Thomas Frank has a good opinion piece, “Why Democrats Are Losing on Health Care” in the Wall St. Journal. The first part of Frank’s article is reflected in its subtitle “They Won’t Debate the Proper Role of Government,” in which he argues that Democrats should be making the health care debate in terms of “fundamental principles,” specifically “the size and role of government.” He doesn’t really address the size of government here, nor should Democrats. Ideologues already have strong opinions on the topic, and most Americans are less concerned about size than making government more effective in helping to provide affordable health security.
But the best part of Frank’s article provides a nicely-stated response to the frequently-heard protest, “Why should I have to pay for your health care?” First the set-up”

Consider the assertion, repeated often in different forms, that health insurance is a form of property, a matter of pure personal responsibility. Those who have insurance, the argument goes, have it because they’ve played by the rules. Sure, insurance is expensive, but being prudent people, they recognized that they needed it, and so they worked hard, chose good employers, and got insurance privately, the way you’re supposed to.
Those who don’t have what they need, on the other hand, should have thought of that before they chose a toxic life of fast food and fast morals. Healthiness is, in this sense, how the market tests your compliance with its rules, and the idea of having to bail out those who failed the test—why, the suggestion itself is offensive. We have all heard some version of the concluding line, usually delivered in the key of fury: By what right do you ask me to pay for someone else’s health care?

Then the response:

This image of sturdy loners carving their way through a tough world is an attractive one. But there is no aspect of life where it makes less sense than health care.
To begin with, we already pay for other people’s health care; that’s how insurance works, with customers guarding collectively against risks that none of them can afford to face individually. Our health-care dollars are well mingled already, with some of us paying in more than we consume while others use our money to secure medical services for themselves alone.
The only truly individualistic health-care choice—where you receive care that is unpolluted by anyone else’s funds—is to forgo insurance altogether, paying out-of-pocket for health services as you need them. Of course, such a system would eventually become the opposite of the moral test imagined by our Calvinist friends, with the market slowly weeding its true believers out of the population.

And the clincher:

The righteous individualists among us might also consider that our current health-insurance system, which delivers them the medicine they think they’ve earned, is in fact massively subsidized by government, with Uncle Sam using the tax code to encourage employers to buy health insurance. And were it not for government programs like Medicare and Medicaid taking over the most expensive populations, the political scientist Jacob Hacker pointed out to me recently, the system of private insurance would probably have destroyed itself long ago. That image we cherish of our ruggedly self-reliant selves, in other words, is only possible thanks to Lyndon Johnson and the statist views of our New Dealer ancestors.
One reason government got involved is that our ancestors understood something that escapes those who brag so loudly about their prudence at today’s town-hall meetings: That health care is not an individual commodity to be bought and enjoyed like other products. That the health of each of us depends on the health of the rest of us, as epidemics from the Middle Ages to this year’s flu have demonstrated. Health care is “a public good,” says the Chicago labor lawyer Tom Geoghegan. “You can’t capture health care just for yourself. You have to share it with others in order to protect your own health.”

So next time a conservative ideologue at the local tavern starts bellowing about how he/she shouldn’t have to pay for someone else’s health care, explain in the most dulcet of tones: “You already do, my friend. That’s what insurance is. When you get sick, others pay to help you recover. And when others don’t get health care, it makes your family more vulnerable to epidemics. That’s why real reform should include everyone.” It probably won’t change the ideologue’s mind, such as it is. But maybe, just maybe, a nearby listener will nod and get it.

According to Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic today, the White House is finally prepared to pull the trigger on presidentially branded approach to health care reform, in the form of key markers he will expect any legislation to achieve:

Next week, President Obama is going to give Democrats a health care plan they can begin to sell.
He plans to list specific goals that any health insurance reform plan that arrives at his desk must achieve, according to Democratic strategists familiar with the plan. Some of these “goals” have already been agreed to, including new anti-discrimination restrictions on insurance companies. Others will be new, including the level of subsidies he expects to give the uninsured so they can buy into the system.
Obama will also specify a “pay for” mechanism he prefers, and will specify an income level below which he does not want to see taxed.
He will insist upon a mechanism to cut costs and increase competition among insurance companies — and perhaps will even specify a percentage rate — and he will say that his preferred mechanism remains a government-subsidized public health insurance option, but he will remain agnostic about whether the plan must include a robust public option.

