All the noise from the right about Obama being a not-so-crypto-socialist or communist or Marxist has had its desired effect: Obama now seems willing to drop the public option from his health care reform package. But everyone who always saw Obama for what he is—a dogged centrist who knows how to game the system—already knew that the public option would likely be off the table during the initial rounds of reform. Thoughtful folks knews that Obama would play politics—that he would float a plan far more ambitious than he could push through Congress—that his concessions would be scripted from the start, consisting of provisions that he knew to be untenable in the present political climate but which, after becoming familiar through repetition, would sound less extreme the next time they became fodder for public discussion.
Such are the dictates of his technocratic fancy.
What makes the conservative response to his policies particularly dumbfounding is that he’s flashed his incrementalist credentials numerous times—most saliently in his treatment of the GLBT issues—and yet conservatives respond like he’s always playing for the whole pot when, in fact, all his talk of high stakes is intended to distract them from the fact that he’s penny-anteing them into poorhouse. In short, conservatives are giddy because they’ve “prevented” him from winning as big as he talks even though he’s the only one leaving the table with anything in his wallet.
Tempted as I am to expand on all the apt metaphors here—deaths accomplished by a thousand cuts that produce ghosts who proudly crow about not being beheaded, or defeated generals bragging about transitory victories in a long war—but as conservatives have provided me (and Obama) with better material, I can cut to the chase. Consider what the conservative movement currently considers a win:
- Conservatives lie about the existence of “death panels.”
- Liberals cave to public outcry and eliminate “death panels” that never existed from an inchoate version of the Senate’s health care reform package.
- Conservatives declare victory.
I remember playing similar games as a child. I would:
- Pretend there were Imperial Storm Troopers in my closet, who I would
- Defeat by dint of Force and flashlight, before
- Declaring victory over the gathering forces of darkness.
The difference being, of course, that because there were no actual Storm Troopers in my closet, my imaginary victory entailed nobody else’s actual defeat; whereas those who boast of victory over imaginary “death panels” have, in fact, suffered both tactical and rhetorical losses. Any provision short of a “death panel” that crops up in future iterations of health care reform will fail to rouse the ire of the conservative base to the boil it’s at now. They have, in short, diminished the rhetorical effectiveness of future complaints. Sarah Palin has allowed conservatives to feel the thrill of victory amid their agonizing defeat, and they love her for it.
I anticipate the response to this post from those to my right will be that I’m reading Obama’s mind—that I can’t possibly know what concessions he would or wouldn’t have made had it not been for the conservative opposition. Fair enough, I would say, were it not for the fact that I know something they don’t—a truth that the collective oedipalizing of their eyes with stakes named Ayers and Stalin has blinded them to—and that is, simply, that Obama is a centrist; that his entire career is accurately characterized as being centrist; that even his published utopian yearnings show that this is a man who dreams centrist dreams right down the middle. This is because I recognize that the center is the equivalent to zero on a number line that looks like this:
So how do I know Obama’s a centrist? Because I’m dialed up to eleven and annoyed by what I can’t hear.
(x-posted.)
The Edge of the American West 
35 comments
August 16, 2009 at 7:25 pm
Ahistoricality
My only quibble — you know I have to quibble — is that the median of US politics has been in negative territory since well before the Billary debut: I’d put it in the early to mid Reagan years, myself.
My real problem is that you’re mistaking a tactical maneuver — portraying Obama as Che — for the heartfelt beliefs of more than a few. Making centrists look like leftists is precisely what has shifted the public in a conservative direction.
August 16, 2009 at 7:26 pm
blueollie
The public option isn’t dead yet. My guess is that he is demonstrating to the public (and therefore to the blue dogs) that the Republicans are not going to go along with anything.
Hence the blue dogs will have a bit more cover to back the Democratic bill.
August 16, 2009 at 7:56 pm
SEK
My only quibble — you know I have to quibble — is that the median of US politics has been in negative territory since well before the Billary debut: I’d put it in the early to mid Reagan years, myself.
I neglected to include a key: those are actually millions of, you know, political units I’m measuring there.
