Don't believe you discovered water because you walked outside in the rain

by: Chris Bowers

Tue Mar 09, 2010 at 14:30


Another day brings another lecture on negotiating strategy from Big Tent Democrat.  Once again, we are told that the right-wing of the party has received more concessions in health reform negotiations because right-wing Democrats were more willing to defeat the whole bill than were progressive Democrats:

The question was how to bargain with the people who wanted a bill passed (the White House) to maximize your bargaining position. Unfortunately, that required being willing to do something progressives simply were not willing to do - create the real possibility that no bill would be passed because of their opposition. Without that commitment, the progressives were sure to be the first rolled. And they were.

Well, duh.  As though this is some kind of deep insight that has escaped the feeble mental powers of the "village bloggers" that Big Tent Democrat so loathes and stands so superior over.

Since we are in the business of stating the obvious, let me state something else that is obvious: it order to be the party more willing defeat the bill if your demands are not met, then your base of support needs to be more willing to defeat the bill if your demands are not met.  No matter how easy it is to be cynical, political power still flows from appropriate leveraging of popular support rather than some Nietzschean struggle over the will to power.

A necessary condition for the success of the Progressive Block strategy is for voters in the districts of Progressive Block members to demand the defeat of legislation more than voters in districts of Regressive Block members.  With, at most, 17-18% of the country (that is the highest number ever recorded in any poll on the subject) demanding health reform legislation be defeated (not just improved, but actually defeated) from the left, lefties demanding the defeat of health reform legislation fail to form a majority of even the Democratic primary electorate in any House district in the entire country.  That such voters form a minority of the primary electorate in every single district in the country provides a willing Democratic leadership with enormous leverage over Democrats who seek, or threaten, to defeat the bill from the left.  And yes, we are dealing with a White House that is willing to crush Congressional Progressives who cross them.

Now, since the majority of Democratic primary voters in every district in the country want to pass health reform legislation, there is an opportunity to put real pressure on right-wing Democrats who are extorting demands out of the health reform legislation.  However, the White House has taken a complete pass when it comes to pressuring right-wing Democrats in such a fashion.  Further, not a single left-wing group has declared it will run primary challenges against right-wing Democrats who vote against health reform legislation overall.  (Primaries for opposing the public option, yes.  Primaries for opposing health reform overall, no).  This means there is effectively no pressure on right-wing Democrats to pass the bill, and only pressure on right-wing Democrats has come from corporate groups, large donors, right-wing media, tea partiers, and red district voters to defeat it.

To repeat: no matter how easy it is to be cynical, political power still flows from appropriate leveraging of popular support rather than some Nietzschean struggle over the will to power.  Popular support for killing the bill if it lacked a public option never rose to the level necessary to overcome a Democratic leadership willing to leverage the Democratic electorate against the Progressive members demanding a public option.  At the same time, popular support among Democrats for passing the health reform bill without right-wing demands was never leveraged against the Democrats making those right-wing demands.  Those two dynamics were at the very heart of the Progressive Block negotiation, and why it ultimately failed.

(Note: The level of opposition to health reform because it does not go far enough is actually very impressive.  This is the case even if, at most, it only rose to 17-18% of the population.  Just over one-sixth national support for a position like that is quite an achievement for the lefty organizations and media outlets who were advocating that position, given both the resources of the opposition groups they faced and the historically low percentage of Americans who say Democrats are not left-wing enough.  I personally was no longer engaged those efforts as of late September, focusing instead on other, different, strategies which also didn't work very well.)
Chris Bowers :: Don't believe you discovered water because you walked outside in the rain

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Don't believe you discovered water because you walked outside in the rain | 143 comments
No one buys your argument because it is not true. (4.00 / 1)
Perhaps, if you say it enough however you can turn into CW.
Can You Explain Yourself? (4.00 / 3)
There was certainly enormous support for the public option.  And had we had the capacity to mount a sustained campaign, it's possible that we could have rallied popular support to scuttle a bill that lacked it.  I certainly would have liked to see this tried.  

But I haven't seen a scintilla of evidence that anything approaching this was achieved.  So where's the flaw in Chris's argument?

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
I think may be you answer your own question (4.00 / 4)
The criticism by FDL and now Talk Left is precisely that the progressives in Congress did not mount an aggressive public effort to negotiate against various factions in the party, including against the president. Understanding bargaining power is solely what they are focused on. If Chris is not disputing this, then there is no dispute. However, it seems like wants to mount a defense of the progressives in Congress based on a rather thin argument over the polling data to say that "no bill would have happened."

This is factually false. The president's own pit bull, Rahm, announced at the start of all of this that they would do anything to get a bill. That was the progressives' cue to go all in on an aggressive stance.

Chris keeps responding there was not choice because there would be no bill is under the circumstances just common wisdom masquerading as truth.

Look, I keep saying this: I am not certain a more aggressive stance would have worked. I just don't buy the idea of Chris's arguments, which read like excuses. A few years back, people kept saying that the definition of insanity is the do the same thing again and again and expect a different result. Isn't that what progressives in Congress are doing? If not, how are they varying strategies to fit the circumstances?

This is the core point about negotiation. That the progressives went on auto pilot not testing any of their assumptions about bargaining positions etc. The irony is that each time they did push there were signs that it might have worked.  

[ Parent ]
Yes (4.00 / 1)
The president's own pit bull, Rahm, announced at the start of all of this that they would do anything to get a bill. That was the progressives' cue to go all in on an aggressive stance.

How and why that "cue" transformed into the "que" of incremental "reform" is a real question. It is as if the incremental route was predetermined and so the attempt was to fly under the radar and try to do the thing that least offended the centrists and conservatives.

I get your argument, but I don't really hold Chris fully accountable for setting the policy and strategy for the congressional Dems. In fact, he is to be commended for not dodging this issues you have so vociferously raised.

Regardless one parses the past, the only real value in revisiting history is to learn from it. Keep making the points about negotiation because these are critical, but one also has to think about how to find politicians and extra-political groups that can actually get to the postition of enacting those "superior" negotiating skills. "Superior" in quotes because its not that the leadership don't understand your point, rather that they are satisfied with incremental change because it is a low-risk approach (or so the political reality says). Low risk meaning they might be re-elected in a wave of anti-incumbancy.


"It sounds wrong...
     ...but its right."

[ Parent ]
I don't blame Chris for the choices of the Congressional progressives (4.00 / 2)
I do however think he has a different view of us as people outside of the Congress than I do. I don't think our job is to understand their plight. He seems to think , if I am not mistaken, that his role is to be reasonable. There is a time and place for that. There is also a time and place to make them sweat every little bit you can with whatever little influence that you have.

Also, I don't buy that their "low risk" strategy will work. Again, to me Exhibit A is MA , a state progressives should have won but didn't because the base in part was depressed. Unless one is going to argue that some how MA veered far right, there is really no other conclusion that makes sense. Thus, even the Congressional argument over winning is unsubstantiated assumption in this environment. There best bet for winning was to make the best policy they can to make people's lives better. As it is, they have very little to go into the fall with other than excuses. That's electoral problem in nutshell.

[ Parent ]
Stupak and his votes in the House are leveraging only their own will to power here (4.00 / 4)
I don't know nor think a poll has been done about whether anti choice voters are willing to see health care killed if they can't restrict abortion more.

I kind of doubt that's the case. Probably lots of anti choice voters are against the bill anyway.  So who knows what the anti choice voters who want a health care bill feel.

I don;t know but also Stupak doesn't know.  And he doesn't care,...he doesn't care if he has popular support or not.  To him that is irrelevant.  But he does have raw political power and raw political will.  And he says he has 12 absolutely crucial and essential votes needed to pass the bill.

He is using it whether or not there is popular support in the country at large or even in the districts.  

And while I understand Chris's argument, popular support is not the only or esseantial precondition for wielding political power.