It sounds like “ObamaCare,” which will finally begin to merit that term, will be consistent with what’s expected to pass the House, but flexible enough to accomodate what’s “doable” in the Senate.
One key goal will be to identify his administration and his party with reforms on health insurance practicies, such as exclusions of people with pre-existing conditions, that even Republicans claim to support:

The effect of this sales job, if it works, will be to associate the President with parts of the reform bills that are almost certainly likely to pass — assuming the Senate doesn’t bog down.

So: after months of Democratic anxiety over the President’s strategy of deferring to congressional committees, we’ll at last see if his Fabian strategy of gaining by delay in drawing his own lines in the sand will work.
It’s interesting that one long-time and generally nonpartisan Beltway observer, Norm Ornstein, has an op-ed in today’s Washington Post arguing that Obama has in fact chosen the best available strategy for achieving health care reform this year. We’ll soon now if that’s the case. But in any event, the White House’s planned moves should at least calm down progressives who had feared the President was happy to let his signature initiative rise and fall without ever saying exactly what he was willing to expend political captal to accomplish.

A little less than a year ago, (then) Senator Obama spoke on taxes in Dover, N.H., and pledged,

“And I can make a firm pledge: under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 will see their taxes increase – not your income taxes, not your payroll taxes, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes. My opponent can’t make that pledge, and here’s why: for the first time in American history, he wants to tax your health benefits Apparently, Senator McCain doesn’t think it’s enough that your health premiums have doubled, he thinks you should have to pay taxes on them too. That’s a $3.6 trillion tax increase on middle class families. That will eventually leave tens of millions of you paying higher taxes. That’s his idea of change.

Now, WaPo‘s Ceci Connolly reports that President Obama is taking “a more nuanced approach” and taxing health benefits is “on the table,” as far as the President is concerned. Les Leopold, author of The Looting of America, weighs in on the topic with a HuffPo post warning that Obama is flirting with disaster. Leopold spotlights a group of workers who won a good health care policy from Verizon in a difficult struggle and notes:

American working people desperately want President Obama to succeed. They certainly do not expect him to break his word on taxing worker health benefits….These workers also provided rock solid support for Obama, including his call for health care reform so that all working people one day could enjoy similar coverage. In fact, for these workers one of the key distinguishing points between Obama and McCain centered on the taxing of health care benefits. They felt enormously threatened by McCain’s health tax proposals, especially since the cost of many of their excellent plans can exceed $20,000 a year per active member and even more for retirees and their families. Counting those benefits as taxable income would amount to an enormous tax increase for these workers, and their union made sure they understood this point during the campaign. In fact, labor unions all over the country distributed millions of pieces of campaign literature and made tens of thousands of phone calls to drive this point home.
Yet, team Obama led by Rahm Emanuel seems incredibly out of touch with this reality. In their desperate effort to find revenues for their national health care proposals, they are “pivoting” as they signal a willingness to consider taxes on the better, more expensive health insurance benefits. If the administration continues down that path, Obama will lose these workers, now and forever. They probably won’t vote for the Republicans in the mid-term elections, but they might sit it out or fail to campaign vigorously for Democrats.

It may not be fair to blame Emanuel, but Leopold makes an important point. If Obama trades away his earlier promise, he will be hammered mercilessly with GOP ads depicting his promise and its breaking. Breaking promises is a bad idea. Breaking such clearly-stated promises is even worse. His approval numbers will tank far deeper than they are now. Leopold tosses out a roundball analogy to frame the gravity of what is at stake:

Like a good basketball player, President Obama knows how to pivot. Like a good politician he also should know when to pivot and in what direction. But if he pivots towards taxes on health care benefits, he’ll find himself alone on the court with a bunch of blue dogs and bankers as teammates, while his working class fans walk away in disgust. Even more importantly, his real team needs to see him take on the big boys… and soon.

