mutual respect. Sure, the character attacks on both sides are sometimes accurate, but nobody should assume that in any particular case without further examination of each others’ ideological and strategic views. That examination is what we are trying to promote here.


Half-Empty Glasses

The big news coming out of the weekend was that the Senate invoked cloture on health care reform, as President Obama personally brokered an interim deal on climate change in Copenhagen after the negotiations had all but collapsed. Not a bad few days for the White House,
But at Politico, here were the two headlines on these developments this morning: “Health Plans On Collision Course,” and “Copenhagen Fizzle Won’t Help Bill.”
That’s some serious glass-half-empty analysis.


The Improbable Vote

So: at about one o’clock this morning, the United States Senate, or at least the 60 members of its Democratic Caucus, passed the long-awaited cloture vote to proceed to a final consideration of a health care reform bill.
As one who has had an irrational faith that the Senate would get to this point somehow or other, I have to say it was still an improbable accomplishment.
As recently as a few days ago, Joe Lieberman looked all but unreachable for this vote. Then Ben Nelson looked unreachable, even as Republicans Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins made it clear they had decided that nearly a year of begging from the White House and Senate Democrats wasn’t enough to overcome the right-wing heat they were experiencing. Then Democrats like Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders came under intense pressure to hold up the bill from progressives determined to derail the latest deal and force a recourse to a 2010 reconciliation strategy.
More fundamentally, a 60-vote Democratic Caucus was an exceptionally improbable achievement. It took (a) a near-sweep by Democrats of winnable seats in 2008; (b) a complex deal to keep arch-apostate Lieberman in the Caucus; (c) a favorable resolution of the near-tie vote in Minnesota after months of GOP legal obstruction; and (d) swift action by the Massachusetts legislature to provide for an interim Senator to replace the late Ted Kennedy.
It all came down to a one a.m. vote after a rare Washington snow storm, with Republicans openly praying that someone (i.e., the infirm Robert Byrd of West Virginia) wouldn’t be physically present.
The current conservative caterwauling about a “rushed” vote is pretty hilarious, given the endless delays undertaken by Senate Democrats all summer and early fall in an effort to engage Republicans, the open and notorious GOP strategy of running out the clock (reminiscent of the Bush strategy for securing the presidency nine years ago), and the front-page status of every detail of the legislation since last spring. Does anyone doubt for a moment that if Democrats had gone along and delayed final Senate action until after the holidays, the same people whining about their spoiled Christmas would be demanding the legislation be put off until after the 2010 elections? Indeed, that’s what we will in fact be hearing in January when a House-Senate conference committee completes its work.
That conference committee, and the House and Senate votes necessary to ratify its report, is far from a slam dunk, given House Democratic resentment of Senate deal-making, and substantive disputes on issues ranging from the public option to abortion. But the struggle to get to 60 votes in the Senate makes the endgame of health care reform look manageable by contrast.


Chait: GOP Courts Strategic Disaster, Intellectual Bankruptcy

Democrats have railed, with good reason, for a long time about the moral bankruptcy of the Republican Party. But the current political realities, especially the new health care reform deal, indicate that Republicans have also set a new standard of intellectual bankruptcy and strategic disaster, according to a pair of interesting articles by Jonathan Chait in The New Republic.
Chait’s 12/19 post at TNR‘s ‘The Plank’ explains the GOPs strategic blundering it this way:

At the outset of this debate, moderate Democrats were desperate for a bipartisan bill. They were willing to do almost anything to get it, including negotiate fruitlessly for months on end. We can’t know for sure, but Democrats appeared willing to make enormous substantive concessions to win the assent of even a few Republicans. A few GOP defectors could have lured a chunk of Democrats to sign something far more limited than what President Obama is going to sign. And remember, it would have taken only one Democrat to agree to partial reform in order to kill comprehensive reform. I can easily imagine a scenario where Ben Nelson refused to vote for anything larger than, say, a $400 billion bill that Chuck Grassley and a couple other Republicans were offering.
But Republicans wouldn’t make that deal. The GOP leadership put immense pressure on all its members to withhold consent from any health care bill. The strategy had some logic to it: If all 40 Republicans voted no, then Democrats would need 60 votes to succeed, a monumentally difficult task. And if they did succeed, the bill would be seen as partisan and therefore too liberal, too big government. The spasm of anti-government activism over the summer helped lock the GOP into this strategy — no Republican could afford to risk the wrath of Tea Partiers convinced that any reform signed by Obama equaled socialism and death panels.