"Incrementalism isn't a different path to the same place, it could be a different path to a different place"
Stoller

[ Parent ]
Voters only care about the results. Now the process (4.00 / 1)
The popular support argument relies on the idea that voters care whether a bill occurred due to progressives leveling threats or it passed by capitulation. I don't think either matter except for how it is actually going to harm or help peo.
[ Parent ]
Voters only care about the results. Now the process (0.00 / 0)
The popular support argument relies on the idea that voters care whether a bill occurred due to progressives leveling threats or it passed by capitulation. I don't think either matter except for how it is actually going to harm or help peo.
[ Parent ]
Yes (4.00 / 1)
That is exactly the flaw in Chris's argument--that a progressive legislator can or should threaten to (or actually decide to) blow up the bill only if s/he's at risk of being defeated otherwise.
[ Parent ]
Narcissistic Much? (4.00 / 3)
"No one" apparently means people who are not bruhrabbit.
[ Parent ]
No one means people outside of the dc bubble mindset (4.00 / 2)
As usual, the irony  with DC bubble thinkers is that what they try to label others is actually their problem. Here, the narcicism of thinking, for example, that negotiation is so exotic in DC that others can not figure out that progressives are doing it wrong.
[ Parent ]
Or does it mean (0.00 / 0)
"no one who thinks it's just a matter of will"?

So what is the path forward?  How will you get yourself or the right kind of negotiator appointed to do our negotiating?  What must or can we do to move your agenda forward?

If you can't tell us, then your advice doesn't have much value.

sTiVo's rule: Just because YOU "wouldn't put it past 'em" doesn't prove that THEY did it.

[ Parent ]
So, if I say to you don't rush into oncoming traffic, that's not valuable (4.00 / 1)
to you unless I physically prevent you from doing so?

That's good to know.  

[ Parent ]
Not a great analogy (4.00 / 2)
I don't need to tell you that I shouldn't rush into oncoming traffic.  That's just mindless repetition of general rules. If however, you tell me that the step I am about to take would put me in the path of oncoming traffic, that's useful.  Two different things.



sTiVo's rule: Just because YOU "wouldn't put it past 'em" doesn't prove that THEY did it.

[ Parent ]
The sad thing is you probably do think the analogy is not applicable (4.00 / 1)

[ Parent ]
Mindless repeition of general rules includes (4.00 / 2)
voting for Democrats because they aren't Republicans.   Mindless repetition of general rules includes caving in everytime someone thinks filibuster.  Mindless repetition of general rules includes being reasonable when nobody else is.  Mindless repetition of general rules includes pretending that the Democratic Party still represents working/middle class people.  

The Obama bill is a lie.  It isn't health care reform, it is expanded medicaid paid for with a middle class tax with new corporate welfare in the form of a mandate.  If this is the best Obama and the Democrats can do with a majority and a mandate, it and they deserve to fail.

I am so done with progressives caving that I quite frankly don't give a damn if they win or lose.  Burying a potato in my back yard in the full of the moon would have as much impact as supporting them.  

[ Parent ]
Can you present any evidence? (0.00 / 0)
Since your statement that "no one believes" is clearly false.  
[ Parent ]
Bruh might have used hyperbole but (4.00 / 4)
The bottom line is that nothing Chris says in this post changes any facts or minds.  Those of us who don't buy into the idea of taking the best you can get and giving up aren't going to change our minds because Chris finds one more rationalization for the same thing he's been saying for months.  It comes down to this, some of us are capitulators, some of us aren't, and some of us want to wait until we see what the final deal is before we decide.  I'm probably in the latter group.  But I have to say, I respect those willing to lose a battle in order to win the war more than those who give up when the first shot is fired.  

There is a bottom line on all of this.  When the final shot in this health care skirmish, and that's all that this is now, is fired, if we pass this bill, whatever that bill is will be what we get for the next fifty years or until the whole system collapses.  But if nothing changes, then the war will continue.

"Oh. My. God. .... We're doomed." -- Paul Krugman
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c...">http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c...">http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c...

[ Parent ]
Agreed (4.00 / 2)
I actually agree with this, at least spun the other direction.  To that means, I fixed a sentence for you:

It comes down to this, some of us work for the change we can get, some of us want to quit for a moral victory, and some of us want to wait until we see what the final deal is before we decide.

[ Parent ]
Then we don't agree. I'm capable of saying that (4.00 / 3)
But it was entirely different from what I said.  If a person fits into the capitulation group at this time I have nothing in common in principle or belief.  Sorry.  If a person has already made up his mind then he ran before the battle was over.  I see it this way, as long as the decision isn't over, I want the chance to bloody one more nose, kick one more ass, or flip off one more prick.  

In the end I suspect I will follow Chief Joseph.

"Oh. My. God. .... We're doomed." -- Paul Krugman
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c...">http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c...">http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c...

[ Parent ]
We do not suffer like true victims. (0.00 / 0)
Our chiefs are killed; Looking Glass is dead, Too-hul-hul-sote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He who led on the young men is dead. It is cold, and we have no blankets; the little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are-perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever."[4]

It is abject, unlike the "can't we all get along" translation it gets so often.

We have only begun to fight, even those of us that are no longer the children Chief Joseph wanted to find.

Tactical loses are not quite the same as wholesale slaughter. This was merely a betrayal, and possibly an unmasking. Decimation it isn't.


--

The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky

[ Parent ]
I chiefly against the assumptions that they make to arrive at their decision (4.00 / 3)
to capitulate. Often, not admitting that they are making unproven assumptions.  The other side doesn't want a bill is one of them. Part of the other side in this fight was the White House, and the White House clearly wanted a bill at all cost until recently.  
[ Parent ]
But... (4.00 / 1)
Those of us who don't buy into the idea of taking the best you can get and giving up aren't going to change our minds

I don't buy into that idea.  Giving up has never been on my agenda.

So this strikes me as a bit of a strawman argument.

The point here should not be seeing who can win a fight over who was wrong about what to do.  The point should be re-examining assumptions that lead us astray so that we can refocus going forward on the underlying agreements we have that ought to be more important than the things we've allowed to divide us.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
I would never put you into that category (0.00 / 0)
I don't see any strawman or suggestion of it.  I'm stating what I believe to be the main three mindsets on this blog regarding the support of passing this Senate bill.  A careful reading of what I said should lead you to think that I'm still on the fence.  I believe that it is too soon to agree with passing the bill, but I don't rule it out at a later date.  As it stands, if I were a Congressman, I would declare my opposition unless some changes were made.  I don't see the PO as a do or die.  Strong regulation of the private industry would interest me much more as well as the option for states to create their own public plans.  I don't think anything the present Senate bill adequately addresses those issues.

I don't see you or Chris as the opposition.  We might not be able to work together, but we all hope for the same outcome.  I just think that early capitulation will not get us there.  I'm not suggesting Paul, that you are in that category.    

"Oh. My. God. .... We're doomed." -- Paul Krugman
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c...">http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c...">http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c...

[ Parent ]
OK, would it surprise you to learn (4.00 / 1)
that I don't have any problem with Congressmen declaring their opposition even now, trying to extract some extra concessions?  God bless 'em I say.  

Just so long as they know when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em.  

And no, I have no firm opinion on when that is - and if I did, I wouldn't expose my bottom line.

sTiVo's rule: Just because YOU "wouldn't put it past 'em" doesn't prove that THEY did it.

[ Parent ]
Good post. (4.00 / 2)
This is not either or as some frame it. This is about negotiation of the best deal we can get, but with an understanding of what the circumstances are so that we can bargain for the best deal we can get rather than one that we bargain for because we are too afraid of assumptions that we ourselves make up that limit our outcomes. Regulation with strigent cost control on premiums is a mechanism I could get behind if it had real teeth and could not be politcized by later administrations.  But none of this fluffy stuff that the president likes to do where the actual policy is not anywhere near to the rhetoric.  
[ Parent ]
Has it never occurred to you (4.00 / 2)
that those of us who are saying "take what you can get on Health Care" view it PRECISELY as "losing the battle in order to win the war"?

sTiVo's rule: Just because YOU "wouldn't put it past 'em" doesn't prove that THEY did it.
[ Parent ]
Yes, it occurs to me that you believe that. (4.00 / 2)
[ Parent ]
Then why insist that we see it as a victory? (0.00 / 0)
yes, I realize that Obama and his administration will want to spin it as a victory.  I understand that and good luck to them, but I don't have to play along with the spin and I don't.

