And He Smiled A Quiet Smile To Himself.

President Obama is scheduled to outline his vision on moving forward with health care reform tomorrow, but today the president wrote to congressional leaders from both parties, explaining several areas of agreement with Republicans.

"No matter how we move forward, there are at least four policy priorities identified by Republican Members at the meeting that I am exploring. I said throughout this process that I'd continue to draw on the best ideas from both parties, and I'm open to these proposals in that spirit," Obama's letter explained.

The GOP ideas include:

1. Although the proposal I released last week included a comprehensive set of initiatives to combat fraud, waste, and abuse, Senator Coburn had an interesting suggestion that we engage medical professionals to conduct random undercover investigations of health care providers that receive reimbursements from Medicare, Medicaid, and other Federal programs.

How on earth does he keep from bursting out in giggles? He must have the driest sense of humor since the Thar Desert.

--aimai

Teachable Moment.

In theory I agree with Howard Dean that the bill should be killed. That's not because I loved the "Public Option" as it was configured in the House Bill or, for five seconds in the Senate Bill. And its not because I loved dropping Medicare down to 55--although I thought that was a good start on things. I think the bill should be killed because Obama and Rahm and Reid made such huge, tactical, errors and such gargantuan errors in judgement that they will be unable to do anything else if they don't learn their lesson now. The errors, which have been pretty well discussed throughout the bloggosphere, include:

Failure to assume a strong bargaining position from the beginning.
Failure to work closely with natural allies on the center/left.
Failure to activate the grass roots and the actual voters.
Failure to correctly "sell the bill" through the use of propaganda, bathos, sarcasm, and imagery.
Failure to demonize (portions) of the opposition in order to force (portions) to compromise--that would be Snowe and Collins.
Failure to eliminate or sideline opposition like Lieberman before the start.
Failure to neuter or muzzle internal opposition like Nelson, Landrieu, Lincoln and Baucus until very late in the game.
Failure to control Baucus and the timeline
Failure to force Senators to negotiate in good faith--no one who did not commit to vote for cloture should have been permitted to enter into any negotiations, private or public, or permitted to offer amendments (to other than shouts of derision.)
Failure to reward Senators who acted in good faith--that is, Senators who accepted Reid's pleas to cut back on their own amendments were not rewarded in any way when negotiations broke down.

On the other hand, I also think this may be a teachable moment for the Progressives and for Obama and Rahm. I think the Progressives should go to the White House and say "we will stick with you and the bill on several conditions."

One: remove the mandates.

Two: agree to force the good parts of the bill through reconciliation before 2010 is out.

Three: take a fucking class in negotiations.

Four: Reid and the Dems have to blow up the filibuster, immediately if possible, when the new Senate rules are hammered out in 2010 if necessary.

Five: Lieberman takes punishment. As soon as the vote is finalizes Lieberman is stripped of his chairmanship, stripped of his seniority, dumped into a coatroom for his offices, and he is not permitted to offer any legislation with a Democratic sponsor--no matter how good the legislation.

As long as the Democrats think Lieberman is indispensable for something they will continue to cater to him and that is inherently destructive of good government since Lieberman is, in fact, opposed to good government. I'm all for the results and I'd never say this if Lieberman could be shown to be trustworthy on any individual thing--like Cloture--but that ship has sailed.

Six: Nelson, too, takes punishment. Whatever it is, it should be harsh. Party discipline on major initiatives must be maintained.

I think, on balance, the Bill needs to go through, flawed though it is. But the notion that it goes through and we can "build on it" is a fantasy--Obama won't build on it if he doesn't have to. If the Democrats--the real ones--in the House and the Senate are to go to bat to preserve this flawed, botched bill they must demand something in exchange. Everyone else got their slice of the pie. Its the progressives' turn. Lieberman has shown them the way: the more you demand, and at a pivotal time, the more you get. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. The progressives should go to the President and demand all the concessions they can get in exchange for their support for the bill. And the biggest concession of all is, to my mind, that he should fire Rahm and hire someone who actually knows what he's doing.

aimai

You Can't Always Get What You Want--No, Really.