Chait then describes Republican Senator Olympia Snowe’s role as a sort of GOP shill, feigning a willingness to compromise as a delaying tactic, attempting to “run out the clock” so Dems wouldn’t have time to put health care reform behind them and get focused on jobs in time to get in optimum position for the mid-terms. Thus the Republicans forced the Dems into a 60-40 partisan strategy, motivating even “relentlessly centrist” Democratic senators, like Evan Bayh to give up on the possibility of a bipartisan deal. As a result, Chait concludes:

The Republicans eschewed a halfway compromise and put all their chips on an all or nothing campaign to defeat health care and Obama’s presidency. It was an audacious gamble. They lost. In the end, they’ll walk away with nothing. The Republicans may gain some more seats in 2010 by their total obstruction, but the substantive policy defeat they’ve been dealt will last for decades.

In Chait’s longer 12/21 article, “The Rise of Republican Nihilism,” he explores the equally-unimpressive Republican bankruptcy of ideas behind the strategic blundering. As Chait notes in a couple of nut graphs,

In the days following the 2008 election, some Republicans predicted that the party would retool itself in response to reality–not just political reality but the actuality of policy challenges. “Republicans,” wrote conservative Ramesh Ponnuru in Time, “will have to devise an agenda that speaks to a country where more people feel the bite of payroll taxes than income taxes, where health-care costs eat up raises even in good times, where the length of the daily commute is a bigger irritant than are earmarks.” Nothing like that rethinking has happened or will happen.
…The administration has selected three main issues as the focus of its domestic agenda: the economic crisis, climate change, and health care reform…In all three areas, the Republican Party has adopted a stance of total opposition, not merely because it disagrees with aspects of Obama’s solutions, but because it cannot come to grips with the very nature of the problems of modern American politics.

Chait goes on to describe the GOP ‘alternatives’ to Democratic approaches in the three areas, which boil down to: tax cuts for the rich; denial of global warming and “fantastical geoengineering schemes”; and “plans that mostly reflect the right’s embrace of the failed market system that created the health care disaster.” More specifically, on health care reform, Chait explains:

The Republicans’ favorite reform is to let people buy insurance from any state they want. Currently, states require insurance plans to offer certain basic services–psychiatric benefits, maternity care, and so on. That creates another subsidy from the healthy to the sick–healthy people have to buy insurance that pays for all kinds of care they probably won’t need, keeping down the cost for people who do need it. If you let people buy out-of-state insurance, states will lure insurance companies by offering lax requirements, and the healthy will follow. That would allow all the healthy, inexpensive customers to have cheap plans with other inexpensive, healthy people, while sick, expensive customers would get stuck in expensive insurance plans with other sick, expensive customers.
Almost nobody takes these plans seriously as legislative proposals. They are a response to the cross-pressures of the general public’s demand that the party appear to have a positive vision on health care and the base’s demand of fealty to the ideals of the free market. So the House Republican plan would require states to establish plans to cover people with preexisting conditions, but it makes no suggestion for where the funding for such plans would come from. Likewise, the “Health Care Freedom Act,” sponsored by DeMint, is funded by repealing the financial bailout and demanding a prompt repayment. If you’re wondering what the consequences of immediately repealing the bailout might be, or where this plan would find its financing after the bailout funds ran out, you’re missing the point of the exercise. The main role of these plans is to serve as a prop for the disingenuous party talking point that Congress should defeat Obama’s plan and “start over” with “real reform.”