My real problem is that you’re mistaking a tactical maneuver — portraying Obama as Che — for the heartfelt beliefs of more than a few.
I don’t think I am. I’m saying that they were bound to disappointed because they mistook a centrist for a leftist, which is why all the conservative nonsense about him being a Marxist and what-not was so misguided.
The public option isn’t dead yet. My guess is that he is demonstrating to the public (and therefore to the blue dogs) that the Republicans are not going to go along with anything. Hence the blue dogs will have a bit more cover to back the Democratic bill.
That’s the eventually of which I speak. I think it’s dead for the moment, but it’ll revivify itself—or be revivified—at some future point, after the conversational goalposts have shifted from “sheer lunacy” to “merely obtuse.”
August 16, 2009 at 8:35 pm
Vance
And as several have said, the half-loaf compromise us progressives fear we will have to choke down, hardly willing to examine its details so far short does it fall of our reasonable hope….is well to the left of what crazy Howard Dean was proposing four years ago. Someone’s being gamed, and it may well include us.
August 16, 2009 at 9:36 pm
felix
This is so darned smart.
August 16, 2009 at 9:44 pm
Vance
I believe that, in SEK’s chart, leftness increases to the right.
August 16, 2009 at 9:46 pm
Ben Alpers
The “news” about Obama and the public option is even less remarkable than you indicate, SEK.
Obama (and other administration spokespeople) have said nothing about the public option in recent days that they haven’t been saying all along. They’ve always said that they favor it but that it’s not essential. That’s still their position. Every time they repeat it, a few progressive Obama Koolaid-drinking fantasists express shock that the administration is dropping hardcore support for the public option, support that it in fact had never expressed. And plenty of media try to make mountains out of these molehills. But as far as I can tell, the administration’s latest position on the public option is not only an unsurprising development….it’s not even a development at all.
Back when I felt that Obama was a less bad option than Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primary, and when I actively supported Obama as a lesser evil in the general election campaign, I always said that there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that we’d get real healthcare reform. This was not only because Obama is a centery-centery centrist (though he is), but also because both major parties are bought and paid for by the insurance industry.
I actually remain today just a sliver more optimistic that we’ll get real reform than I was last year (and to be clear: I thought the glass was empty, but there appears to be a drop of water in it). In all likelihood, however, at the end of the day I’ll unfortunately be able to say “I told you so.”
August 16, 2009 at 9:51 pm
Ahistoricality
both major parties are bought and paid for by the insurance industry
Among others.
Scott, I wasn’t quibbling with your units, but your chronology: you put “Since Clinton” on the chart, which I think puts the responsibility in the wrong hands.
August 16, 2009 at 11:01 pm
serofriend
I’m saying that they were bound to disappointed because they mistook a centrist for a leftist, which is why all the conservative nonsense about him being a Marxist and what-not was so misguided
I’m no blue dog, but I have been waiting for a few weeks now for the Obama Administration to elucidate several key points of the bill (for both personal and, from a historical standpoint, intellectual reasons). I’m not so much disappointed as I am frustrated.
August 16, 2009 at 11:36 pm
andrew
I’m disappointed that Obama seems to have been elected the leader of all legislative efforts at health care reform, rather than just president. His administration isn’t set on the public option, fine. But someone in Congress should be, so that even though it likely won’t pass this round, it will be something more than just “the public option” – which currently seems like a name for a policy so unlikely to pass, it’s not worth describing except in vague terms – when it comes up again in the future.
It’s an idea that needs to be made familiar so that fewer people feel threatened – by which I mean worried it will eliminate their current coverage if they have any, or some similar worry, not personally physically threatened – and that means someone needs to take it up in the media. (Maybe Kennedy would have done this. Or a still Senator Clinton.) Of course some people will always feel threatened, or at least say that’s how they feel, but (I’d like to think that) not everyone is totally unreachable. We can laugh at people who want the government to get its hands off Medicare, but at least they have Medicare. I’d be fine with some people wanting the government to get its hands off the public option in a world with a good public option in existence and accepted by lots of other people.
And now someone will probably come along and point out that there are people in Congress who are set on a public option, but that casual observers – like me – don’t hear about or from them in the news media that often.