Obama has just come out and, according to TPM, made one of the most enraging statements of all time.

Speaking to reporters after meeting with Senate Democrats this afternoon, President Obama said he is "cautiously optimistic" about health care reform's chances for passage.

If he is, he's the only one.

"I am absolutely confident that if the American people know what's in this bill..."

stop right there--why don't the American People know what's in the bill? Because there is no bill. There are only a series of contentious, badly understood amendments to a sprawling, jerry rigged, corporate giveaway. Sometimes poor people are being helped, sometimes the sick, sometimes the elderly, sometimes children. Sometimes there are good subsidies, sometimes the subsidies are too small. As far as the American People are concerned some old white democratic dude, what's his name? Lieberman, just tanked the bill over something huge, like a government takeover of health care. And the Democrats didn't care enough to stop him. If "the people" even know there's a different House Bill, they heard the same thing there--some old white democrat, what's his name, Stupak?, barely prevented the House from killing lots of babies with taxpayer money. Everyone else, who is pro Health Care Reform because they are unemployed, or underinsured, or sane has been promised a series of changes which are not going to be in the bill--perhaps they never were but people thought they would be. Again, that's not because people are stupid but because the White House and the Dems couldn't sucessfully sell something that was changing every day, sometimes minute to minute for the worse.

...and the Senate knows what's in this bill, it will pass, because it's right for America," he said, adding that he welcomes "the scrutiny of the press."

On what planet can Obama claim that the Senate "doesn't know what is in the bill?" This line just makes him look out of touch. No Senators are claiming not to know what is in the bill. All of them are on record not liking it for one reason or another--too liberal or too conservative. The lines have been drawn, and were drawn long before the battle started. This statement is wholly disingenous and just makes Obama look like a rube.

He warned that "the final bill won't include everything that everybody wants," but senators "simply cannot allow differences" over specific elements of the bill to derail reform.

Can someone tell me who Obama is warning here? Because the progressives and the rank and file Democrats know very well that they didn't get anything that they wanted. Since it does no good to warn the Republicans, who don't want HCR at all, he must be speaking to his own side. But this kind of haranguing of his own supporters, his own party, and (presumably) people like Howard Dean and the progressive bloggosphere, is really misplaced. You don't go to your own side publicly and tell them they are unrealistic, whiny, titty babies. For one thing its not true. For another thing its hugely impolitic. If you have to beg and plead with your own party to vote for your own signature initiative it should be done privately, and with a little regard for everyone's face. Because in fact your own party and the progressives have already given up everything else to please your enemies.

The bill meets his own requirements, he said.

"Any fair reading of the bill will show that all the criteria I laid out, before a joint session of Congress, have been met," he said.

This is irrelevant. The fact that "the bill meets his own requirements" is neither here nor there--he has yet to make the case that the bill meets the people's requirements, especially once so many goodies were cut out. Lastly, the bill will not get a "fair reading." There is going to be no cease fire from the center/right attacking this bill and its authors. The sooner Obama grasps that fact and grasps that he and his party must be on the offensive every minute the better.



The problem the Democrats are having with this bill is that they oversold what they would do, and underfought the bill--very, very, very, publicly. Obama came in with a huge reservoir of good will and a big rolodex of names and friends to push for the policies he said he wanted. Health Care Reform was one of his signature issues and he immiediately set about talking, in very vague terms, about getting it done. For pretty good policy reasons he nominally turned it over to the House and Senate to "get it done" while setting out, broadly, some guidelines about what he thought should be in the bill. Those guidelines, of course, ought to have been the most comprehensive, well thought, out, clearly stated set of bullet points he could have come up with. Because those guidelines were what Obama and the Democrats were going to be campaigning on. Those would be "the bill" as far as the public was concerned.