Chait attributes the shallowness of Republican alternatives to “the deepening hold on the GOP of anti-government ideology.” He links to an amusing but revealing TNR collection of quotes by Republican leaders during the last century, predicting certain doom following the enactment of reforms like Social Security, regulation of child labor, the minimum wage, womens’ suffrage and Medicare. Particularly noteworthy is this dilly from conservative icon Ronald Reagan, now hailed as his party’s great visionary, arguing against Medicare in 1961:

The doctor begins to lose freedoms; it’s like telling a lie, and one leads to another. First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then the doctors aren’t equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him you can’t live in that town, they already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else. And from here it is only a short step to dictating where he will go.

Ridiculous as it reads, this Reagan quote is emblematic of the sort of fear-mongering that remains the core of the GOP’s strategy, absent any credible alternatives to Democratic health care reform proposals. Chait is exactly right in terming Republican strategy as nihilism, eloquently depicted in this YouTube clip featuring one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. One key — make that critical — challenge for Democrats in 2010 is to inculcate the nihilism of the GOP as a meme among swing voters.


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TDS Co-Editor William Galston Outlines Dem Battle Plan for 2010

In his latest article at The New Republic, TDS Co-Editor William Galston surveys the chaotic political realities of the moment, warns of serious hazards ahead and charts a path for Dems looking toward the 2010 elections. Here’s Galston on the daunting challenges of this political moment:

When the history of the Obama administration is written, this week may well be regarded as the moment when Democrats’ anxieties crystallized into genuine alarm. Factional fights within the party exploded into public view. Howard Dean—regarded by many progressives as a leader on health reform—denounced the Senate bill, declaring that it “would do more harm than good to the future of America.” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi made it clear that the Obama administration would be left on its own to make the case for its Afghanistan policy; odds are that a large number of House Democrats—perhaps even a majority—will oppose funding it. Thirty-eight House Democrats, many facing tough races, joined forces with the Republicans to turn the vote on a new jobs bill into a cliff-hanger that forced the Speaker to spend an hour on the House floor personally lobbying wavering members. Even E. J. Dionne Jr., an ardent liberal and congenital optimist, worried publicly that while “[a]n increasingly bitter and negative Republican Party may not be able to win the midterm elections … Democrats definitely can lose them.” The reason: Democrats’ “turmoil and backstabbing are making what is a rather good [health care] plan look like a failure while persuading political independents that they are a feuding gang rather than a governing party.”

Galston goes on to cite discouraging poll figures regarding the country’s direction, confidence in President Obama’s goals and policies, ratings of congress and feelings about the Democratic Party, among other concerns. He notes parenthetically, however that the “Democrat’s only consolation is that Republican leaders receive even lower ratings.”
Galston then offers some specific strategy suggestions, including:

Get health care done as quickly as possible. The House should recognize that any Senate bill that can garner 60 votes is likely the only bill that can do so. Logic suggests that the best course would simply be for the House to pass the Senate bill, avoiding a useless and time wasting conference.
Pivot hard toward the economy and jobs, and keep the focus there throughout 2010. That means keeping divisive issues—such as immigration and cap-and-trade—off next year’s legislative agenda. It also means more action—such as expanding the flow of credit to small business—to promote job creation in the private sector.
Acknowledge that public concern about spending, deficits, and debt is high and rising. That doesn’t mean turning toward fiscal restraint next year, while the economy remains fragile. It does mean endorsing the creation of a bipartisan fiscal commission—along the lines of the Base Realignment and Closure Commission—with the power to make recommendations after the mid-term elections to which Congress would be required to respond early in 2011.

“Beyond these specifics, ” Galston adds, “Democrats will have to shift their mindset and recalibrate the balance between stability and change. He adds that what Americans wanted most in ’08 was “getting rid of the Bush-Cheney administration. (The NBC/WSJ poll shows that they remain the two least respected public officials of the past decade.)” Now, however, “They want their government to be a rock of security in uncertain times…They want reassurance, jobs, and temporary assistance until they can find them, not a new New Deal. They will accept sensible change in measured increments, but not pell-mell and all at once.”
Tough advice from an experienced Democratic warrior — and it merits serious consideration from Party strategists.