August 17, 2009 at 12:08 am
Mario
I am tired (I get up for my $11.54 per hour job in 6 hours) but I completely fail to understand why dropping the public option is on the table.
Any system that forces poor Americans to buy into an insurance plan is *worse* than the current system. Any system where you can get in trouble for going to the hospital (i.e., for not having insurance) is *worse* than the current system.
Any system without provision paid for out of general tax dollars for health care is actually worse than the current system.
Why? Because I can show up now at the public hospitals in New York, Boston, San Francisco and pay what my income allows me to pay–that is, very little. Most public hospitals have a sliding scale. What happens when I get caught by the hospital as someone who hasn’t paid an insurance company (or, right, co-op, uh-huh) because I already live hand-to-mouth?
The fact is that poor and brown people do not want to be found by the government–and that poor and brown people will stay away in droves unless they are treated like full citizens; that is, will get care and not be subjected to bill collectors and legal punishment for going to a doctor for the rest of their lives.
But there is zero push back on what this means for the working poor, or worse, the unemployed poor. How do you pay for any private insurer on $300/week? This plan is unconscionable. Oh yes, right, COBRA, like that works for the poor.
August 17, 2009 at 1:00 am
nick
why is “American politics since Clinton” a point on the spectrum? shouldn’t it be the label for the spectrum itself?
August 17, 2009 at 1:07 am
aschup
Interesting analysis, but this:
Any provision short of a “death panel” that crops up in future iterations of health care reform will fail to rouse the ire of the conservative base to the boil it’s at now.
seems to greatly underestimate the level of maximum stupid incoherence of which the wingnut base is capable.
August 17, 2009 at 5:33 am
dana
Ezra Klein has been arguing that although the reform would be better with a public option, reform without a public option could still be good. For what it’s worth.
(Plus, the linked article has one Senator saying that he can’t pass it, not Obama saying anything definite. So… it’s the same theater that’s been going on for the past few weeks.)
August 17, 2009 at 7:46 am
Ben Alpers
Ezra Klein has been arguing that although the reform would be better with a public option, reform without a public option could still be good. For what it’s worth.
This sort of argument–which Nate Silver of 538 and publius of ObiWi have also made–is part of the endgame of killing off the public option: soft supporters of it telling hardcore supporters of it that it’s unnecessary.
There is a perception, right or wrong, that Obama needs to sign something into law, or both he and Democrats in Congress will take a major political hit. And this perception is the biggest weapon in the arsenal of both sides of the debate over the public option. People (effectively) opposed to the public option like Ezra Klein will argue that Democrats cannot afford to oppose a bill simply because it doesn’t contain a public option. Around sixty (maybe more) House Progressive Caucus members will vote no on any bill that doesn’t contain a public option while asking Senate Dems and House Blue Dogs whether they can afford to vote against a bill just because it contains one.
This is a staring competition.
August 17, 2009 at 9:32 am
Chris
Ezra Klein isn’t opposed to a public option, he just prefers a bill with no public option to no bill at all.
There is no “killing off the public option” because it was never alive in the first place. That’s SEK’s entire point – it was a stalking horse for the things that *actually might be passed* now that they’ve been redefined as moderate, not like that scary ultra-liberal public option socialist takeover of medicine thingy. The actual issue is whether inflexible devotion to the public option will kill the entire bill or not. I would prefer not. So would Klein. So, I believe, would Obama. When, a few weeks or months from now, Waxman comes out of the conference committee saying “This is the best deal we could get and it’s this or leave things the way they are”, I’m prepared to believe him – even though I expect that that deal probably won’t include a public option.
The bill will not be as far left as coastal urban academics would prefer because some of the Senate represents places like Nebraska, Montana, and Wyoming. Places without very many Americans, but with 2 Senators each. In the really long term, that problem can only be solved by demographic change or reform of the Senate itself (including state-splitting plans that make the Senate more representative of the country), but in the short term it can’t be solved at all and that’s the reason for all the sausage-making.
August 17, 2009 at 10:00 am
SEK
In all likelihood, however, at the end of the day I’ll unfortunately be able to say “I told you so.”
