| Replace "great presidents" with "great leaders". The problems facing the US are not unsolvable. They are not intractable. They are not beyond our abilities. Yet again and again, we find ourselves mired in a brand of politics that paralyzes rather than liberates us to solve our problems. The White House is the single most crucial bully pulpit in America and it has been badly underused by the current Administration.
More fundamentally, though, progressives have failed to provide meaningful leadership. In Unite and Conquer, Kyrsten Sinema argues that successful politics requires the ability to articulate core values and principles rather than defining and end result and defending it. In the health care debate, Democratic members of Congress and the White House failed at many levels to cast a compelling vision of health care reform. Instead, they cast a vision of bipartisanship. Here's the thing: faced with a hugely complex task of providing meaningful health care reform, these ostensibly progressive leaders focused their discussion and public comments on "bipartisanship" - as if passing a bill with bipartisan support were the most important value.
I've written before about the trap of false bipartisanship - the idea too often embraced by Dems that if people from both parties support a bill, it must be a good bill. This approach puts the horse inside the cart and wonders why we're getting nowhere. It's not that bipartisanship is bad in an of itself - but the mindset of so many Democratic leaders denies the reality that many of today's Republicans are simply not open to compromise and that some ideas are so bad or so absurd that you should not try to compromise with them. (I.e., death panels - Democrats seem to believe they can compromise with someone who is upset about a policy that has not been proposed - seriously that's madness.)
The problem with placing so much emphasis on bipartisanship is increasingly obvious - it allows the most conservative members of the Democratic party to dictate policy, while leaving the progressive wing of the party locked out of the process. By chasing Republican support so passionately, party leaders alienate the most passionate and dedicated members of the party's base. At the same, as we're seeing, it results in many of the best parts of legislation being tossed out to appease Repbulicans who are opposed to the basic concepts of the legislation any way and so don't care if the resulting bill is a bad bill.
In reviewing the health care trainwreck, the biggest issue is was summed up by Nate Silver:
If [the administration is] hedging a bit now, it's probably because they're hoping to temper the reaction some in the blogopshere. I don't blame them for wanting to do so. And I don't blame the blogosphere for being angry -- the White House did not provide much in the way of leadership on this issue.
In fact, the White House has consistently cut Nancy Pelosi off at the knees as she's tried to push for better legislation. The administration had a variety of options here and they seem consistently to have chosen the course that of failing to inspire moral courage in not shrinking from challenges. Barack Obama is an inspiring speaker, and his rhetorical gifts could have been employed in the health care fight and they have not been. The President failed to articulate an organizing vision, a central value around which the debate could take place.
Health care policy is complex precisely because there are so many competing interests. Insurance companies, health care providers, government agencies and programs, hospitals and clinics and of course patients and end-users. Without an organizing vision of successful health care policy, the debate descended quickly in a morass.
Knowing the health care reform is inevitable - our system is eventually going to crash - the White House should have brought Democratic leaders together, crafted a strong, organizing message, then began communicating it. Following Sinema's advice, I'm not talking about a policy outcome here, but rather a values message, something like:
"We believe all Americans should have access to regular, affordable health care and to affordable emergency health care as needed, and should be covered by affordable health insurance at all times during their lives."
Such a statement doesn't lock us into a specific policy (i.e. single payer or a public option or managed competition) but it provides a standard by which we can measure proposed policies. Will this make health care available to all Americans? Will it make it affordable? Will it make insurance affordable? This vision then becomes the centerpiece of communication about health care - it articulates core values (affordable, includes all), it allows room for creativity in drafting public policy, and most importantly, would allow Democrats to craft a unified message. It makes it safe for someone like Jim Matheson because you can advocate for the things in the vision without necessarily having to embrace a single policy position (i.e. "The public option is only of the ways in which this bill expands health insurance - it also creates private co-ops for people to pay into it.") The vision of reformed health care becomes the tent pole on which you hang the debate. Such a vision also allows you to play some rough and tumble politics as necessary. "What that's Senator Hatch, you say your opposed to affordable health care available to all Americans?" It forces your opponents into the position of either accepting your vision or of arguing for excluding some Americans from health care.
Good leaders are not afraid of the tough issues but they don't just run into them and do their bull in a china shop impression. They inspire moral courage by casting a powerful and compelling vision of what will happen after we confront the problem before us. The Obama White House has, genuinely, faced a host of complex and difficult problems that were not of their making. But the current mess in the health care debate was entirely of their making; they blew it. They failed to craft and articulate a compelling vision. They repeatedly missed openings to shift public debate in a favorable direction. The administration tried so hard to avoid the mistakes of 1993, they crafted an ineffective strategy from day one and now that it's going awry, they're going to have work twice as hard to get things back together. The signs that the administration is finally aware of the nature of the problem are encouraging. It may be too little too late at this point, but never underestimate the power of a good speaker articulating a compelling vision to shift the debate. Hopefully, the administration will have learned a valuable lesson - the campaign was successful because average voters got inspired and once inspired did amazing things - like elect a skinny kid with a funny name to the Presidency. It can work on public policy as well. |
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