Bloggers Make Case for HCR Compromise

Former DNC head Howard Dean may have ample support for his opposition to the latest Senate version of health care reform, but there are plenty of progressive bloggers and columnists who see it differently. Some examples:
At The New York Times, Paul Krugman’s “Pass the Bill” makes a tightly-crafted case for progressives supporting the latest compromise:

But let’s all take a deep breath, and consider just how much good this bill would do, if passed — and how much better it would be than anything that seemed possible just a few years ago. With all its flaws, the Senate health bill would be the biggest expansion of the social safety net since Medicare, greatly improving the lives of millions. Getting this bill would be much, much better than watching health care reform fail.
At its core, the bill would do two things. First, it would prohibit discrimination by insurance companies on the basis of medical condition or history: Americans could no longer be denied health insurance because of a pre-existing condition, or have their insurance canceled when they get sick. Second, the bill would provide substantial financial aid to those who don’t get insurance through their employers, as well as tax breaks for small employers that do provide insurance.

Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic also believes the bill is a significant improvement, “…light years better than what we have now.” In his MyDD post on former President Clinton’s support of the bill, Jonathan Singer explains “This bill isn’t perfect, but it may be the best chance at reforming the system that there will be for a long, long time. .” WaPo columnist
WaPo columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. agrees
, noting,

…There is one thing that must be done fast: Democrats need to agree on a health bill and sell it with enthusiasm and conviction. Their own turmoil and back-stabbing are making what is a rather good plan look like a failure while convincing political independents that they are a feuding gang rather than a governing party.

At TPM Cafe Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, supports voting for the current version as the second step in a 3-part effort :

Here’s my position. In these final days of the health care fight, progressives should work hard to improve the health reform bill in the Senate and in the conference with the (better) House bill. But we should support the passage of the best bill we can get – and then keep fighting for more and better reform.

Ezra Klein sees it this way at his WaPo blog:

But now we’re talking about killing the Senate health-care bill — with its $900 billion in subsidies and its delivery system reforms and its Medicare Commission and its Medicaid expansion and its exchanges and its regulations on insurers — unless we make the exchanges slightly stronger prudent purchasers, when they’re already strong enough to “thrill” the original sponsor of the prudent purchaser amendment?
I guess this is the logical outcome of a system in which the greatest gains accrue to those making the most credible and severe threats. But it’s not healthy.

At FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver’s “Health Care:The Elevator Pitch” takes a more persuasive tone than his previous post on the topic, “Why Progressives Are Batshit Crazy to Oppose the Senate Bill .” Says Silver:

…The bill is not “real reform” in the sense of something that fundamentally alters the structure of the current, predominately private, predominately employer-based insurance system. The only solutions that I’m aware of that might do that are single payer and Wyden-Bennett, either of which I’d prefer to what’s on the table now — but neither of which are liable to be politically viable any time soon. By the way, I don’t think a bill with a public option would constitute fundamental reform either — it would be better, but it’s still tinkering around the edges of a flawed system.
…Fundamental reform like single-payer or Wyden-Bennett was never really on the table. The bill comes very close, indeed, to establishing what might be thought of as a right to access to health care: once it’s been determined that people with pre-existing conditions cannot be denied health care coverage, and that working class people ought to receive assistance so that they can afford health care coverage, it will be very hard to remove those benefits. It’s the sort of opportunity that comes around rarely — and one that liberals will greatly regret if they turn down.

In his article, “Deal or Die on Health Care: Why progressives should support a Democratic compromise,” at The American Prospect, Paul Starr argues:

Liberals in Congress should also recognize that with either a 2013 or 2014 date for implementation, there will be time enough to revise the program before it goes into effect (indeed, time enough for the opponents to roll it back). Many of the specifics, such as the level of subsidies, almost certainly will be changed in the intervening years. And many of those specifics can be changed through budget reconciliation, which requires only 51 votes to pass the Senate.
Sen. Lieberman’s influence is at its maximum in passing health-care legislation now, and some of those provisions will be hard to change. But if Democrats succeed in getting a bill through Congress in the next several weeks, they can return to some of the issues in the reconciliation process next year. And at that point they won’t necessarily need to have Lieberman on board…If progressives in Congress can see that far ahead, they’ll see their way to vote for a compromise.