Funny story, Ben: when I searched the site for references to Obama as a centrist, 90 percent of them came from your comments. You’ve been vocally mainlining political reality for some time now, and have totally earned the right to say “I told you so.”
And now someone will probably come along and point out that there are people in Congress who are set on a public option, but that casual observers – like me – don’t hear about or from them in the news media that often.
Someone has to be leading those committees, right? Obama’s made himself the face of this initiative, I think, because he learned from the Hilarycare debacle: you can’t have subordinates take the point unless you want to see some slaughter.
And as several have said, the half-loaf compromise us progressives fear we will have to choke down, hardly willing to examine its details so far short does it fall of our reasonable hope….is well to the left of what crazy Howard Dean was proposing four years ago. Someone’s being gamed, and it may well include us.
Could you explain what you mean here, Vance? I know I’ve heard Dean himself say somewhere that this was a more effective package than what he helped implement as governor, but I’m fuzzy on the details of what that was. (Although, any trending of the discourse to the left is fine by me.)
I believe that, in SEK’s chart, leftness increases to the right.
That’s because we’re positive, baby!
why is “American politics since Clinton” a point on the spectrum? shouldn’t it be the label for the spectrum itself?
No complaining about poorly labeled joke charts! Seriously though—or unseriously but accurately, if you will—what I meant there was that the overall political discussion has shifted so far rightward that, as I mentioned in my previous post, where once we debated about whether a war was just, now we’re debating about whether a preemptive strike is necessary.
[I]t was a stalking horse for the things that actually might be passed now that they’ve been redefined as moderate, not like that scary ultra-liberal public option socialist takeover of medicine thingy.
Shift the discourse, and the policy will follow. Absolutely. I think the public option eventually will too, by the by. Just not yet. Ideally, what Obama thinks is that once people see that this works—once they understand that the complaints about the British system aren’t attacks against the whole, but minor annoyances about a system they otherwise love—he’ll be able to go whole hog with the public option.
seems to greatly underestimate the level of maximum stupid incoherence of which the wingnut base is capable.
I thought about this, but I don’t think so: “death panels” is so tightly ratcheted that there’s no way to let go without stripping the bolt, as it were.
August 17, 2009 at 10:14 am
Vance
Could you explain what you mean here, Vance? I know I’ve heard Dean himself say somewhere that this was a more effective package than what he helped implement as governor, but I’m fuzzy on the details of what that was.
I was thinking of Ezra’s account of the plan Dean pushed in his presidential primary campaign.
And further, even if we think that what we want is “too far left” to be what succeeds this fall, and we’re willing to imagine settling for something more “centrist”, we shouldn’t let on, even to ourselves — we don’t play our role right without fearing that outcome.
August 17, 2009 at 10:16 am
Ahistoricality
state-splitting plans that make the Senate more representative of the country
My working theory is that our love of round numbers is going to override any good sense: the number of states will never exceed 50, because everyone can remember that we have a hundred senators. Eventually, we’ll have to round up the House to a round 500, too.
August 17, 2009 at 10:20 am
Ben Alpers
There is no “killing off the public option” because it was never alive in the first place.
I suppose I simply disagree about this, while noting that this is perhaps the single most effective meme to kill off the public option.
As for Klein’s position on this…
Old Leftists used to be infamous in their use of the adverb “objectively” in phrases like “objectively fascist” to describe people whose action’s encouraged fascism whatever their self-description. The Old Left certainly overdid this usage, but at its heart was a political reality. Ezra Klein can claim to be in favor of the public option, but when he repeatedly writes posts whose very point is to discourage those who insist on the public option, he is objectively opposed to it.
The only way we get a public option at this point is if Congressional Progressive Caucus members make it impossible to pass any bill that does not contain a public option. I think this is a long shot, but it’s possible. We know that Obama will sign a bill with a public option (though he doesn’t insist on it). There’s no guarantee that any future president–Republican or Democrat–would do so. The best possible way to kill off this last chance at a public option is to convince progressives to settle for a bill without a public option. And that’s been the focus of Establishment Dems like Klein over the last several days (and in some cases for longer than that).