From the get go they refused to aggressively market a single set of bullet points that were clear, cogent, and defensible. Then they refused to activate their own activist network. They refused to demonize a subset of their opposition to force another subset to compromise. They didn't drum up enough support in the country as a whole--for instance, they didn't back and organize the free health clinics that we later saw emerge. They allowed Baucus to move from a supporter to an enemy of reform and to drag the entire process out of whack in August. They didn't organize and orchestrate the August Town Halls and they let them be taken over by the Tea Partiers. Because of their own refusal to activate Obama's network--which came about because they didn't want to back actually popular reforms and were wedded to the most insurance friendly set of minor tinkers--they lost the August recess. They didn't send the Democratic Senators and House members out with a single set of talking points. They didn't strong arm the weak or conservative members of their own caucus.

Worse, they undercut and undersold the most progressive members of both the Senate and the House while cozening up to, and bargaining with, Pharma, the Insurance Companies, the Hospitals, the Blue Dogs, Baucus, Lieberman, Snowe, Collins, and all the rest of them. When progressives warned them not to let Baucus push the Senate bill farther and farther out that was ignored. In the House the blue dogs were given benefits and attention that the progressive caucus never was, and the progressives found themselves outgunned and outmaneuvered on Stupak. Then we were all promised that, somehow, things would be fixed in the conference report. Now, of course, we are being told that there won't be any conference report, or at any rate that to placate the worst elements of the Senate and the House there is no chance of ameliorating the worst bits of either bill.

And now Obama goes hat in hand to the progressives and begs them to back the bill right now?

Obama and TPM, and others take the attitude that the progressives--hell, just your run of the mill democrats, should trust Obama and Reid and to somehow take a bad bill and make it better "later." Now later means not in conference but in the distant future. Its a fair argument--if it hadn't already been gutted by our experience with Obama and Reid and the Democrats during the run up to the bill itself. There's no doubt in my mind that Obama would have a better shot at making this argument--in fact, would never be in the position of pleading with his own supporters to support his own bill--if he'd shown any respect for the progressives and their amendments earlier. Or any serious passion for getting it right. I'm not saying that because this all comes down to some kind of pissing contest and if only Obama had been politer, or hosted more parties, or something he could count on his own party. I'm saying that Obama and Rahm and Reid have, in effect, broken any tacit promises to support their own supporters. They never went to the mat--even rhetorically--for their own side: not women, with Stupak, not the public with a good public option, not their new constituency for medicare at 55. When they relentlessly courted the worst elements of the center/right they were also repudiating or undercutting their own supporters at every turn. You might say that's the problem with bargaining at all with people who bargain in bad faith--every time they forced their own side to concede something important to one of the reactionaries, who then rejected the compromise, Obama and Reid showed their own side that principle, even the principle of winning, meant nothing to them. Its been all tactics and no strategy and the tactics were all capitulation. Obama and Reid together have shown that there is nothing that a center/right Senator or Congressman can do that will earn any punishment, and that there is nothing that a progressive can do that will earn any support. Now they want to make the argument that, in the long run, they will have a strategy to make up lost ground? They've already lost that argument. Does anyone believe that these guys have a long range strategy that is progressive? Because I don't. They've lost the trust of their own membership, just as they are losing the trust of their own voters for very good reason.

As I watch this health care debacle break out into open warfare I'm just stunned. Just personally stunned by the utter incompetence of Obama and his administrative staff. If you have to come out and plead with your own party to support a signature initiative you've already fucked up beyond imagining.

Edited to add my apologies. Every time I come back and read this post I find another typo. Put it down to rage.

Tell Me Not In Mournful Numbers

I'm not as crazy as the Balloon Juicers and I forebore to watch the holy rolling and the foaming at the mouth, the baby kissing and the hysteria about the freedum agenduh on Cspann as the Republicans marched lockstep to our doom and Pelosi emerged triumphant. I did see the shouting down of the Democratic Women, of course. And I salute Pelosi and Obama and all the others who fought so hard and got us so far. And like everyone else I'm waiting with bated breath to see how the Senate and the Conference screw this up. I'm not proposing to throw the baby out with the bathwater on Democracy at this point.