There's entirely too much unsubstantiated opinion on the part of the kill the bill crowd that says that those who disagree are enthralled by Obama or hope he will save us.  I assure you that I harbor no such illusions and I find it annoying that you insist, despite a complete lack of evidence, that I do.

sTiVo's rule: Just because YOU "wouldn't put it past 'em" doesn't prove that THEY did it.

[ Parent ]
because your limitations are not the point of getting ideas out there (4.00 / 2)

[ Parent ]
I wonder if there was a way of saying this that didnt expose you more than sTiVo (0.00 / 0)


--

The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
[ Parent ]
This Sort of Sums It Up: (4.00 / 2)
To repeat: no matter how easy it is to be cynical, political power still flows from appropriate leveraging of popular support rather than some Nietzschean struggle over the will to power.

I'm probably a good deal more sympathetic to the ends of BTD, Lambert and others of like mind, but I've never been able to understand their belief that it's basically a matter of will, as you've so aptly pointed out.  There simply is no short-cut to long-term hegemonic struggle, though it certainly would have been a significant help if Obama hadn't been such a huge disappointment, even to someone like me who never endorsed him.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

"basically a matter of will" (4.00 / 1)
That, to put it charitably,, Paul, is a  mischaracterization of lambert's position.

To quote lambert from today referring to Chris's post [emphasis lambert's]

The opportunity cost here is that what Bowers and his coterie could have been doing...was educating the public on what the best policy would be, and changing the definition of what's politically feasible.

Only Ian Welsh, as far as I could see, educated readers here on policy (see, for example, here and here). No one else here who posts grappled with these issues or even acknowledged them.

So, lambert was engaging and advocating in the health care reform realm what you're recommending with regard to the "hegemonic struggle" in a way that Open Left generally did not.

[ Parent ]
hegemonic struggle (4.00 / 3)
I've never been able to understand their belief that it's basically a matter of will, as you've so aptly pointed out.  There simply is no short-cut to long-term hegemonic struggle,

not a matter of will. a matter of actually fighting the hegemonic struggle instead of pre-compromising to fight for neoliberal policies with neoliberal thinking. losing the immediate battle is not the biggest loss - it's that a whole year and more was spent 1) advancing the neoliberal frame instead of the progressive frame 2) not educating the readership about the policy issues involved and 3) not supporting the progressive grass roots healthcare activists and 4) not even engaging with their intellectual leaders (people like elizabeth warren's coauthors, the first executive director of the nejm, and many many more -- real intellectual power houses who could have served as a resource at the very least even if there wasn't agreement.

since your focus is on the hegemonic struggle, i'll just quote a little of george lakoff et al. from 2007 (my bolds):

http://www.cognitivepolicyworks.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/logic-of-the-health-care-debate.pdf

But people using a neoliberal mode of thought do not view a market-driven, profit-maximizing approach as a surrender of any kind. They deeply believe that progressive moral principles can be served through neoliberal methods and forms of argument. We want to stress, however, that the consequence is dire whatever the motivation. The failure to articulate a clear progressive morality in favor of more technocratic solutions to profit-maximizing  markets puts the progressive cause at a disadvantage on health care and other policy issues as well. It doesn't matter whether one is simply trying to avoid conservative and insurance company opposition or whether one truly believes in one's heart that the market will cure us. The progressive moral basis for providing health care for all-empathy and responsibility, protection and empowerment-is not stated. As a result, Americans don't get to hear the progressive moral basis for extending health care to all Americans, and they don't get to decide whether they agree with that moral premise. Americans only hear the conservative moral view. That moves them in a conservative direction, not only on this issue, but on all issues.

There is an additional danger.  As a strategy, surrender-in-advance puts advocates in the weak position of starting negotiations by going half way or more toward what the other sides want. No one would think of taking that approach when bargaining in the marketplace.  

\

two and a half years ago and they nailed it.

oh and about the "political power still flows from appropriate leveraging of popular support "

i agree. that's one of the reasons this matters:

Two-thirds of Americans support Medicare-for-all part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6.

[ Parent ]
This has been a core belief (4.00 / 1)
since the very start of the rise of the blogsphere: liberals aren't tough enough and if they were things would be very different.

There is truth in this argument, but is surely not applicable in every instance.  In my experience believers in this position don't really care what evidence you present to the contrary - it is a core belief that defines them more than a belief in a particular policy.  This makes exhanges like the ones in this thread mostly pointless.  

I will go back to a question I posted here months ago: is it moral to oppose a Bill that will save a significant number of lives?  The answer for most in DC was no, and as I have written here before everyone in the negotiating rooms knew it.  The truth is the vast majority of Democrats will answer that question as no was well.  So the debate was pulled right as we chased 60 votes.  In the end I think we might have had a better result if we had 57 votes instead of 60, because it would have been clearer reconcilliation was the only way forward.

The larger issue, though, is that battles were lost inside the conference rooms that were actually won with the larger public.  I posted a rather lengthy review of the polling here a couple of days ago, and the major conservadem victories were won on issues where their position was demonstrably less popular (excise tax, size of the subsidy, the employer mandates, the public option).

I find that troubling.

[ Parent ]
Are you actually arguing (4.00 / 5)
that Dems in Congress are going to vote for the PO-less package, not because of fear of what passing nothing would mean for the party and not because of pressure from the White House and not because of a genuine desire for reform, (however weak) but because of pressure from constituents?

Put another way, are you actually arguing that Congressional Dems would pay a big political price from constituents by holding out for a PO?

I'm not sure there's a single politician in American thinking, Damn, I really want to vote against this bill but I'm afraid my constituents will punish me if I do.  

Put still another way (4.00 / 4)
No pol -- left, right, or center -- would pay a political price at the ballot box for voting against this bill, unless perhaps he/she were the deciding no vote. If there was a groundswell of support for this bill, Pelosi would already have the votes in her pocket.

This stat is interesting

With, at most, 17-18% of the country (that is the highest number ever recorded in any poll on the subject) demanding health reform legislation be defeated (not just improved, but actually defeated) from the left

But it doesn't capture the lack of passion for the bill among most Dems, nor does it capture the mood of the country as a whole. Here's a stat from Drew Westen:

The polling data are clear that 75% of voters, despite the concerns that led them to support health care reform so strongly during the 2008 campaign, now prefer to start from scratch or kill the bill.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

To be clear, I'm not blaming you, Chris, or any other activist who tried to pressure Dem pols to support the PO. You did what you could. They said they'd oppose a bill w/o a PO. They lied.


[ Parent ]
Assuming all this is true (4.00 / 4)
Then this really points out that withholding votes wouldn't help progressives get the PO.  I actually think there are plenty of conservadems who were hoping the progressive block would hold, just so they'd have an excuse to not vote for the bill and blame the progressives.

Hardball negotiating tactics only work when the other party is committed to getting something done.

[ Parent ]
Bingo! (4.00 / 3)
This hits the nail on the head:

Hardball negotiating tactics only work when the other party is committed to getting something done.

The implicit foundation for health care reform was that something significant had to be done.

But moving forward on the mechanics without constant making the implicit foundation explicit was a formula for disaster, just waiting to happen, and a big chunk of the reason why is that it relieved conservadems--as well as Republicans--of the pragmatic motivation to be "committed to getting something done".

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Who do you think the other party is? Do you include the White House? (4.00 / 5)

[ Parent ]
Negotiating with the White House (0.00 / 0)
For the record, I agree with you about negotiating with the White House.  Hard line negotiating tactics would definitely work with them -- and they were working!

