Even though I favored passing the gutted Senate health care bill, I am heartened by the noise some progressives are making in opposition to it. Without such noise, there would be no hope to improve the bill, or much hope of getting better health care legislation in the future. In keeping with the basic principle of the Overton window, there has to be prominent, public left-wing disagreement with Democratic policy, or else the national political discussion will never move to the left.
The degrees of acceptance of public ideas can be described roughly as:
- Unthinkable
- Radical
- Acceptable
- Sensible
- Popular
- Policy
The Overton Window is a means of visualizing which ideas define that range of acceptance by where they fall in it, and adding new ideas that can push the old ideas towards acceptance merely by making the limits more extreme.
Progressives looking to defeat the bill from the left are currently in either the "acceptable" or "sensible" stage. While it is pretty amazing that they have even been able to get that far in such a short period of time, they have not moved onto the "popular" stage just yet. That is why efforts like these are bound to fail, and fail spectacularly:
We also dedicate ourselves to Defeating Progressive Caucus Dems who vote for HCR without a Public Option @keithellison #p2 #fb
Such proclamations are necessary both to continue moving the national political discourse to the left, and in fostering a much needed culture of primary challenges. However, with only 16% of self-identified Democrats favoring defeating the bill (and many doing so from the right), the beliefs backing up those proclamations still have a long way to go before they become electoral winners:
In the first months of 2010, one of my main projects will be working on primary campaigns against incumbent Blue Dogs and Conservadems. These campaigns will include, but are not necessarily limited to, Marcy Winograd against Jane Harman (Blue Dog), Regina Thomas against John Barrow (Blue Dog), and Joe Sestak against Arlen Specter (recent Republican, current member of Evan Bayh's Conservadem caucus). Given the numbers quoted above, it does not take a genius to conclude that all of these primary challengers would be at a real disadvantage if they argue against the health care bill, especially if the incumbents vote in favor of it.
Primary challengers already face in terms of money, name ID, and establishment support. These challengers cannot leverage unpopular positions as compensation for those disadvantages. The only advantage progressive primary challengers can consistently have is to articulate and represent the hopes and dreams of the Democratic electorate when an incumbent Democrat has failed to do so.
There may come a time when, for left-wing reasons, defeating a bill like the one that passed the Senate becomes a popular position among the Democratic rank and file. However, that time is not going to be 2010. As it moves closer to becoming law, liberal and Democratic support of the bill is going up, not down.
The only viable progressive primary challengers we are going to have next year will be candidates who backed the bill even though they thought it had a lot of room for improvement. By the same token, the only Democrats who I hope vote against the final health care bill are center-right incumbents who face primary challenges from their left. A vote like that will make my--and I hope our--efforts to defeat those incumbents much, much easier.
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