But the whole thing turned from joyous farce to something pretty deadly serious with the Stupak amendment--at least for me. I'm not angry that Pelosi had to allow the amendment--there seem to have been enough anti women votes just on the Democratic side to force it. Maybe. And apparently it was the Stupak amendment that enabled Cao, who is anti-abortion, to vote for the bill as a whole. And they are claiming they made not promises not to strip the thing out in conference.

But it should never, ever, have come to any Democrats voting for the Stupak amendment once it was submitted to the floor. And, frankly, I don't think it should ever have come to allowing Stupak to forward the amendment in the first place. Pelosi and the Democratic Majority should never have allowed women's health issues to be severed from family health issues in the first place. They should have insisted, publicly, that the whole point of the legislation was to "get government and insurance companies out of the business of telling you what you need and what you don't need." No amendments referring to specific procedures should have been permitted and the grounds for that refusal should have been made generic, not specific to women's health care. The rallying cry should have been "Democrats stand for freedom of consumer choice. Your health care money will be spent as you choose--not as we choose."

As for Stupak and the Catholic Bishops I would have taken a very, very, very, hard line. I would have gone to the Bishops and said I was going to allow Grayson to read into the record the names and insurance status of every child raped by a Catholic Priest and I was going to hunt up records showing how the Catholic orphanages benefitted financially from "gunshot adoptions" and their anti-choice work. I would have gone to Stupak and said we would primary him, and all assistance of any kind to his community would be cut off or redirected so that it clearly came from other hands than his. And I would have had Obama and other surrogate dems all over the TV making this argument:

"We can't allow small minorities of religious extremists to dictate which lawful medical procedures will be performed on non-co-religionists. That would be like putting the entire country under Sharia law, for example. I mean, look, there are religions and sects that will ban absolutely everything--from blood transfusions to fertility treatments. We simply can't allow the door to be opened to punish one section of our society at the behest of another for religious reasons. There will, of course, be an opt out clause for patients and consumers to refuse to avail themselves of treatments if their religion forbids it. But insurance companies will have to cover all lawful and medically necessary procedures for everyone."

If necessary I would (pre-emptively) have introduced a clause--call it the Real Conscience Clause Amendment-- to allow consumers to opt out of insurance entirely if they didn't want to pay premiums to cover services like abortion or asthma or whatever other fantasy contract they've got with god--but they'd have to sign a form stating that they wouldn't use insurance at all, or emergency care services either, for anything. Penalize the shit out of the believers up front--before they penalize the shit out of us. No abortion care for mommy? Then no fertility treatments for daddy or mommy. No abortion care for mommy? then no cancer treatment for daddy. Simple as that.

I'm not arguing that the bill isn't an historic piece of legislation (so far). It is. Its a great achievement for Pelosi and for Obama. And you can see from its squeaker nature that Congress is a very wobbly institution to whip into shape. But the work of whipping a vote has to start long before the night of the vote. Pelosi and Hoyer have been whipping and counting since day one, of course, but the time to create party discipline is not in the run up to the vote but every day, and every way. Famously, when you ask a peasant woman how she "makes a loaf of bread" she is supposed to answer

"well,a few months ago I prepared the land for planting. I took the seed I saved from last season and planted it. I hoe'd and weeded and watered it for two months, then I reaped it, threshed it, winnowed it, ground it, and then today I baked the bread."

Whipping the vote for an important--ground breaking--party line vote for Health Care Reform is exactly the same. Months before the vote itwas clear that the Republicans were going to have a party line vote and the Democrats had better have one too. You get no public credit for the fact that your majority party lost votes, that individual Democrats crossed party lines to vote with the Republicans. You lose face, in fact. And if you don't want to lose face you prepare the ground thoroughly by explaining to the various Democratic representatives that they can choose to be all alone running their next race, or be given the backing of the DSCC. That they can have the various allies of the Democratic party with them, or against them. No private voting strategies, no conscience voting, no nothing but the party line vote when the party line vote is needed. A hard line on this long before the big vote would have paid off in spades late in the game when Stupak would have been too cowed to offer the amendment in the last instance.

