Noam Scheiber:
Around the conference table at TNR, we've been saying for weeks that what Obama really needed was a group of equally vocal, equally zealous critics on the left, pulling the debate's center of gravity in the other direction. And, wouldn't you know, that's exactly what's happened over the last 48 hours. We've now got a pole on the left to match the intensity of the pole on the right. (Don't get me wrong: I'm not suggesting a moral equivalence between the two. As far as I'm concerned, the critics on the left are basically right and the critics on the right are either insane or deeply cynical.) From a sheer tactical perspective, I think the White House and the Democratic leadership in Congress have dramatically improved their position.
Out of the recent "death knell" has risen mobilized anger on the public option. This is an incredible opportunity. While Scheiber has said it gives the president bargaining power to wrest incredible concessions from the conservative Democrats should the public option be whisked away...I can't see the public option going anywhere - unless the president and Congress aren't counting on activist support to help pressure it through a vote. Frankly, without the public option, there won't be many folks on the phones or at the doors.
Klein - who has always played down the importance of the public option as something not key to reform, a sentiment I think is...well...foolish - goes further. He basically implies the "liberal revolt" in Congress and on Twitter, at ActBlue, on email, and on the blogs, is endangering reform:
With every week, and every month, that drags by, health-care reform becomes a bit less popular. At this point, disapproval of the president's plan -- if not of his plan's ideas -- outpolls approval. That's a function of the legislative process. Of stories about congressional infighting and of anti-change campaigns mounted by the opposition and of the risk aversion of members of Congress. Almost all major domestic legislation follows the same path of public approval giving way to public disapproval.
That makes it even easier for conservative Democrats and the mythical moderate Republicans to abandon the effort. And thus the effort gets abandoned. What usually happens next is that the opposition wins the following election and reformers spend the next 15 years lamenting all the deals they didn't take, and the country ends up with 10 million more uninsured, and 100,000 more needlessly dead, and so on.
First, anti-reformers will not necessarily win the rhetorical battle. As with any political narrative played out in the media, there will always be backlash to the original story. The Tea Baggers were media darlings because they were a nice backlash or "counter" to Obama's lopsided win and talk of a united nation looking for a collaborative political process. Now, there'll be another backlash, and I think we can see its genesis thanks to the Tea-Baggin' gun-toting lunatics who just happen to have ties to 90s-era violent radicals. (And who aren't unrepresentative of the kind of people Tea Baggers are - see Greer's testimonies for details.)
Secondly, this is the fight we needed to have. The threat to the public option woke us all up. Now there's something to fight for, and an enemy to engage. The right had the rhetorical and media advantage because they had the clear goal and the energy. We didn't even know what the reform was going to be. Now there's energy.
But the most important effect of this brouhaha is that progressive, Congressional Democrats have stood up and coalesced around this issue. They're fighting. That's good if, say, we need to do some retribution against those Democrats that block health care reform by, say, filibustering a Democratic president's Democratic bill.
The key to all of this is, of course, Max Baucus, who's sitting on the last bill in the last committee. As Klein explains, we need a Baucus bill before the legislative process can begin that could lead to a robust public option. But now, as Matt mentioned, even co-ops are anathema to Republicans, any chance at crafting a bipartisan bill have to be nil. So why is Max waiting? |