But I don't believe that is sufficient.  But then I'm very risk adverse at this time with this bill.

[ Parent ]
It is true a more aggressive stance would have brought greater risk (4.00 / 5)
but it may have also increased the chance of reform rather than the bandage that we have put on gapping wound.   Definitely more than strategies that have not served us well already in the past.

It would have at least defined the parameters of left versus right that are not there now in the national conversation. Many people view this bill as left leaning or progressive.

I just don't think we are doing the public any favors to set up this chimera.

[ Parent ]
Back to view of HCR (0.00 / 0)
And of course, it all gets back to one's view of the current bill.  I think the current bill is fantastic upgrade to our health care system, even though it falls very short to where I think this country needs to be.  The status quo sucks that much.

You think it is just a bandage that doesn't qualify as real reform.

Ironically, this only proves my point about willingness to walk away.  Since you don't like this bill anyway, you are willing to walk away, which makes it much easier to go for a much harder bargain.

I actually think the watered down level-playing-field public option doesn't do all that much in the short term.  Long term, it is a big deal because it is another platform to build upon.  Same can be said for Medicare Buy-in.  But neither is worth the cost of the full bill.

[ Parent ]
I think anyone who thinks this bill is a good bill doesn't understand (4.00 / 1)
health care economics, something I have followed very closely since my mother passed away. So, we are not disagreeing over your opinion versus mine. We are disagreeing over your factual understanding of what the issue is.  
[ Parent ]
But that is opinion based upon your personal needs (4.00 / 2)
Yet you build the argument for why this bill is not in the best interest of the country.   Then we must assume that you couldn't give a shit about my needs, or Bruh's needs, or Paul's needs, etc., etc.,   So how do we build consensus?  If it's all about what is best for me, how are we different than the GOP or the neolibs?

"Oh. My. God. .... We're doomed." -- Paul Krugman
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c...">http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c...">http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c...
[ Parent ]
My needs? (4.00 / 1)
Where did you get that idea?  My health care is fine.  It is the country as a whole that I'm worried about.  And all the individuals without health care outside of the emergency room.

I may be wrong, of course; it has happened before.  But I'm completely focused on what I think is best for everyone, not myself.  Quite honestly, I haven't even looked into this plan from the point of view of how it effects me, personally.  (Not that I don't know stuff, of course.)

[ Parent ]
When I say that this is a bandage, that's because the underlying (4.00 / 1)
economic issues that leaves our system in crisis and that will continue to eat up GDP will only continue. That lost capital means more deaths due to wastes (now in a new form of waste) and a middle class that will continued to be squeezed and in decline. This bill changes nothing for most people.
[ Parent ]
When You Start Talking GDP, Even Single Payer Is Inadequate (4.00 / 2)
Single-payer can cut out the fat of the insurance companies--which is a tremendous boon.  But it doesn't take care of the endogenous growth of the health care sector (as opposed to the "health care" part of the financial sector).

The only thing that would seem capable of that would be a VA-style national health service.  And folks like BTD and Lambert never seem to realize how inadequate even single-payer is when you step back and look at the really big picture.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Yep (0.00 / 0)
Single payer is a one-time savings; it doesn't "bend the curve" all by itself.  It does, of course, put in a system that makes it easier to implement policy that does bend the curve, but it doesn't just happen automagically.  The current bill also makes it easier to implement changes to bend the curve, just not quite as easy as single payer.

The advantages of single payer are huge, but lie elsewhere.

[ Parent ]
It is still cheaper. I am not a purist (0.00 / 0)
There are various strategies that can be used to legitimately drive down cost even if they are not the best plans. My problem is that none of those plans are on the table in any realistic sense.  
[ Parent ]
Medicare (4.00 / 1)
Most of the cost savings come within Medicare.

...gives it full marks in six areas: forming insurance exchanges, reforming Medicare Advantage, value-based payment for Medicare, creating an independent Medicare advisory board, fighting Medicare fraud, and investing in IT.

[ Parent ]
a system of stringent price control not easily touched by the political (0.00 / 0)
process could also reduce costs, but that's not really on the table either and from what I understand would not reduce cost as much. Despite what you say below, I don't pretend to be an expert. I do however pay attention to the various models that seem to work else or those models that are pointed out to me that work. We aren't apparently doing any of those models. Not in full or in a way that will guarantee cost control in any meaningful way.  
[ Parent ]
I'm Not A Purist, Either (4.00 / 3)
But if we want to control the growth of health care sector costs, then we're going to have to go beyond single payer to do it. Single payer will be just one more stop along the way.

That's one reason that I get irked by folks who denigrate the public option for not being the Holy Grail: Neither is single-payer.  It's certainly closer to the Holy Grail than the public option is.  But it's still not the Holy Grail.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Considering that Obama cut a deal with big hospitals, too... (4.00 / 2)
I don't see us moving from "fee for service" to "fee for outcome" anytime soon.
[ Parent ]
Obama's Not Going To Solve Anything (4.00 / 3)
It should be obvious by now that Obama's a "part of the problem" kind of guy, not a "part of the solution" kind of guy.  So progress is going to depend on building power to the left that will force changes he would not otherwise support.  This is just one of countless examples.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
controlling healthcare sector costs (4.00 / 1)
there is a difference between $350 billion / year and $25 billion over ten years that has NOTHING to do with any holy grail. it's just math.

That's one reason that I get irked by folks who denigrate the public option for not being the Holy Grail: Neither is single-payer.  It's certainly closer to the Holy Grail than the public option is.  But it's still not the Holy Grail.

the criticisms i've read of the public option are not that it's notthe  holy grail -- it's that it's stupid policy and depends on a the fallacy of market competition delivering good results. if you were so convinced about putting forth a public option policy that saves money for the healthcare sector, why couldn't we have been promoting hr 193?  or at least identifying the characteristics of what might make for a viable po and promoting them?

nothing about the hcan campaign made sense to me if healthcare was the priority and not preserving donations for the dems from big insurance, big pharma, etc.


[ Parent ]
For The Umpteenth Time (0.00 / 0)
The logic of the public option as Jacob Hacker devised it is as a transition to single payer.  Forcing people off health insurance that they like and trust generates political resistance that's avoided by the public option.  

Of course, Obama would try to gut it so that it won't serve that function.  That's just another battle that has to be fought along the way.

Is this an ideal way to do things?  Of course not! But it is a way that comports with American political history.  It's not based on fantasy.  That doesn't guarantee it will work.  There are no guarantees in politics.  And I'd be pleased as punch to go faster, should the opportunity arise.  State-level single-payer plans, for example, would be a great way to speed things along.  I'm all for that.

But I've had it up to hear with folks misrepresenting what the arguments are.  Leave that to the Republicans & conservadems.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
transitions (0.00 / 0)
The logic of the public option as Jacob Hacker devised it is as a transition to single payer.  Forcing people off health insurance that they like and trust generates political resistance that's avoided by the public option.  

i don't buy that argument (given that the only polling support i've seen for it is lake's). but putting that aside, how is hacker's plan designed as a transition to single payer? hr 193, on the other hand, could be a transition to single payer.

that's why i think it was just marketing. if a transition to single payer from a public option was what was wanted stark's hr 193 was already written, introduced and had cosponsors. that hr 193 wasn't the flagship bill of po advocates -- who instead had no bill and no policy criteria for what it would take to make a successful po -- tells me that progressives were punked. not pleasant, but better to live and learn than not.

http://seminal.firedoglake.com...

[ Parent ]
Single Payer (0.00 / 0)
would be a one time significant savings.

Health Care costs are rising everywhere - Single Payer or no.  The reason for this is complicated, and primarily a result of "cost desease".  See Baumol's equation.

[ Parent ]
This Doesn't Explain (0.00 / 0)
Why other country's health care sectors aren't growing in costs like ours.