Still, I accept the proposition that a good beginning was made and that, perhaps, in the long run, like Medicare itself or the Civil Rights Bill this thing will be improved no end by the time a few more Democratic Congresses and Presidents have enlarged it. I certainly hope so. Because otherwise in order to get something pretty good for the men and children of this country we allowed the Catholic Church to go all medieval on the women of this country.

aimai

Read It and Weep

Also known as "What Can Happen When You Actually Put Good Policy Ahead of the Political Process."

In the Land of "Might Have Been" McCain Would Have Already Gotten Us Health Care Reform!

Turns out that McCain's Economic Brain Trust is Flat Busted:

Holtz-Eakin said he's been paying about $1,000 a month to extend the private health insurance he received on McCain's campaign through the government's COBRA program, but that will expire in a few months. This is the first time in his life he has not had employer-provided health coverage. "I worry about where I go next in the way many Americans do," he said. But although Holtz-Eakin dresses the part -- on this day he wore a gray pinstripe suit, white shirt with cuff links and a powder-blue tie -- he is in no hurry to find full-time work. He said he'll get a job when he's ready, even if it means buying an individual health insurance plan at an exorbitant premium.

"Let's not whine too much about me," he said. "I'm a wealthy, affluent American in the big picture."

Despite his personal trials, however, Holtz-Eakin said his conviction on the hot-button issue of health care is unchanged. He believes that reform is needed, but that President Obama and congressional Democrats are going about it the wrong way. The system is "broken," he said, but the bills now before Congress do not cut costs enough. On the campaign trail, Holtz-Eakin promoted McCain's plan to eliminate the tax exemption for employer-sponsored health insurance and give tax credits to individuals to buy their own coverage.

Of the bills moving through Congress, Holtz-Eakin said: "I wish the policies were different, and I wish I could've somehow gotten us to a bipartisan place. I think McCain had the capacity to do that.

"But the reality is what it is," he continued. "You can't live your life in the land of what might have been."

What I find astonishing about this article is that it comes right up to the water's edge of the reality of most Americans, dips its toe in, and then runs back for cover. If Mr. Holtz-Eakin is the divorced father of two children who is paying for his children's health care coverage? How would his suggested "fixes" for Health Care affect his wife's premiums, or her employer's liklihood of continuing family coverage for her? Who pays for his mother's health care coverage if it isn't Medicare--and if it is Medicare why does the article (and Holtz-Eakin) ignore that fact and ignore the historic attacks on Medicare levied by McCain and the entire Republican party?

How can a presumably intelligent man look at all the data and imagine for one minute that McCain--a notoriously unpleasant and difficult egomaniac with little insight into economic issues could have "gotten us to a bipartisan place?" But I suppose its all of a piece with the fact that he still believes that taxing employer health care benefits and subsidizing the purchase of junk health insurance would solve his personal medical insurance issues, let alone make a dent in those of the rest of the country.

For the Nation:

You know, nowhere is the dysfunction of our original compact more clear than in the discussion of the "opt out" Public Option. Lets go back to first principles: we have, until recently, had a system of largely private insurer based healthcare in which large and larger for profit private insurance companies offer group plans to large "groups"--generally employer based--and individual plans for individuals and families who don't get employer sponsored group membership. That has been "state based" because, as I understand it, when you allow for profit insurance companies to sell policies across state lines state AG's discovered that they were even more likely to rip off the consumer than when you simply let them gouge people within state lines.

Surrounding this basically for profit system, in which individuals and companies pay into the plans while they can/while they are employed and then attempt to handle their health care needs through insurance is a not for profit, government run, safety net for 1) the elderly and 2) the chronically sick and poor, and 3) people who need dialysis and kidney transplants. In other words, for a very long time, the government and the tax payer have acted as a kind of safety valve for the neediest--the elderly who have chronic "pre-existing" conditions like, say, life and the the very sick and very poor. This is precisely what hurt the Post Office, of course. We allowed the growth of for profit Federal Express and UPS to cream off high paying business mail services and left the Post Office to handle the more costly and difficult task of providing low cost delivery to everyone else. In effect the government has stepped in and saved Private Business from the actual cost of carrying through on their promise to insure workers/citizens and to guarantee health care coverage by saying "if you want to refuse coverage to an elderly person, or raise premiums beyond reason, we'll catch some number of the people you throw overboard."