By the way, Chris, while I am an academic I am neither coastal nor urban, fwiw. And polls show as much as 76% of the American public favoring Medicare for All (i.e. single payer). The problem in this case is not Senate apportionment or Americans Not Like Us® (a favorite bogeyman of coastal, urban types), but is rather our political elite, who actually tend to be rather more like coastal, urban academics than the majority of the great unwashed who’d like access to Medicare before they retire.
Although the beast has been bloodied by the picadors on the hard right, the coup de grace to the public option, this time around, will be delivered not by yahoos from flyover country but by folks like Ezra Klein (UCLA ’05) and Nate Silver (University of Chicago ’00).
August 17, 2009 at 11:04 am
Ben Alpers
Somewhat more subtly, Matt Yglesias–who at least recognizes the power of House Progressives to kill a bill–lays out the case for settling for a bill without one
Two thoughts:
1) It would be fascinating to see the correlation among Democratic bloggers (and pundits in general) between support for dumping demands for the public option now and support for the war on Iraq in 2002-2003. My guess is it’s pretty high.
2) Part of Big Media Matt’s sorta case for dumping the public option is this:
Given that adding a robust public option into the mix would reduce costs, if you set up a system without a public option wouldn’t you be able to add the public option in later years as an uncontroversial application of the reconciliation process? It seems to me that doing so would count as a 100 percent legitimate deficit reduction play. The public option concept also polls substantially better than does health reform as a whole. Under the circumstances, the odds for securing 50 senate votes for adding one strike me as pretty good.
But all of these things are just as true today as they will be in the future. Like so much of what passes for progressive politics these days, the idea that this will be easy sometime in the future is dangled as a pseudo-argument for accepting that it’s impossible now.
Oh look….here’s Barack Obama himself doing it on this very issue in 2003:
I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that’s what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.
Of course, this move is a bit trickier now because Democrats not only control the White House but have overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress. So Yglesias’s future what-if isn’t even a what-if. It’s just the wild hope that when the exact same set of circumstances that pertains today pertains again in the future (this is, I might add, itself a rather optimistic assumption), they will somehow yield different results.
August 17, 2009 at 11:41 am
dana
part of the endgame of killing off the public option: soft supporters of it telling hardcore supporters of it that it’s unnecessary.
Look, it’s been a pretty busy morning, I didn’t mean to kill off the public option in between working on papers, honest! Come on. I’m not part of any endgame and I suspect Klein isn’t, either; I am wondering whether affordable universal coverage is achievable without a public option. (Don’t several European countries have a private set-up like this?) This is a desperately important issue for me & mine, and personally, I will take imperfect health reform over the godforsaken status quo because the status quo effectively means I’m uninsurable at the levels of coverage I need.
That said, what I’ve read seems to suggest that the bulk of the cost control was working through the increased competition of the public option. No use for a mandate that one can’t afford.
Unfortunately, I’m not an expert in health care policy and the media are too busy wanking out process stories. But my question was legitimate: if there isn’t a public option, what does its job?
August 17, 2009 at 12:12 pm
Ben Alpers
Don’t several European countries have a private set-up like this?
I’m not sure about this. Many continental European countries don’t have single payer, but they do have a universally available public plan that is supplemented by private alternatives (this is the system in Germany and, I believe, France, e.g.).
I do seem to remember reading somewhere that the Netherlands, which had a system like this, recently got rid of their public option, but I don’t know how that’s worked for them, nor do I think that such a situation (in which there was a public option of long standing that was then eliminated) could really be a model for public-option-free healthcare reform here.
August 17, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Vance
The counterexample of the day is Switzerland (here and passim).
August 17, 2009 at 1:09 pm
politicalfootball
Scott gets this wrong, I think:
And:
But the reactionaries get this – after all, one thing they understand is the peril of slippery slopes. They knew that FDR had to be kept from getting Social Security passed, because if you let that happen, sooner or later you’re talking universal healthcare.
And they know that Obama can’t be permitted to make healthcare accessible to all, because ultimately that will lead to mental health services becoming universal, which, if you think about it, really is effectively a program of genocide against the teabaggers. It could wipe ’em out.