Baumol's equation explains too much--it explains costs increases in other countries that don't exist.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Now We're Back To Where We Agree 100% (4.00 / 3)
Which is where my primary interest is right now.

I'm substantively right there with you, whereas in process terms I see things more like Mark.

A weird combination?  Perhaps.  But, hey, I grew up in California, what can I say? Pad Thai & fish tacos are my idea of "traditional cuisine."

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
I gave you a 4 due to the fish tacos. (4.00 / 1)

[ Parent ]
Right Back At You! n/t (0.00 / 0)


"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
In the years I have been in (0.00 / 0)
blogsphere, arguments over tactics are far more heated than arguments over policy.  Does anyone here not support Single Payor?  

Tactical arguments are in the end usually not subject to definitive proof.  As my law partner likes to say: the anger an argument generates is inversely related to the amount of actual evidence available to resolve it.  

[ Parent ]
"The Other Party" Was Different Folks At Different Times (4.00 / 1)
Obviously, the WH became "the other party" wrt to some battles.

Just as obviously, this was stupid as shit, given what a mess they've made of things--even just strictly from their own POV.

But those of us who see this quite clearly can't just assume that others will magically see it our way.  It takes a whole lot of work to make that happen. Especially with the "First Black President" (TM).

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Yeah, I am very clear (I think) on what last year was (0.00 / 0)
it was the first year of the presidency of a popular president. No one, including the Blue Dogs, knew what kind of power he would have. The conservative smartly took the risk of pushing the boundaries while progressives feared taking the necessary risk. Last year was the opportunity to strike since we were always negotiating against a new president. Even if the negotiation became a battle between a popular president and progressives, the effect would be policies that are further on the side of reform than what we see now. I believe the battle was always between the president and progressives. The Blue Dogs, the Conservadems, and even more so, the GOP were always foils to this battle. By allowing this president to hide in the dark, we favored him rather than the interest of passing a reform bill. It is part of the reason I say that the focus should have been on an up or down vote rather than on pointless whip counts. LEt the light of day force out who is for or against the PO.  
[ Parent ]
I Think This Is Too Simplistic A View (4.00 / 1)
Not that it's wrong, but there were more factors involved, IMHO.

I believe the battle was always between the president and progressives.

I certainly think this was true.  But remember the spat that David & I got into with Nate Silver when we disputed his assertion that Obama was a progressive?  And a good deal of folks are still confused on this most basic point.  It's damned hard to negotiate effectively with someone who's fooled everyone into thinking he is you.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Well that's part of age of branding we live in (0.00 / 0)
I say the same of pragmatism that when you think about it is not all that pragmatic but DC labels it as such.  
[ Parent ]
Stealing Is The Tribute Vice Pays To Virtue (4.00 / 1)
Some say it's hypocrisy.  But since every decent idea, concept, phrase or whatever ends up getting "appropriated" by folks with the exact opposite intent--and why should "pragmatism" be any different?--I'd have to say that stealing beats out hypocrisy by a country mile.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
I'm with on this one Bruh (4.00 / 1)
Either I'm reading them wrong or Paul and Mat don't get that the negotiation was never with Republicans or Blue Dogs.  It was with the White House.  The whole negotiation was whether or not Obama would get off his lame ass and fulfill any of his campaign promises. It might have helped if he would have  used the same pressure he has been using for the last week to get a better bill 8 months ago.   Unfortunately, his campaign promises were never meant to be taken as honest.  So the point they are making to you is that who do you negotiate with?  The fix was in before the 2008 election.

At this point, I don't give a rat's patoot which way it goes.  I'm just sitting here waiting until the next two elections so I can get even.  They may not care what I think, but let's see if they like how I vote.  

"Oh. My. God. .... We're doomed." -- Paul Krugman
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c...">http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c...">http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c...

[ Parent ]
It Was MUCH More Complicated Than That (4.00 / 1)
There never was a singular "the negotiation".  

It would have been so much simpler if there were.  In which case I would have agreed with you 100%, instead of maybe 85%.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Well, maybe not (4.00 / 2)
But the idea of a real threat -- which Chris says is obvious but which people seem not quite to be getting -- is that you are willing to take the whole thing down, that you decide that health care reform w/o a PO isn't it worth it. This has become a despised position, but for a while it was commonplace in the netroots. Clearly there were some people who meant it, and others who were insincere, and still others using that position as a bargaining chip.

It's a little annoying that people who've have come to decide, or who always believed, that reform w/o a PO is still worthwhile are angry at the people who meant what they were saying all along.  

[ Parent ]
negotiating around the PO (4.00 / 2)
The two really big chips on the table for HCR were the mandate and the public option.  Everything else was just nibbling at the edges of the health insurance crisis.  Forget the Medicaid expansion, the pre-ex condition changes, the anti-rescissions rules -- all those things are small potaotes and could be taken care of in different ways other than via omnibus health care reform.  

To get the public option we had to have a mandate, to shortstop the problem of adverse selection.  The mandate was the poison pill we'd all swallow to get the public option.  ("the public option" meaning a real public option big enough to provide leverage in the market place, i.e. the original 130 million enrollee p.o.)  

Insurance companies wanted the mandate.  The mandate was supposed to at least provide some "balance" against the arrival of this new competitor, the public option -- yes, more competition for the ins. cos. but a bigger potential customer base.  The public option was the poison pill they'd swallow in order to get the mandate.

Now we are with just the mandate and no public option.

Kill-the-bill people aren't being purists.  They're saying:  why does one party still have to swallow the poison pill and the other doesn't?  Start the negotiating again, this time in public with some transparency to ensure some level of good faith bargaining.  If insurance companies want a mandate, there has to be a real public option.  If we want a public option, there has to be a mandate.

When it comes to making real change to health care, everything else in this bill is just static.


[ Parent ]
Mostly agree (0.00 / 0)
except that I think the order in which the policy developed was different (at least from the Obama administration's point of view).

Obama wanted to end the insurance abuses (preexisting conditions, rescissions, discrimination, etc.).  This is the one thing I think he's sincere about.  Part of what makes me think so is his sob story about how his mom had to fight with insurance companies in the last months of her life.

To end those abuses, we have to have individual mandates, to avoid adverse selection.

Once we have mandates, we have to have subsidies.

Here's the crucial fourth link: once we have mandates, we have to have a public option to make sure insurance companies don't just run away with our money.  And this is a point that the pass-the-bill crowd has a hard time accepting, for some reason.  They think it's okay to just let the insurance companies get control over everyone's money without any kind of alternative.

Kill-the-bill people aren't being purists.  They're saying:  why does one party still have to swallow the poison pill and the other doesn't?  Start the negotiating again, this time in public with some transparency to ensure some level of good faith bargaining.  If insurance companies want a mandate, there has to be a real public option.  If we want a public option, there has to be a mandate.

Totally agree, except I think it may be possible to have at least a limited public option (e.g. a limited Medicare buy-in) without a mandate.  The public option may have to charge back-premiums for those who wait until the last minute to get care, to avoid adverse selection.

The total lack of simple, comfortable ways to do this makes me think that the only real way to get universal health care is Medicare for All or a mandate + heavily-regulated non-profit health insurance companies.  Anything "in between" isn't a stepping stone; it's a side detour to a health care cliff, with hungry insurance companies waiting below.

[ Parent ]
This was always the problem (0.00 / 0)
some believe the PO wasn't make or break, some believed it was.  

Still another group didn't really believe that it was, but pretended they were.  Markos is in this group - as can be seen by his attack this morning on Kucinich.

You are right to argue that what appears to be an arugment over tactics is in fact an argument over policy.  The truth from the very beginning is that in the House and Senate there were very few members who believed that the Public Option was worth taking the Bill down.  60 House members signed the letter pledging not to vote for a Bill without a Public Option.

How many of them actually meant it? Five?

[ Parent ]
I think the point is to make the other party want to get something done (4.00 / 2)
Many, many bosses hate the idea of signing a union contract with their workers.  And yet, many of those bosses end up signing those contracts.  Why?  Because, as much as they hate the idea of the contract, they hate the idea of a strike even more.