But of course people don't need insurance, or health care coverage, only for the portion of their lives when they are employed. In fact, as it turns out, they really need it especially when they are unemployed and unable to pay the premiums. In states where very few people are covered during their working life times and their early youth to middle age (*cough* red states, union busting red states *cough* ) people routinely get to the age of medicare coverage much sicker than they do in blue states with good health benefits through employment. The cost of lifetime coverage simply gets shifted towards the latter end of life when the government steps in and picks up the tab.

Well, that's basically what is going to happen, geographically speaking rather than temporally, with the opt out provision for states. This was an integral part of discussions, as I remember them, about Welfare back in the day. We always heard about how people from low welfare states would move to get welfare in high welfare states. We hear about women going across state lines to get abortions. We hear about citizens travelling to Canada to get treatment and drugs. We hear about "high tax" citizens going across state lines to get the cost benefit of "low sales tax" states. But suddenly we hear nothing about the individuals whose state's opt out of the public option? I'd suggest we hear nothing about it because a) fears of mass population movement for welfare purposes were wildly overstated by anti welfare people b) people just don't have the option of moving and c) its not sociall and politically convenient to talk about widening the gap between modern, humane, welfare states and the old former slave states and territories.

Another reason we hear nothing about individuals and families voting with their feet to get into states with a good standard of living and a good safety net because individuals and their health care needs have been largely ignored in this debate. Who has brought up the needs of the uninsured and the underinsured? The DFH's, the fringe, MoveOn, and the rest of the leftist weirdos. The stories that these groups have collected reveal the odd fact that people need health care coverage regardless of their income level, regardless of their employment situation, and regardless of the profit margins of their insurers. In fact, generally speaking, people need more health care as they get progressively less profitable for insurance company coverage. They need more health care as they take on "risks" like getting raped, or assaulted in domestic violence, or while living sexually, or having children, or getting older. Sometimes, as we now know, they need more health care when they take on the "risk" of being "fat" as a breast fed four month old. Individuals and families in low coverage states will continue to get low coverage and continue to need high coverage regardless of the compromises that Harry Reid and the Democrats are willing to make on their behalf. This is going to be a regional "compromise" that echoes the compromise over slavery that poisoned the first half of our life as a country.

The semi independence of our States has been the bane of this country since its inception. But never more so on questions of civil rights, women's rights, and health care as a right. What gives Republican Senators, or Centrist Democrats, the right to declare that individual citizens in their states can't choose a low cost, permanent, form of health care? Do they have the right to opt their states out of Social Security, or Medicare, or the tax system generally? Why is this a decision that gets made at the state level? Its not as if states are guaranteeing coverage to their citizens, as they do with a public school system. Its as though states were refusing to set up a free public school system and insisting that the only educational options were private, high cost, religious schools.

Its time for the Democrats to grasp that national initiatives must be national in scope. Health care choice is the perfect place for that argument to be made. Individuals require health care coverage regardless of their age, station, or location. They need progressively more health care coverage as they age, or the sicker they get. Allowing some states to "opt out" of the struggle to cover all citizens is identical to allowing private, for profit, insurance companies to cherry pick high paying/low cost, healthy people and while shoving the sickest off onto Medicare and Medicaid. Just as we are trying to prevent a situation in which the neediest have to go to expensive emergency rooms we should be actively working to prevent the situation in which the neediest drive across state lines to establish residency to get more generous benefits than their own states will cover. Not because we don't want to see everyone covered but because we don't want red states to free ride on the rest of us. This is so obvious a point that you can expect no one at the top level, the White House say, to make it.

aimai

Why Is This Even a Question?