There are times when political leaders have to admit a mistake and change a position. This is not one of those times. Obama was right a year ago. As Leopold points out, there are other, less dangerous ways to get the needed revenues. — ways that don’t break such a clearly-stated pledge and that keep faith with working people. Entertaining the notion that it would go unnoticed is asking for trouble. This trial balloon needs to sink. There are plenty of alternatives. He should pick one — or more — and protect his integrity.

A lot of Democrats look at Republican efforts to alienate Medicare beneficiaries from health care reform and think it’s all a matter of misinformation: if seniors really understood that their own health insurance was “government-run,” they’d be less inclined to oppose an offer of similiar insurance to others.
I”m afraid this interepretation misses something fundamental about the conservative assault on health care reform: the idea is to convince seniors that the uninsured don’t deserve similar federal benefits. In essence, they’re bringing back the old “welfare wedge” in a new form, this time aimed at stigmatizing the working poor and at middle-class families trying to stay in the middle class.
I’ve got an article up at Salon that goes into this in some detail, and examines how “welfare” rhetoric began characterizing Republican attacks on Obama’s policies back during the presidential campaign. This is something progressives need to get a grip on, because this divisive strategy is by no means limited to, or likely to end with, health care reform.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
It’s becoming more obvious each day that the conservative assault on Barack Obama’s legislative agenda, including his incrementalist efforts towards universal health coverage, isn’t much about the details. It is, instead, a counter-revolutionary campaign to revive 1980s-era middle-class resentments of particular beneficiaries of government social programs. Beneath the hysterical talk about Obama’s “socialism” or the “Democrat Socialist Party,” conservatives are actually revolting against the ancient targets of the New Deal and Great Society, and indeed, against the very idea that “interference” with the distributional implications of free markets is ever morally legitimate.
Consider a long, classic column published at National Review last week by the Hoover Institution’s Victor Davis Hanson, entitled “Obama and Redistributive Change.” It’s an angry screed against the egalitarian underpinnings of progressive politics, past, present and future. It goes over-the-top in suggesting that Obama is determined to wipe out absolutely every distinction in wealth and status among Americans. But the self-righteous fury against any “redistributive” activity by government seems perfectly genuine, representing as it does a rejection of virtually every way of ordering society other than laissez-faire capitalism:

When radical leaders over the last 2,500 years have sought to enforce equality of results, their prescriptions were usually predictable: redistribution of property; cancellation of debts; incentives to bring out the vote and increase political participation among the poor; stigmatizing of the wealthy, whether through the extreme measure of ostracism or the more mundane forced liturgies; use of the court system to even the playing field by targeting the more prominent citizens; radical growth in government and government employment; the use of state employees as defenders of the egalitarian faith; bread-and-circus entitlements; inflation of the currency and greater national debt to lessen the power of accumulated capital; and radical sloganeering about reactionary enemies of the new state.

Hanson is clearly looking beyond our current political debates at much of the history of civilization, and it infuriates him. But if Obama’s health care reform efforts represent a drive to “enforce equality of results,” what existing government program can’t be described the same way?
Social Security is redistributive. Medicare is redistributive. Public education is redistributive. Public investments in highways, bridges, dams, and other infrastructure are most definitely redistributive. The land reforms that accompanied the rise of every society, dating back to feudalism, are inherently and overtly redistributive. Even defense spending is redistributive, insofar as the benefits of national security are rarely captured by current taxpayers.
Beyond government and politics, it’s not only “socialists” who have embraced “redistributive” thinking. The Hebrew lawgivers and prophets; Jesus Christ; Mohammad–all were blatant redistributionists. All denied that wealth or status was invariably the product of productivity and virtue, and rejected the idea that redistribution was theft.
If Hanson and the many conservatives who so often sound like him want to openly take the posture that much of American–not to mention, world–history is a long, disastrous saga of tyranny in the pursuit of “enforced equality,” they are free to do so. But they should at least acknowledge that the rage against Barack Obama is really just displaced rage at democracy; at the mild forms of collective social action embraced by most Americans during the last century; at the longstanding policy positions of both major political parties; and at many of the very people they are calling upon to kill Obama’s agenda–including Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries, people with government-protected mortgages, farm-price-support recipients, military veterans, and public employees tout court. At an absolute minimum, Hanson should rush to publish a column savaging Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele for trying to position the GOP as the Party of Medicare this last week.