We never had a strike threat in this campaign.  The other side -- whether that's the elected GOP, or the White House, or teabaggers, the Blue Dogs, or Big Insurance, or whoever -- just weren't afraid at all of an outcome in which the left ends up with nothing.  The White House clearly wants something passed, but don't care much about what it is.  The rest of them are just as happy with the whole thing blowing up.

No strike threat = no contract.

[ Parent ]
Agreed, But (4.00 / 5)
It takes a whole lot of cracker-jack organizing to make a strike threat credible.  And that's really the crux of everything so far as I'm concerned.  It was disheartening that no credible strike threat was made. But it was even more disheartening that we weren't in a very good position to make one in the first place.

And it was most disheartening of all that it wasn't automatically obvious that a strike would occur if business-as-usual were the order of the day.  That's our real task, IMHO.  Make it so that there's an automatic unacceptable cost for business-as-usual.  

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Absolutely agree (4.00 / 2)
In that sense, the battle was lost before the armies got to the battlefield.

On this, I do think bruhrabbit has a point:  it was always a mistake to think of the White House as being on our side of the bargaining table.  And I do think most people who voted for him thought, "Wow, we finally have our guy in the Oval Office!"  At best, the White House were in the role of a Federal Medition and Conciliation Service mediator:  someone whose job is to get the parties to agree to a contract, without a strike, regardless of what the contract actually says.

[ Parent ]
True (4.00 / 2)
And I took enormous amounts of shit for not thinking Obama was necessarily "our guy."  Got called a racist so obsessively on one occasion that we ended up having to ban the commentator.

But I was mistaken in thinking just what you suggest--that he would be like a federal mediator.  Of course I had my suspicions otherwise, but I mistakenly believed that GOP intransigence would force him into that sort of role within a few months.

Never happened.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Well.... (4.00 / 3)
If management knows that you're likely to lose the strike vote, or is aware of the size of your strike fund, and suspects that more than half your members will be forced to cross the picket line after a week, and you know that they know these things, won't this affect your negotiating position?
[ Parent ]
Oh, definitely (4.00 / 6)
I think this is the weakness of the "progressive negotiating skills" position on this matter.  Our side simply didn't have a way to make our opponents more afraid of scuttling a deal than of making a deal that we like.  It's possible that a big Medicare-for-All push at the start would have helped, but it would have to have been a very dramatic campaign to get Big Insurance to consider it a credible, long-term threat that had to be bought off with a PO or something.

Ironically, the protest in DC today is exactly the kind of thing that needed to happen, IMHO -- make the issue, "How much do you hate insurance companies?" not, "What is the Gummint gonna screw up next?"

I think what many were hoping was that Obama would keep campaigning, hold rallies, organize through OFA, and scare targeted congresscritters into supporting something good.  Obviously (and somewhat predictably) he didn't do that.

[ Parent ]
I absolutely agree with you here (4.00 / 5)
And with Paul. The earlier we made our intransigence -- and the reasons for it -- clear to everyone, including the voters, the better chance we would have had. Our chances would've improved even more markedly, of course, if the President had given us more than a purely perfunctory nod before heading off to cut his deal with Big Pharma.

That, just as we suspected, was never in the cards, and the phony war period when everyone inside the Beltway waited patiently for Baucus to fart, gave Sarah and Glenn the opportunity to blanket the ether with their own brand of enraged populism. False or not, it pretty much ruined the signal-to-noise ratio for us.

[ Parent ]
This last point you make is really critical (4.00 / 1)
The biggest failure of the White House was in losing key parts of the public opinion battle.

This point gets missed to often.  The battle to some degree was lost outside of DC, not inside of it.

If this bill was 60-40 in favor in polling, the negotiations over it would be completely different.

[ Parent ]
This is smart. (4.00 / 1)
And so recommended up. I urge readers to read it three times.

The other side -- whether that's the elected GOP, .... or teabaggers, the Blue Dogs, or Big Insurance, or whoever -- just weren't afraid at all of an outcome in which the left ends up with nothing....   The rest of them are just as happy with the whole thing blowing up.

ed I took out the WH because it was cited as wanting and not wanting, the popint I think is most important is clearest.
I dont mean it as censorship, or letting the WH off the hook, its clarifying the ground this whole debacle was fought on.

--

The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky

[ Parent ]
Not taken as censorship at all, HoP (0.00 / 0)
Thanks for the edit, you're right about that.  The White House clearly has wanted a deal all along (q.v. the federal mediator analogy I make above), and has even had a few standards for that deal -- not wanting a deal that anyone could say cost $1 trillion, for instance, which is a dumb standard but a standard none the less.  The GOP wanted to kill basically anything, as have teabaggers.
[ Parent ]
I'm Not Sure They Lied (4.00 / 2)
It's one thing to intentionally deceive. It's another to say something that you end up not feeling right about following through on.

I'm certainly disappointed that they caved so easily, but a correct understanding of why is needed in order to act intelligently to try to prevent a recurrence.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Well, look (4.00 / 1)
Most people, including Bowers. knew it was unlikely that they would stick to their word. It was bullshit. Is that more or less than a lie?
[ Parent ]
It's Other Than (0.00 / 0)
Part of poset.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
Building the emerging progressive majority includes such steps as calling for things that (4.00 / 1)
might just not make it, might just be smoke. Or might at soem point stop being smoke. But then I am one who thinks that little quantitative changes, like building the progressive caucus, one bold step at a time, lead qualitative changes, like the prog caucus becoming government.

--

The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
[ Parent ]
w/o "a" PO (4.00 / 1)
It would have been nice, too, if we had all been able to draw a line in the sand around just what exactly constituted "a" public option.  130 million enrollees in a Medicare-lookalike plan?  6 million enrollees in some other benefit plan administered by some other organization at some undefined cost?  

All I saw were lots and lots of phone drives and whip counts for "a" public option and no effort at all to define that to the people.  If you don't define the terms yourself, your enemy will do it for you -- I think we ran into a lot of that.  And in the end, can you blame people for not rallying around something as elusive and ephemeral as "a" public option turned out to be?

[ Parent ]
I think there was a fear of being too clear (0.00 / 0)
They wanted some flexibility in their demands.  I do think there's a difference between your ask and your line in the sand.  The line in the sand was different for everyone.  For me the level playing field PO with state opt-out is the weakest PO I can still accept.  Others may have different lines.

I do think the Hacker 130-million proposal should've been the one to be written in at least one of the House committee proposals.  I don't think it was, and I don't know why it wasn't.

[ Parent ]
There never was "a" PO written (0.00 / 0)
into any of the plans, not one with any concrete definition, whether as an ask or as a line in the sand.  I think Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism nailed it when she said the PO, for the WH and the Congress, was never more than a marketing slogan.  

Or really:  it was the bait to get everyone to swallow the mandate.  And then the bait was yanked back.  

Now here we are with a mandate to buy private insurance, with failure to do so a crime punishable through the IRS.  

How can progressives not see the political problems in that?  That alone should be enough to sink this bill.

It should have been a mantra, like No Justice, No Peace:  No Real Public Option, No Mandate.  

[ Parent ]
It's easier to bamboozle people if everyone can project their own (4.00 / 1)
understanding on a term: their own needs, wants, hopes....

I think we've seen this approach somewhere before....

Plus, people were mislead by people who told them it was something like Medicare for All. Flimflamming.

The WH never defined what they wanted it to be.

[ Parent ]
I Don't Think So (4.00 / 6)
As I read Chris, he's saying that constituent opinion hadn't coalesced around a demand to defeat the bill if it didn't have a public option.

That's hardly surprising, because it usually takes a good deal of political work to get low-info voters to come to such a relatively sophisticated position.

As you know from countless comments, you and I see things very similarly in a lot of ways.  But I'm under no illusions that there's been sufficient hegemonic push-back from our side to make this sort of desirable position a commonplace one amongst voters who do support the public option.