From Firedoglake:

On the Rachel Maddow Show last night, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) publicly delivered a message that is likely not to sit well with Senate majority leader Harry Reid. Schumer basically said it was completely up to Reid if he wanted to put a public option in the combined Senate bill that is brought to the floor. (The HELP bill contains a public option and the Finance bill does not.) Schumer also said if Reid puts a public option in the Senate bill, it would not be removed and likely become law.

Well, first leader Reid has the option of putting [the public option] in the final bill. If he puts it in the final bill, in the combined bill, then you would need 60 votes to remove it, and there are clearly not 60 votes against the public option. And so we’re urging him to do that, and he is seriously considering it. Once it passes the Senate, if that were to happen, it is in the House bill, it is in the Senate bill, and it would have to be in the final product. So, it is very important to see if the public option is in the bill leader Reid puts together. He hasn’t yet made up his mind, but many of us who believe in the public option are urging him to do so. So far, we are getting heard.

The message is pretty simple. Reid has the power to pass a public option. If the public option is killed in the Senate, the blame rests squarely on Reid. The question is, with a very tough election coming up, does Reid want to be know as the man who killed the public option?

All true, of course. But remind me again why this is even in question? Obama, supposedly, wants the Public Option. The Public wants the Public Option. A majority of the Democrats in the Senate and the House want the Public Option and the Votes are even there for the Public Option. Can someone explain to me in what universe there is, or ever could have been, a question about Reid putting it into the Senate Bill?

The same universe that we've been plumbing for signs of intelligent life for the last nine months. The universe in which Rahm and the White House didn't bargain away most of the goodies at the start by accident, but on purpose. The Universe in which the Republicans insist on total accountability within their party and the Democrats never do. The Universe within which when major, powerful, political figures refuse to use their power to get something done you kind of have to assume they don't want to do it.

In his book "The Great Derangement" Matt Taibbi has a fascinating account of the horse trading around the war funding and the timeline to get out of Iraq. He argues that in order to get language indicating that there needed to be a timeline into various bills a whole lot of moolah and perks were given away to wavering congressmen and senators. After the timeline was used to leverage their bargaining power the timeline was dropped, but the perks and the goodies stayed in the bill. Isn't this exactly what is happening, in a double reverse twist, in the Senate Bill? It may be a strategy that, ultimately, backfires. But if Reid doesn't put the HELP public option in the final Senate Bill, or doesn't force the sixty Democrats to vote for cloture, and in the meantime pays off Snowe, Lieberman, and all the other wavering Dems for their "support" we will have exactly the same situation Taibbi describes. A good bill, a good bill with the Public Option, will have been dangled in front of the public as the reason we had to massage Snowe, Lieberman, Collins, Baucus et al... to get their "support." But suddenly they get to keep the goodies--like committee assignments and a seat at the table--but the Public Option, like the Timeline, will be dropped.

Some of us have been saying for quite a while that Obama's super deep game was too deep for a quite straightforward question of ends and means. Isn't this the proof? That Reid can even, for one moment, quite publicly, toy with the idea of leaving the Public Option out of the Senate Bill speaks volumes.

aimai

It Should Never Have Been Played Out In Public This Way:

John Amato and everyone else I read is cautiously optimistic that yesterday's weird pavane in Max Baucus's hearing went as well as could be expected. I've seen piece after piece analyzing the exact implications of this vote, or that, or this statement, or that. Harkin says a few days ago that we have 51 votes in the Senate as a whole for the Public Option. Nelson's moronic statement to his constituents that no vote will be legitimate without 65 votes is evidence that he is trimming and will vote for a Public Option, maybe. Schumer is cautiously pleased that sheer, righteous, reason and hard facts were enough to partially embarrass a few Dems to switching their votes even though Landrieu and Lincoln and others are still voting against Democratic initiatives and Baucus himself is still voting against his own party.

I just don't get the optimism here. The Democratic Senators who have been signaling, semphoring, bitching, whining, and all but screaming that their interests are not their constituents interests, that their votes are not democratic votes but industry votes, are *not reliable* when the vote gets to the Senate Floor. They can continue to be intransigent, if they want, and if its worth their while. And if its not worth their while because they are wholly owned subsidiaries of the insurance industry then its still not going to be worth their while--in fact its worth more to them--to vote no, or to support a filibuster, at the last minute.