I know it’s the last week before Labor Day and all, when the higher-status pundits are by tradition esconced (with the First Family) at Martha’s Vineyard, but it sures seems like the conservative commentariat, so excited by town hall protests and declining presidential approval ratings just last week, is kinda dialing it in right now.
This very morning, you had a George Will column sniffing that Barack Obama and his allies are “unserious;” a Robert Samuelson column lecturing everyone about federal budget deficits and entitlements; a Max Boot column warning that America’s enemies are chortling in derision at America’s newfound delicacy about torture; and even a “historical” Michael Barone column that manages to suggest the the “royal status” of the Kennedy family was spoiled by its growing liberalism.
And just to prime the pump, there was even a snarling Dick Cheney interview on Fox yesterday.
It was all so predictable and by-the-numbers that it could have been, and may have been, filed a week ago, or even a year ago.
Looks like Barack Obama’s not the only one who needs some batteries recharged.

The most interesting aspect of American media coverage of Japan’s startling “change election” is that nobody much knows what to make of it. Yes, it’s assumed that the opposition Democratic Party, which dislodged the Liberal Democratic Party by a landslide, will be cooler to the United States, even as its leader, soon-to-be Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama makes it clear nothing much will change on the foreign policy front. Maybe Americans just don’t understand Japanese politics.
But Matt Yglesias is definitely on to something in suggesting that systems in which one party dominates for long periods of time don’t tend to be terribly ideological:

One consequence of this prolonged period of one-party rule is that the LDP is not an especially ideological political party. It’s essentially a “party of government” patronage machine that contains diverse factions and different points of view. The Democratic Party, consequently, is more of a generic umbrella opposition grouping than a clear ideological alternative. Thus the Democrats are riding in on a tide of public discontent, but don’t seem to have articulated much in the way of a policy agenda beyond the obscure issue of bureaucracy reform.

Back in the late 1990s, I participated in a international conference in Taiwan sponsored by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the long-time opposition party to the reigning Kuomintang (KMT). The purpose of the conference was basically to draw on center-left experiences elewhere to help devise an ideological and policy agenda for the DPP, which had long been defined as simply the opposition party, and as the preferred party of ethnic Taiwainese who had long resented the domination of “mainlanders” from China. After a period in government beginning in 2000, the DPP (and for that matter, the KMT) has a somewhat sharper ideological focus these days.
Come to think of it, the same dynamic was evident in the “Solid South” of my childhood in Georgia. The governing Democratic Party was a catchment of all sorts of people from serious progressives to hard-core segregationists, and the Republican Party was a motley assortment of transplanted Yankess, older African-Americans, and people interested in federal patronage during Republican administrations in Washington. Ideology was not a particularly clear or important partisan differentiator until the Civil Rights Act, and even then it took a decade or two for the parties to sort themselves out.
So maybe Japan’s parties will make more “sense” to us foreigners once the LDP has been out of office for a while. Serious competition has a way of clarifying things.