That's why it's no surprise that Kucinich is virtually alone in holding out.  You can't really doubt that Bernie Sanders is as staunchly progressive as Kucinich, for example.  So you really can't argue that it's just a matter of who's "truly principled."

We should not be arguing one another to death over this.  We should be working together on how to change the larger hegemonic structure that's got us boxed into a no-win situation--not just for progressives, but arguably for the entire country, and (given the reality of global warming) the entire planet, too.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Oh, I see (4.00 / 1)
But then if that was the precondition, that a public push would coalesce around something as esoteric as the PO, then the progressive bloc strategy was doomed.

As for -- "we shouldn't be beating each other up about this" -- I basically agree. I don't support the bill but I won't call Chris or anyone else who does a sellout or anything like that. Unfortunately, the demonization of HCR opponents and skeptics has been going on for a long time  --Hamsher is the bete noire at Daily Kos -- and is now moving into overdrive, with Talking Points Memo calling Kucinich the Nader of health care reform.  

[ Parent ]
Agreed (4.00 / 3)
The need for subtle thinking is greatest when the urges against it are strongest.

Which is why I'm not about to demonize folks just because they're falling into demonizing thought-patterns at this most excruciating point in time.

They may be foolish for doing so, but adding my own folly to the mix is not what I'd call a positive contribution.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
I don't see anyone calling Chris and others sell outs (4.00 / 2)
in this particular argument. Indeed, the argument is  not about chris at all. Not really. It is about progressive bargaining.
[ Parent ]
Well that's good to know (4.00 / 2)
Good to know you're not calling him a sellout.  

But what do you do when you stand by your willingness to walk out the door and they tell you not to let it hit you on the way out?  Well, I suppose you pretty much have to keep on walking, and wait for them to call.  And if they don't then what?

Or is the principle of negotiating never to threaten something you don't know you can deliver on?  How does that not devolve in this case to never threatening anything?

And when are you going to acknowledge that some on the pro-HCR side DID make some threats they could deliver on and by so doing won something?  Yes, I know, they didn't hold out for as much as you wanted them to but who appointed us as the arbiters of what "enough" is?

When will you admit that this is a much more complicated business than the negotiating you have done (between businesses) in which the people at the table are directly empowered by those who have the real power?  

sTiVo's rule: Just because YOU "wouldn't put it past 'em" doesn't prove that THEY did it.

[ Parent ]
Am I suppose to respond to all this shit you and others just make up? (0.00 / 0)
The fact is your prove my point about how much progressives psychology like to make up little scary scenarios to justify what you. It is truly weird behavior.  
[ Parent ]
can we at least start this (4.00 / 1)
can process by admitting that "public option" was a stupid frame the meaning of which just wasn't obvious.  It was a term from wonkdom.  And pollsters had five-million ways of asking about it.

Something like "Medicare buy-in" would have been simplier and I think more powerful.

[ Parent ]
It's the DINOs (4.00 / 3)
Without walking into the pissing match, and I assume someone else has made this point already in another post, but the average voter who supports the public option never had a chance because conservative Democrats, led by Obama, did not let them have that chance. The hope was that Obama would take the most reasonable and efficient approach (extending an existing program like Medicare or the private insurance Congress has) but instead he pushed for a corporate boondoggle.

The good news in all this, for me as a voter, is that we've smoked out the Republicans in the Democratic party. We know for certain which Democrats feel most comfortable pushing Republican policies, whether it is health care or climate change or EFCA. We didn't know that when Obama was inaugurated. Now progressives can get to work this summer and fall to replace as many of these DINOs as is possible. We also can get to work helping progressives in Congress demonstrate to voters they have been on their side on all these issues over the past year. Hopefully that'll lead to the defeat of the corporate sellouts and the retention of progressive "real" Democratic seats but we'll see.

I'm profoundly unhappy with the health reform pushed by Obama. I'm fed up with being financially raped by private insurance companies. I'm tired of a system that looks the other way at 40,000 needless deaths a year. It is guaranteed private insurers will find a way to go back to cherry picking their customers and excluding (or jacking rates) those with prior conditions.

But, to Frank Rich's point this weekend past, Republicans will make hay no matter what Democrats do. My hope is that if health care passes, the combination of progressives working to oust DINOs will lead to real reform. We have a couple years before any of this current bill would go into effect certainly.

All that said, I'm hoping it'll pass to watch Rush either leave the US or come up with some BS about how he's too cowardly to eat his words. Maybe he'll move to the Dominican Republic where, I imagine, his pills cost less.

Yet again (4.00 / 1)
People trying to change the system will find withholding their support for changing the system a poor strategy to change the system.

This is so amazingly obvious I still can't believe anyone really, honestly thinks it would work.  Perhaps when the stars are aligned perfectly... perhaps.

What's happening in Congress (4.00 / 2)
is that Dems fear that if they vote "to change the system" they won't be able to really change the system, because they won't be in office.  
[ Parent ]
i respect your opinions but this is not obvious (4.00 / 1)
as dandelion points out above, if access to abortion is really important to you as a political issue - it's not obvious.  if you believe that incrementally changing the existing system to some degree will demobilise opposition to the current system, it's not obvious. if you believe that fiscal debt is a big issue and this won't curb it, it's not obvious.

but even beyond all that, the question is not about whether or not to oppose the current health care system - EVERYONE does - or almost everyone - even many of the Republicans probably do if they're being honest, I would guess.  Or would if they learned more about it - and not that much more.  It's also not whether you should try to change the system.

It's - today, six months, a year, five years, ten years, fifteen years, twenty years from now - will the situation be better or worse with the passage of this bill.  Personally, I think I agree that it would - but I also feel like gagging while I say that and I find dandelion's account above extremely compelling.

I also think that practically speaking, a progressive wobble on the bill would probably get us some concessions, even before the last minute wrangling.

[ Parent ]
The Progs were never going to vote the bill down (0.00 / 0)
Even it were the smart thing to do, electorally, voting to kill a key bill of your own Prez because it's insufficiently liberal is not something the Progs are tooled up to do.

(When did it last happen in the House, I wonder?)

There were umpteen letters from various permutations of Progs during last year threatening all kinds of mayhem if certain provisions weren't in the House bill. And, in each case. those letters were just good for wrapping fish.

Threats like these from the Progs have zero credibility without the trigger getting pulled sometime. And now wouldn't be the time, natch.

Here's The Thing (4.00 / 2)
They actually might have pulled the trigger, if the bill had gone through in a timely fashion, leaving enough time for a credible second go.

Just one more way that endless delay empowers the status quo.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Still don't think so, but... (0.00 / 0)
Even if the passage vote on the House bill had been in September, say, rather than November, as with HR 3962, I still don't see the Progs being within a mile of supplying the votes necessary to defeat it.

All the pressure from the WH and the House leadership has been on them, rather than on the Dogs, Stupaks, et al; we know that, if the bill had been defeated, Nancy and co would have gone medieval on Prog ass.

And what would have been in it for the Progs to outweigh all this misery? Their liberal constituents seem to find futile letter-writing and televised hand-wringing an adequate expression of their rep's ideology. So why should they have bought themselves a bunch of grief by pulling the temple down on everyone?

There's also the question - who would actually have voted? If it had only needed 20 votes (allowing for Stupaks, etc), how do they decide who crosses the line? Short straws?

Or do we think (despite all evidence to the contrary) that they're 'I am Spartacus' kind of guys?

[ Parent ]
well I guess those progressives got into office through some (0.00 / 0)
other means than the voters you are now putting down.
[ Parent ]
Progs will make the calculation, no doubt (0.00 / 0)
No doubt Progs would have considered the electoral effect of voting against the health bill - I can conceive that a Prog expecting a close race in November, and with a significant bloc of kill-the-bill liberals in his district, might decide it would be worth it.