August 17, 2009 at 1:13 pm
SEK
But the reactionaries get this – after all, one thing they understand is the peril of slippery slopes.
They know this abstractly, and usher slippery slopes out willy-nilly, but that doesn’t mean that the terms of the debate aren’t changing. GC attributes it to the Overton Window, which approximates what I was getting at: they’re so fixated on preventing Obama from winning the pot, they don’t realize that’s exactly what he’s doing, only incrementally instead of all at once. I’m not saying they won’t be talking about slippery slopes so much as they can’t tell that’s Obama’s made one just for them, and they’re happily sliding down it.
August 17, 2009 at 1:26 pm
Josh
This sort of argument–which Nate Silver of 538 and publius of ObiWi have also made–is part of the endgame of killing off the public option: soft supporters of it telling hardcore supporters of it that it’s unnecessary.
publius? The guy who wrote these two posts?
August 17, 2009 at 1:40 pm
Chris
dana: This is a desperately important issue for me & mine, and personally, I will take imperfect health reform over the godforsaken status quo because the status quo effectively means I’m uninsurable at the levels of coverage I need.
I believe that by Ben’s definition at 10:20 am, he is objectively in favor of your death from lack of medical treatment. Killing an unacceptably centrist bill, after all, means perpetuating the status quo.
This is one of several reasons I don’t agree with this use of “objectively” (apparently meaning roughly “what he/she advocates would have this result, whether that’s what he/she intends or not”) — it leads to describing people as being “objectively” in favor of things they don’t actually favor. It also means you can’t describe anyone’s positions without a long argument about practical consequences (or, better yet, predicting the future) and you certainly can’t just accept their own description of their own intentions even if it is given in good faith.
That’s what I call poisoning the well.
If you want to argue that Klein or anyone else is misguided or being manipulated, go ahead, but that kind of inflammatory language doesn’t contribute anything useful, IMO. (I hope it is understood that I responded in kind only as a reductio ad absurdum of the method of non-reasoning.)
Ben Alpers: Although the beast has been bloodied by the picadors on the hard right, the coup de grace to the public option, this time around, will be delivered not by yahoos from flyover country but by folks like Ezra Klein (UCLA ‘05) and Nate Silver (University of Chicago ‘00).
Ezra Klein and Nate Silver have zero votes in the U.S. Senate and cannot deliver any blows to anything. The genuine obstacles to the public option are the marginal(ly) Democratic Senators from such fine and sparsely populated states as Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Arkansas. If you think the presence of yahoos in the electorate of those states doesn’t influence their Senators’ positions, I strongly disagree. On the other hand, the opinions of progressives are not likely to carry much weight with someone who represents a state that has very few progressives in it. Most Senators from states with lots of progressives are already on board.
Klein in particular has repeatedly made the point that the structure of the Senate opposes any action, and especially any even slightly controversial action. When your beast fails to clear the Great Wall of China in a single bound, you don’t need to look around for who kneecapped it.
This argument is the equivalent of the conservative argument that predicting a quagmire in Iraq is equivalent to wanting our troops to fail. It confuses a pragmatic examination of the realistically possible options for a statement of goals and aspirations.
Ben Alpers: The only way we get a public option at this point is if Congressional Progressive Caucus members make it impossible to pass any bill that does not contain a public option. I think this is a long shot, but it’s possible.
IMO, the only way we get a public option out of the current Senate is if the Orbital Mind Control Lasers rewrite a few alignments. (If you want to get down to the details and start listing individual Senators, Nate already started that game. Feel free to point out specifically where you think he’s being too pessimistic.) If the CPC acts as you suggest, the resulting deadlock will lead to no bill being passed at all, which is the worst of all the plausible outcomes from a policy standpoint and probably also very bad politically.
On the other hand, if the public option really is that popular, than the current Congress is about as hostile to it as you could expect a Congress to be, and future Congresses are more likely to be in favor. The long-term demographic and political trends heavily favor progressives (the Senate can still stand athwart history and yell “Stop!” for a while because it systematically underrepresents people who live in urbanized states, but there are several elderly Republicans, or in some cases Dixiecrats turned Republicans, hanging on through incumbency whose seats will probably go Democratic when they retire or die, and hardly any states actually moving to the right). So this isn’t the last chance for the public option – it’s the first chance. Any bill that establishes exchanges – regardless of who can participate – lays the groundwork for adding a public plan to the exchanges and/or expanding participation later, not as a what-if, but as “this will work within existing institutions that you already know and don’t fear”.