This is a guest post from Mark Ribbing, Director of Policy Development at the Progressive Policy Institute.
The time is coming to give this decade a name. We are four months from its end, and still we have no handy moniker that captures the spirit of the 2000’s, their odd blend of dislocation, dissolution and hope.
Back at the start of the millennium, commentators offered various spoken shorthands for the 00’s, but none have caught on. The most logical choice, “The Two-Thousands,” is unwieldy. Playing on the multiplicity of zeros, some pundits suggested “The Zeros” or even—in an antiquarian turn—“The Aughts.”
Others chose to see all those circles not as numbers, but as letters, and to pronounce them as such—“The Oh’s.” This, it turns out, was a step on the right track. But let’s consider a different pronunciation, one that captures not only the numerical identity of the 00’s, but also their historical essence: “The Ooze.”
This name’s been suggested before, mainly as a gag entrant in the dub-the-decade sweepstakes. Now it’s time for us to embrace its aptness for our times. Let us ponder ooze.
My desk version of Webster’s dictionary lists its first definition of “ooze” as a verb meaning “[t]o flow or seep out slowly, as through small openings.” The second is “[t]o vanish or ebb slowly,” and offers as an example the following phrase: “felt my confidence ooze away.”
But “ooze” is not just a verb for things that seep through small openings (like an infiltrating terrorist, or a flu virus) or for things that vanish or ebb over time (like Arctic ice, or the U.S. manufacturing-job base).
For “ooze” is also a noun. It is mud, goop, gunk, but its meaning goes a bit, well, deeper than that.
Back to the dictionary. It turns out that ooze is the “[m]udlike sediment covering the floor of oceans and lakes, composed mainly of the remains of microscopic animals.” In other words, it is the inert decayed matter of that which was once alive, and moving, and whole, however fragile it turned out to be.
This was our national condition all too often in the 2000’s—a perceptible wearing-away of living, intact structures that upheld our sense of security, liberty, prosperity, and mutual obligation.
This sense of national loss and unsettlement was a continual theme of the first eight years of the decade. It was an undercurrent running from the September 11 attacks to Hurricane Katrina, from the abuses at Abu Ghraib to the implosion of our financial sector.
Yet before we mire ourselves in pessimism, let us once again consider the floors of oceans and lakes, where microscopic beings settle and separate into the mud. The resulting stew is a vital staging ground for life itself. It is a place where ecosystems filter and regenerate themselves.
In short, ooze need not only signify decay. It can also represent the conditions for lasting growth and renewal—the kind that emerges from the ground up.
Such emergence is often hard to see at first. Ooze does not lend itself to clarity or rapid fruition. But down there, beneath the surface, things are happening that will one day become visible to the wide world.
Somewhere, a laid-off worker is taking her career into her own hands and starting up a new business. An abandoned building is reborn as a charter school. A vacant lot becomes part of the growing nationwide push toward local, sustainable sources of food.
The American instinct for renewal was crucial to Barack Obama’s electoral appeal, and it may yet manifest itself in a national willingness to confront such challenges as our deeply flawed health-care system, our educational dysfunction, and our increasingly costly dependence on fossil fuels. These are big problems, and anyone who expected them to be solved easily or without opposition has forgotten the basic truths of human nature, and of democracy.
What matters is this: Progress toward change is indeed taking place, on all of these fronts and others besides. That progress may seem too slow, and it may send its tendrils down the occasional dead-end channel, but it’s nourished by something quite real—a keen desire to see our nation do better, to reclaim its inventive, expansive soul. The Ooze is where we have been, and our future is forming in its depths, nourished by the broken shells ofwhat had come before.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
It’s debatable whether the latest incarnation of Mike Huckabee represents a turn to the dark side by the genial and amusing 2008 presidential candidate that a lot of Democrats admired, or a revelation of what the man has always really been.
But ever since he became a radio and TV gabber, the Bad Huck has taken over. Aside from his early charges that Barack Obama’s agenda was aimed at creating a Union of American Socialist Republics, and his more recent arguments for a displacement of Palestinians to a homeland somewhere outside Palestine, Huck really went over the brink today, as reported by HuffPo’s Sam Stein:

The 2008 Republican presidential candidate suggested during his radio show on Friday that, under President Obama’s health care plan, Kennedy would have been told to “go home to take pain pills and die” during his last year of life.
“[I]t was President Obama himself who suggested that seniors who don’t have as long to live might want to just consider taking a pain pill instead of getting an expensive operation to cure them,” said Huckabee. “Yet when Sen. Kennedy was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer at 77, did he give up on life and go home to take pain pills and die? Of course not. He freely did what most of us would do. He choose an expensive operation and painful follow up treatments. He saw his work as vitally important and so he fought for every minute he could stay on this earth doing it. He would be a very fortunate man if his heroic last few months were what future generations remember him most for.”

This despicable rant should disqualify Mike Huckabee from any further liberal sympathy, no matter how much he tries to joke or rock-n-roll his way back into mainstream acceptability.