Whether to support or oppose the current Senate version of health care reform bill is a tough call for many progressive Democrats, and all of the aforementioned commentators have expressed their concerns about some measures of the Senate bill. But clearly many are ready to sign on and get something they feel is substantial passed soon — and carry the fight for amendments advancing comprehensive, universal coverage with some form of public option to another day.


The Long Overdue Debate

This item, by Washington Monthly Contributing Writer Steve Benen, is crossposted from The Huffington Post. It’s a reworked version of a piece that first appeared at Steve’s Political Animal blog.
The United States was supposed to have had a great debate this year about one of the most important domestic policies of them all. With a once-in-a-generation opportunity to address a dysfunctional health care system, the left and right, Democrats and Republicans, would bring their A games, and the public would benefit from the discussion.
We now know, of course, that Americans were denied that debate, not because of the proposals, but because the right didn’t have an A game to bring. Intellectual bankruptcy left conservatives with empty rhetorical quivers.
But as it turns out, it wasn’t too late for the debate, we were just looking in the wrong place. We expected the fight of the generation to occur between the right and left, when the more relevant dispute was between the left and left.
It’s easy to overlook right now, but the quality of the policy debate between competing progressive contingents is infinitely better and more interesting than the policy debate between Democrats and Republicans, which has unfolded in depressing ways over the last eight or nine months.
Consider, for example, two op-eds this morning — Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) attacking health care reform from the right in the Wall Street Journal, and former Gov. Howard Dean (D-Vt.) going after reform from the left in the Washington Post. Both called for the defeat of the Senate Democratic plan, and both were written by leading figures on their respective side of the ideological fence, but only one had something sensible to offer.
Coburn’s piece was absurd, wildly misleading, and included arguments that seemed oddly detached from the substantive reality of the debate. Dean’s piece, whether one found it persuasive or not, was policy focused, serious, and credible. Dean’s piece conveys the concerns of someone who cares deeply about health care and improving the dysfunctional system, while Coburn’s piece reads like someone auditioning to be Sean Hannity’s fill-in guest host.
Of course, it’s not just two op-eds on a Thursday that bolster the point. Much has been made this week of the often-intense dispute between activists and wonks — progressive reform advocates who think the Democratic plan has merit and is worth passing, and progressive reform advocates who think the Democratic plan is a failure and should be defeated. It’s an important dispute, with significant implications.
But notice the quality of the debate. Note that Howard Dean, Markos Moulitsas, much of the FireDogLake team and others are raising important questions and pointing to real flaws. At the same time, note that Ezra Klein, Jonathan Cohn, Nate Silver and others are offering meaningful defenses of the Democratic plan, based on substantive evaluations.
Progressive activists and progressive wonks are at each other’s throats this week, but they want largely the same goals. Their differences are sincere and significant, but the intensity of their dispute is matched by the potency of their arguments.
And then turn your attention to the other side of the divide, and notice the quality of the arguments conservatives and Republicans have offered — and continue to offer — in this debate. Death panels. Socialism. Hitler. Government takeover. Socialized medicine. Incomprehensible charts. Incessant whining about the number of pages in a proposal.
Time will tell whether reform will pass, whether the bill will be worthwhile, and whether the activists or the wonks win out. No matter what happens, the argument will continue beyond this one piece of legislation. But regardless what side of the dispute you’re on, it’s worth appreciating the vibrancy, energy, and seriousness with which progressives are engaging in the debate, as compared to the incoherent, ridiculous, and dull qualities our friends on the right have brought to the table.


Brooks Follows His Formula

In the most predictable column you could imagine, today the New York Times’ David Brooks dances around the pending Senate health reform bill, moving hither and yon, touting up reasons to like it and reasons to hate it.
And then, of course, he sides with the GOP in opposing the bill–not really because he objects to its provisions, but because it falls short of his goals for health care cost containment, and might let irresponsible Americans continue to get too much health care.
It was the Brooks formula for thoughtfully disdaining both sides of messy debates, and somehow always lining up with the immediate positions of the Republican Party.
Brooks or his editors entitled the column “The Hardest Call.” Funny–it was a call that was amazingly easy to spot from a far distance.