August 17, 2009 at 1:42 pm
Ben Alpers
You’re right that publius is a slightly tougher case than Klein. I think publius’s support of the public option is a little more robust. But he has repeatedly said (in the posts to which you link, for example) that the public option is not the centerpiece of reform and is negotiable.
Since I think real reform requires (minimally) a robust public option and the only way to get a public option is by making it non-negotiable (specifically in the House), I also think that, despite his good intentions, publius is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
(To be fair to publius’s position, he feels that a robust public option is simply not going to happen, and that a flimsy and uncompetitive public option–which is a possibility in his view–is not worth fighting over. While I do question his sense that the Democrats should get something in return for dropping a flimsy and uncompetitive public option, my main area of disagreement is whether a reform plan without a robust public option is worth supporting at all. He thinks that’s all we’re going to get and that’s still better than nothing. I disagree, marginally, with the former conclusion and strongly with the latter.)
August 17, 2009 at 2:14 pm
Ben Alpers
If you want to argue that Klein or anyone else is misguided or being manipulated, go ahead, but that kind of inflammatory language doesn’t contribute anything useful, IMO. (I hope it is understood that I responded in kind only as a reductio ad absurdum of the method of non-reasoning.)
I understand exactly what you’re doing, but I actually think that while this kind of reasoning has its limits (hence my comment about Old Left overuse) in the case of Klein the causal chain is pretty short.
Ezra Klein is incredibly smart and very knowledgeable about the healthcare debate, but tends to think within a rather limited and static inside-the-beltway sense of the horizon of political possibility. In effect he thinks that while there may be solutions to our healthcare system’s problems (and he’d probably identify those as single payer or some sort of robust public option), none of them are politically possible. So we should settle for anything that is, on the margins, better than the status quo (see, for example, this piece from last month).
To the extent that getting a public option will involve progressive obstructionism in the House (and I don’t know anyone who things that it could happen any other way), he will be against it. He has already actively arguing against calls for an aggressive use of Senate rules to get a public option passed there (aggressive tactics which, it should be noted, Matt Yglesias supports….at least in the future). Klein’s support for the public option is, in effect, theoretical. In this, actual world, he is arguing against the only things that might in fact achieve it.
If the CPC acts as you suggest, the resulting deadlock will lead to no bill being passed at all, which is the worst of all the plausible outcomes from a policy standpoint and probably also very bad politically.
Here’s a place where we just disagree. I think some possible “reform” bills would be worse than the status quo. As for the politics: if failing to pass a bill would be deadly to Democrats, that would apply to Senate Democrats as well as House Democrats. And that’s the pressure that the House can put on the Senate.
I think you totally overestimate the power of grassroots yahoos over Democratic Senators from small, purple-and-red states. The pressure on Max Baucus and many other small state Senators is much more intensely from the special interests that fund them. Compared to large-state Senators, they are much more dependent on out-of-state dollars. And in Baucus’s case, he’s been richly rewarded by the healthcare industry.
The entire story of the failure of healthcare reform is a monument principally to the inability of public opinion to move policy when monied interests stand to lose. Yes, there is a substantial and enraged grassroots minority of the public that thinks that national healthcare would be a leap down the road to serfdom. But they are far from a majority and are not what’s killing this reform effort.
August 17, 2009 at 6:45 pm
Ceri B.
I think it matters a lot what context actions happen in. Two cases:
#1. All public options are abandoned as part a general conceding to Republican demands, in turn driven by the most extreme elements of their fringe constituencies. Mandates get pumped up, restrictions in insurers are all weakened, and it’s Medicare Part D in excelsis.
#2. Public options are given up as part of an aggressive, concerted response to Republican demands, other provisions in the public interest greatly strengthened, insurers thoroughly contained, no giveaways via mandate tolerated, and Republican intransigence held up for public scrutiny (and mockery).