We’re pleased to cross-post from The Huffington Post this piece by Mike Lux, founder and CEO of Progressive Strategies, LLC, and author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came To Be. It is offered as part of the continuing debate over progressive strategiy and intra-party Democratic relations.
I wanted to weigh in on this whole left flank for Obama issue (the idea that Obama needs a strong progressive movement pushing him from the left to get things done), because I think getting it right is probably the single most important thing in creating transformative change. Let me start by talking for a bit about my personal situation, because I think it has lessons from the broader issue.
I am blessed and cursed by this man-in-the-middle life I’ve created for myself.
One the one hand, I am a DC insider. I have served inside of five Presidential campaigns, two Presidential transition teams (sadly, the only two in my adult lifetime), and the Clinton White House. On the other hand, I have chosen to spend most of my life outside of government and the Democratic Party, working instead on helping to build progressive infrastructure and issue campaigns. This being connected to both the inside and outside has created some interesting dynamics.
Last week was in some ways fairly typical for me. I had one senior White house official tell me I was positioning myself in a fairly helpful way, and another who people told me was referring to me as an “(expletive deleted), (expletive deleted), (particularly gross and disgusting expletive deleted).” My blog posts prompted some of my responders to say that I was way too pro-Obama, and what could you expect from a DC insider like me, while the same posts caused another friend to e-mail me, worried that I was being too tough on Obama and was endangering my relationship with the White House.
I am sort of used to having at least some of my friends pissed off at me almost all of the time (let alone what my actual enemies — there are a few — think of me). In the Clinton White House, I got yelled at almost daily from people on the outside about (a) all the bad things we had done to progressive causes, and (b) other White House officials who said I was just carrying water for all the lefties outside. My job there was described by people as being the person responsible for having all my friends yell at me.
This personal experience has made me reflect a lot on what an effective left flank is for a Democratic President. First, on the definition: my view of what is effective is based on my understanding of history laid out in my book, The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be: an effective left flank pushes the more progressive party’s President toward big, transformational changes. The abolitionist movement successfully pushed Abe Lincoln and the radical Republicans toward ending slavery and other big changes; the Populist and Progressive and suffragist movements pushed Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson toward making the big progressive era changes in the early 1900s; the labor movement pushed FDR toward the major achievements of the New Deal; and the civil rights and other movements of the 1960s pushed the Kennedys and LBJ toward the big achievements of that era.
Moving toward transformational change is especially urgent when the nation is in crisis. Lincoln would not have won the civil war without the Emancipation Proclamation, and FDR would not have led us out of the Great Depression without New Deal economic policies. In both cases, the country was too broken, and needed big changes to fix it. And the reason that Buchanan, Hoover, and LBJ ended up as failed Presidents is that they stayed with conventional wisdom and weren’t bold enough on the biggest crises of their times (respectively, the lead-up to the Civil War, the Great Depression, and the Vietnam War).
I believe we are at that kind of crisis moment now, and that we can only get ourselves out of it with big, bold, progressive policies. Lincoln, FDR and JFK/LBJ on civil rights all started out in more of a conventional wisdom mindset, but the combination of progressive movement pressure and the crisis itself moved them toward making the major changes needed to solve things.
So how do we create an effective left flank? Given that (per the above stories), I tend to get everybody I know mad at me at some point or another, I’m sure there will be a lot of disagreement on this, but here are some principles I believe we ought to follow in creating that left flank:
1. Understand that whether we like it or not, the progressive movement’s fate, at least for the next few years and probably longer, is inextricably tied to Obama’s. As mad as many of us progressives get at Obama over certain policy or strategic failures, we have to understand that him failing as President hurts the entire progressive cause. In case you didn’t notice, LBJ’s and Jimmy Carter’s failed Presidencies did not usher in eras of progressive reform, they moved the country inexorably to the right. As President from the more left party, most Americans saw them as liberals even though LBJ was decidedly un-liberal on Vietnam, and Carter was the most conservative Democratic President on economics since Grover Cleveland in the 1800s. But progressives were struck with their failures anyway and paid the price. People who think Obama is failing because he’s following a more moderate path, and that eventually helps us move in a more progressive direction, are fooling themselves.