The White House and the Democratic Party as a whole have accepted, for way too long in this process, the notion that there could, or should, be some deference paid to Senatorial position, or status, or even to the notion that these Senators were independent, moral, actors. There has never been any logical, moral, or political reason why a Democratic Senator in a majority party should ever have deferred to the interests of Corporate America or sided with the minority Republican party--not rhetorically and not really. Never. From the get go the White House and Schumer, qua head of the DSCC, and Reid as Majority leader should have insisted that there would never be *any* breaking of ranks on the Public Option. Not only should Baucus never have been allowed to negotiate privately with the Republicans but it should never, ever, have come to the point we saw yesterday where Democratic Senators voted down any Democratic Amendments to Baucus's bill.

Please don't explain to me that Blanche Lincoln, for instance, is "in trouble" in Arkansas. I don't care. And neither should anyone else. She should have been told she would have to take a bullet for National Health Care and if she took it graciously she'd be rewarded after. Or supported more heavily in the eventually Senate fight. But either way her personal fortunes are not my problem.

I look at what happened yesterday in the Senate Finance Committee and I think that, as usual, the Democrats are either too caught up in the process, or too stupid, to grasp that a public hearing and a public committee meeting is a show trial, not the place to hammer out a compromise. Schumer and others think they "won" by shifting a few votes publicly? I think we "lost" because it was clear that the Democrats are pretending that their counterparties--the Republicans and Blue Dog Dems--are acting in good faith and can be reasoned with. They can't. And the same thing is going to happen on the floor of the Senate if the Democrats don't wise up and start playing hardball behind the scenes. They have allowed the few industry friendly Dems, like Carper and Lincoln et al, to hold the stage and attack the Public Option. They have allowed them to essentially piss all over the very idea of a national plan, and a national party. If we proceed to the attempt to merge these bills on the floor without taking care of this problem--the problem of dual loyalty and betrayal--we are going to find ourselves surprised by the fact that we lose our "sixty votes" and perhaps even our 51. We are already losing the public battle for the legitimacy of our policies because of our continued insistence that the Carper's, Nelson's et al be allowed to speak for our party.

Edited to Add:

I see that Joe Sudbay agrees with me.

Edited to Add:
This is what I'm talking about.

Can this Possibly Be True? Or, If True, of Whom is It True?

According to Huff Po the Dems are finally figuring out that the battle for Health Care is entirely on their side of the Aisle and the push for Cloture has begun in earnest. However the party still seems to be under the impression that there is some real world electoral reason why their most intransigent, right wing, members are refusing to simply commit both to cloture and to voting for a popular and important party priority--ie the actual bill. Tad Devine explains to us that "people" lose seats over "procedural votes."

"People have lost seats on procedural votes," said Tad Devine, a long-time Democratic strategist. "That is what happened in the 1994 election, when President Clinton's economic package went into law and a number of Democrats in the House lost their seats... But if you are talking about one or two people who are well established, they can oppose legislation on the merits but allow it to come to a vote and I don't think that's enough to cost them a seat."

I just find that impossible to believe. For one thing, as usual, it assumes a static world in which Republican propaganda is naturally let to fly free and the Dems can't even marshall enough gumption to stand up and proclaim the value of what they are doing. Certainly if the Party as a whole doesn't publicly back its initiatives and brag about their value and demonstrate their value to the voters people who merely stand on the sidelines and spit may not pay a price for that intransigence and people who vote with the party won't reap the benefits electorally. But that is merely to say that the Dems must be prepared to actually, you know, run on their record instead of running away from it.

But, more to the point, I find that impossible to believe of the people--like Landrieu, Lieberman, Conrad, Nelson, etc...who are in question. These are simply not liminal people politically. Or, if they are, voting *for* cloture and *no* on the actual bill just seems to be a recipe for suicide by some other means. Anyone know the actual history of the '94 lost seats? Way, way, way, more was going on than could be captured in "procedural votes."