If we were getting #2, I’d be okay with it. But the problem is that all the evidence I’ve got points to #1.
August 18, 2009 at 4:34 am
Uncle Billy the Un-Cunctator
Is it agreed by all here that we need and want universal healthcare? If so, enough of the subtle and impotent stratagems, and onto the end run. As it stands it feels like we’re on a 10,20,50 year path towards it, and people are getting sick and dying each day — you, your child, the person in the street you’ve never met. We don’t have time for all this dickering. Either we launch a massive PR campaign and convince people we need government to interfere with their medicare or we organize a 10 Million Person March and demand it (though one would imagine security would be a major consideration in this scenario).
Tick. Tick. Tick.
August 18, 2009 at 8:11 am
Chris
In this, actual world, he is arguing against the only things that might in fact achieve it.
You’re doing that “objective” thing again. What he is arguing is that progressive obstructionism *can’t*, in fact, achieve passage of a strongly progressive bill, and *therefore* it is counterproductive. It makes no sense to criticize his conclusion when arguing from different premises, without first engaging on the premises. If the insidery insider Ezra’s insidery knowledge of what is possible is *right*, then he’s not walking away from an approach that could work, he’s walking away from an approach that couldn’t work, which is a completely sensible thing to do.
In fact, the only way to attack his tactics is to first reject his evaluation of the political conditions and what is and is not possible. But if you do so implicitly and dismissively (“in this actual world”) rather than explicitly and with substance, you’re needlessly obscuring the real point of disagreement. The real point of disagreement is that your prediction of the outcome of your favored tactics is different from Ezra’s prediction of the outcome of those tactics. Not the desirability of the outcomes, but the outcomes themselves. And that’s an argument you seem strangely unwilling to actually argue.
The idea that we can get everything we want if we just want it hard enough, try hard enough, is a familiar one. It is often emotionally appealing. But it is not, in general, well grounded in reality. If you want to argue for the feasibility of any particular course of action you need to *argue* for it and not just intone that we can do it if we try. That works fine on five-year-olds, but adults ought to know better.
List the Senators who will support the public option rather than see progressives shoot down a moderate bill. (Personally, I bet a lot of red-state Democratic senators would love to crow about how they defeated the ultra-liberal wing of the party – they pretty much have to perpetually run against their own party to have a prayer of reelection in places like Nebraska. If not getting a bill passed at all is the price of this, well, *their* constituents were pretty ambivalent on the subject anyway.) If you can’t, then Ezra is *right* about the political feasibility of the public option in the current Congress and the only fights left to fight are to get an incremental bill that is better than nothing, and to elect more progressive Congresses in the future.
August 18, 2009 at 12:15 pm
nick
thanks for the clarification re. the chart, SEK; I know it’s a drag when people ask one to explain one’s jokes…..
Alpers over SEK and Chris by a TKO, I’d say.
I personally loathe the argument from maturity, of the adult perspective, since I view it as the key rhetorical device in promoting acceptance of how the Democrats have failed to fight effectively for left/liberal policies. Nice of Chris to invoke “five-year-olds”, just to make this perspective fully explicit.
Yes, American politics are dominated by a conservative political culture and influenced by corporate money; but neither of these forces is equivalent to a law of nature. There are political tactics that could put a lot of pressure on the Blue Dogs; there are options re. eliminating the filibuster–there’s a lot of evidence, certainly more than enough for reasonable fears, that the Democratic leadership is not going to “try hard enough.”
August 19, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Uncle Billy the Un-Cunctator
Either I’m almost as smart as young Ezra, or I’ve been purloined. Compare my comment above at 4:34 a.m. with this:
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/08/todays-must-read-ezra-klein-health-care-is-not-a-negotiation-but-a-campaign—-the-liberal-revolt.html
Is he as much of a “Progressive” as everyone thinks he is? Is he by chance related to Howard Klein, a director of the Orange County Federalist Society?
Just can’t help wonder about the authenticity of the Center For American Progress, with the huge money and personalities behind it… if it’s really not what it seems to be… (Not trolling. Genuinely interested)