Via Mark Matson in the comments, I have never been a huge fan of The New Republic, but I think Noam Scheiber has a real point in his column today. Obama needs left-wing criticism in order to have any hope of passing progressive legislation:
Prior to all the apoplexy on the left, the two poles of the debate were the president, who wanted a reasonable, fairly moderate set of health insurance reforms, but was nonetheless being branded a socialist or whatever, and a lot of lunatics on the right screaming about death panels and enemies lists and home invasions.
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...)
In the national debate, Obama now looks like the centrist voice of reason instead of an over-ambitious lefty (I'm caricaturing, of course, in the spirit of the cable-news coverage). Inside Congress, Obama may not get a public option, but if he doesn't, he was never going to get it. And now he can extract a ton of concessions in return, because he can point to a left-wing of his party that's ready to eat him alive for failing to deliver on it (whereas that left-wing outrage was largely hypothetical before now).
Since the November election, some of the more dyed in the wool Obama supporters within the blogosphere have taken great umbrage at any criticism coming at President Obama from the left. Having been a target of much of this umbrage myself, it sometimes even feels as though more anger is directed toward us critical lefties than even at Republicans. My best guess is that this is because such left-wing criticism smacks of betrayal and / or Naderism to some people. (Yeah, I know that I am sort of vaguely calling people out here.)
However, the current fight over the public option is a perfect demonstration of why such left-wing criticism is absolutely essential to any attempts to pass progressive legislation by the Democratic leadership and the Obama administration. If there had been no left-wing revolt to Sebelius's statements on Sunday, it would be far more difficult for the Democratic Congressional leadership and the Obama administration to justify not giving into right-wing demands. Lacking any Progressive Block demanding more progressive legislation, the Democratic leadership and administration would be practically forced to offer up even less progressive legislation than even the compromises they were floating over the weekend.
Mike Lux once told me an anecdote about then-Representative Bernie Sanders and President Clinton during the signing ceremony for the fiscal year 1994 budget. Before the ceremony began, he heard President Clinton telling Representative Sanders that he and other progressive members of Congress should have attacked the budget from the left more vehemently. President Clinton's reasoning was that such attacks would have provided his administration more room to push the legislation to the left, and less justification to give into demands from the right.
Two months ago, President Clinton himself told me a similar story. He said that he had read a lot of people online calling him a sellout, or something similar, for any number of reasons. Rather than being upset with this criticism, he said that he wished that sort of progressive media had been around to broadcast that left-wing criticism during the 1993-1994 health care fight. Once again, if that criticism had been both prominent and backed up with real power in Congress, it would have given him a lot more room to work on health care.
It is understandable that some progressives who worked very hard to elect President Obama get irked by left-wing criticism. Not all Democrats are on the left, not everyone buys into the same strategies as me, and criticism toward someone you personally identify with is irritating.
It is also understandable that not all Democrats and progressives will be on board with the Progressive Block strategy, since they are not comfortable with maintaining such an oppositional stance against either the Obama administration or the Democratic Congressional leadership. And make no mistake about it: the Progressive Block strategy is an oppositional stance. The entire idea is for Progressives in Congress to deny a Democratic Congress and White House something that Democratic leadership and White House greatly values unless they deliver something big for Progressives in return.
No matter these objections, in order to pass progressive legislation, both prominent left-wing criticism and powerful, Congressional Progressive opposition to a Democratic trifecta is absolutely necessary. In the current health care fight, the lack of such criticism and the lack of such a block would mean that the public option was dead in the water right now. Not everyone is going to like it, and some party higher ups like Rahm Emanuel may call it "f*ckng stupid," but any progressive ecosystem lacking such criticism and left-wing organizing is only a short time away from suffering a mass extinction.
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