If Obama fails on health care (and, by the way, I consider failure to be either not passing a bill, or passing a bill that doesn’t work for the middle class), we won’t see another attempt at serious health care reform for at least another generation. If he fails at doing something big on climate change, we probably won’t be able to get anything done on it until it is too late to make a difference. And if his economic policies fail, regardless of demographics moving in our favor or Republican extremism, all Democrats will be punished at the polls, and the far-right that has taken over the Republican Party will probably come into power. And this isn’t just about the long term, either: for every percentage point Obama’s approval drops, we probably lose another two or three House seats in 2010.
Progressives’ strategy, then, should not be to attack Obama personally, to undermine voters’ confidence in him, but to shore up the backbone of progressives in Congress — and in his own administration, because I guarantee you, policy debates between more and less progressive staffers are held every day at the White House. If Obama makes a bad policy decision, we shouldn’t hesitate to push back or encourage progressives in Congress to do the same, and if White House staffers are pursuing destructive political strategies (see the “left-of-the-left” quote), we shouldn’t hesitate to bang on them. But our goal should be to do all this while still holding up hope that Obama will move in the right direction, and to praise the hell out of him when he does.
2. We should value the different roles we all play. The “we” in the previous sentence includes insiders and outsiders, different players in the movement, and people who work in that building at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. We all have (hopefully) constructive and important roles to play, even when we disagree sometimes on tactics and strategies. I think it’s a mistake to assume anything about each other’s motives. These are big important policy debates we are having, and it’s natural that things will get heated. But we have to respect each other’s roles to make this work.
Frederick Douglass excoriated Lincoln for moving so slowly on abolition even while Lincoln was inviting him to the White House for quiet conversations about how to move forward, conversations that were critical in shaping Lincoln’s abolition strategy. Labor leaders loudly announced that no one, FDR included, was going to get them to back down, even as FDR was meeting with them privately and urging them to keep pushing. Alice Paul was chaining herself to the White House fence and going on hunger strikes while other feminist leaders were meeting with Wilson and other congressional leaders, and it took both tactics combined to get the vote. King and other civil rights leaders refused to back down on pleas to stop civil disobedience and the march on Washington, but met constantly with White House officials to keep things moving.
We all have roles to play. Let me throw out some specific examples:
DC coalitions tend, by their very nature, to be clunky, cautious, and a little slow-moving. But they still have incredibly important roles to play in terms of coordinating lobbying, field, and communicating tactics, and keeping a steady dialogue going on important details of legislation with congressional and White House staffers.
Some progressives chose to play an inside role so that they can be at the table on the incredibly important details of the legislative language. That is a really good thing, but to be on the inside, you have to be a team player, and you have to mute your criticisms. That can leave you open to criticism by folks on the outside, but it is an incredibly valuable and important role. Jan Schakowsky (an old friend, so I am biased) is a big example of this kind of person. She is both a strong progressive and is a loyal member of the Obama/Pelosi team. I am thankful every day she is fighting for our cause on the inside, because I guarantee you the important details of the bill would be a lot worse without her.
The bloggers who have been demanding that Congressional Progressive Caucus members stand firm on a public option have annoyed a lot of insiders, but their single-minded focus on the strategy of keeping House progressives united is a big reason why the public option is still alive. If the left didn’t keep pushing, this health care debate would keep shifting more and more to the right.
The kind of silly attitude, that the “left of the left” is the problem, hurts the White House. As I wrote the other day, when progressives are being critical is exactly the time the White House ought to be cultivating them. If people are inside a tent, they generally wee-wee (as the President would put it) outward, and if they are kept out, they generally wee-wee inward. And if you can’t figure that most progressives are trying to be your friends (even if, yes, we are occasionally big pains in the butt), then the White House has a very big problem.
Hopefully this discussion continues, because getting this right is arguably the single most important thing that will determine whether Obama and those of us in the progressive movement are a success. When the stakes are so incredibly high, tempers will flare, sharp elbows will be thrown, and various players will be critical of each other. All that’s understandable, and can be healthy. But we also all need to understand that progressives and the White House need each other to get anything big and important done. Abe Lincoln and Frederick Douglass understood that. So did FDR and John L. Lewis. So did Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. It’s how big change happens in this country.
In the meantime, everybody feel free to keep yelling at me. I’ve gotten kind of used to it.