But that's a very tricky calculation (who knows what will happen between then and Nov/10), involving the weighing of far off ifs and ands against immediate grief.

I have no idea whether we have any plausibly reliable data on the strength of liberal voters' opinions on killing any particular health care bill (eg, the Senate bill); one difficulty with such data would be the extreme fuzziness of the information voters have had on everything relating to the health care reform.

[ Parent ]
I believe Exhibit A for my argument is MA (0.00 / 0)

[ Parent ]
Unless those progies who said it would be interesting if the democrats lost (0.00 / 0)
possibly helpful, and not at all harmful, convinced a whole lot of people to simply stay home. Ariana had one such article, and we all know others.

Anger happens, so does principled action.

--

The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky

[ Parent ]
I believe Exhibit A for my argument is MA (0.00 / 0)

[ Parent ]
hmmm ... (4.00 / 1)
To repeat: no matter how easy it is to be cynical, political power still flows from appropriate leveraging of popular support rather than some Nietzschean struggle over the will to power.

you could have generated huge public support for this:

... but if you're a Canadian, you're automatically covered. And so you go in -- England has a similar -- a variation on this same type of system. You go in and you just say, "I'm sick," and somebody treats you, and that's it.

but instead chose the inside-outside progressive block strategy to champion a marketing phrase. if that's not some Nietzschean struggle over the will to power, i don't know what is.

Theoretically, Yes (4.00 / 2)
you could have generated huge public support

Chris and what $100 million?  That's the question.

I have no doubt that political will is very important.  But it has to be intelligently directed in order to have any possibility of success.  Wishing will not make it so.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
yes, an extra $100 million would have come in handy (4.00 / 1)
but lacking huge sums of money, you need huge amounts of public enthusiasm. you can generate a lot of enthusiasm for a small outlay if you can talk about free health care.

I have no doubt that political will is very important.  But it has to be intelligently directed in order to have any possibility of success.

i can see why a lot of progressives found the 'middle road' idea of a public option attractive and even thought it might be doable. the fact that it looked good on paper does not mean that it was an intelligent direction to go in.

the fight over the public option distracted progressives from at least two important things. the biggest and most visible result, of course, was to divert activists' energy away from single payer. this pleased the insurance companies [and many others] to no end. but the less-recognized result of NOT talking about expanding medicare to cover all of us is that all kinds of pet projects for experimenting on medicare and medicaid [and public option] patients flew under the radar entirely.

most of these pet projects are doomed to fail [most have already been tried on a smaller scale, with, at best, mixed results] so probably all that's going to happen is that a few more groups get to feed at the public trough for a few years. basically, all these pet projects are NOT how other countries control health care spending. they all use govt price controls. but hey, we're the usa, we don't need no steenkin' guvmint price controls!

[ Parent ]
"$100 Million" Should Not Be Taken Literally (4.00 / 1)
Chris no more had $100 million than he had the capacity to wave his hands and have "huge amounts of public enthusiasm" appear out of thin air.

The question is HOW bloggers like Chris were supposed to make "huge amounts of public enthusiasm" appear, and then how they were supposed to shape this enthusiasm into specific legislative demands that congresscriters dare not ignore.

As soon as you can explain that in a credible manner, then there will be ponies for everyone, and all will bow down to you.

Until then, not so much.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
But the question of HOW (4.00 / 2)
isn't just applicable to bloggers like Chris, it's applicable to the entire notion (or nation?) of the Netroots.  If the Netroots is going to take credit for getting Obama elected (and I've certainly read that on this blog and elsewhere) then the Netroots can't at the same time when failures happen throw up their hands and say, "well what can we do, we're only helpless bloggers."  We can't both take credit for success and then shrug off responsibility for failure.  

Obama's entire election campaign utilized the tools of the net to create memes, amplify talking points, create enthusiasm, create the appearance of a juggernaut, and all of that chatter flowed from the net to the MSM to the voting public in a steady stream.  Over and over I read articles talking about how effective this strategy was.  

The same bloggers who are now pleading helplessness in the HCR fight were part and parcel of that campaign-to-Netroots-to MSM-to voter meme flow that looked like it was going to become part of the hegemonic fight.

So why didn't it in the case of HCR? Was it because the WH shortstopped the effort?  Was it because the Netroots didn't know enough about HCR to begin with and couldn't really manuever or persuade effectively?  Was it because they were too eager to bolter a president or claim a victory?  Was it because progs are lousy negotiators?  Was it because the other side is just way way too strong?

I think that's what a lot of people who post on sites like this are trying to figure out.  Telling us, as Chris often seems to, that gee, it's tough, but we did the best we could and it's just going to be a harder struggle, and then asking us to feel good about what feels very small -- doesn't really get at the question.  Struggle in what way?  Surely not more of the same.  The point is:  in this decade, we had different tools to work with, we thought that would make a big difference, and it made NO difference.  

OR:  in an even worse case scenario we should at least consider:  those new tools may be actually HINDERING us.  

Is Netroots activism of any kind really the way to go -- at all? How many candidates took money from the Netroots and then pivoted away from commitments?  How many phone calls and emails were organized from the convenience of laptops and cublicles when maybe it would have been better to be knocking on doors and putting feet in the streets?  How many bloggers wrote about the HCR issue not from an activist standpoint but from a philosophical standpoint, debating finer points of health care as intellectual exercise and thereby creating the appearance that EVERYTHING for progressives was up for debate and negotiation?  Frankly I think that particular blurring between advocacy and philosophizing is a real real problem on the left.  We end up turning what should be matters of passion into cold intellectual exercises -- and then wonder why there's an enthusiasm gap.

Just as we are -- or I am -- doing at this moment.  And I admit -- it's easier to do that, because I'm middle-aged and I'm tired and I'm comfortable at my desk.  But if activism is about afflicting the comfortable and we can't even afflict ourselves, or bear the affliction of self-questioning and scrutiny, and if the whole idea of Netroots make it easy for us to fool ourselves regarding our activism.... then we have a very very big problem.

The Netroots becomes not a political energy generator but a political energy sink.

[ Parent ]
It's Simple, Really. (0.00 / 0)
Hegemonic struggle is bigger than electing a president.  It's harder to pull off.  

I don't mean to be glib--just comment-sized late in the life of a thread.  I think your comment deserves a more detailed answer, and I'll try to provide one in a diary this weekend.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
jeebers this so important... (0.00 / 0)
the sheer theatricality of so much posturing is amazing.

Wishing will not make it so.

Thanks for pointing it out.

--

The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
[ Parent ]
Wishing will not make it so. (4.00 / 3)
yep.

but i was pointing out that in my not at all humble opinion, the inside-outside progressive block strategy was NOT a leveraging of public support, and in fact it WAS a Nietzschean struggle over the will to power. btw, one of chris' earlier explanations about how it was meant to work -- by incrementally helping to build the progressive caucus' power in congress -- supports my interpretation.

and yes, generating public support for medicare for all would have been easier than generating public support for the public option. even chris said this in one of his posts some time back.

[ Parent ]
Both of these I agree with wholeheartedly (0.00 / 0)
And it points to the road out, the road we should always be on. Much of the discussion here on openleft is despondent and inaccurate and repetitive. This, your point is none of that.

As to your NSHO - so what, it can get in the way, it can cause anger, it can cause 'self-defensive-ism' but I dont see any here, so enjoy your production of insights.

--

The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky

[ Parent ]
it's not MY insights that matter (0.00 / 0)

[ Parent ]
Obama and his bully pulpit -- huge presidential win? Gee, got to be worth a few $million. (4.00 / 1)
A large Congressional majority and a huge win is a terrible thing to waste.

Obama did not want single payer, Medicare buy-in, even shriveled public options (whatever they might be).

He wanted to protect the viability of the for-profit health insurance companies. He wanted insurance reform which would do that. And the for-profit health insurers wanted that as well. Obama negotiated with them quite well.

And he worked with Baucus and added Baucus's former chief of staff, Jim Messina, to his WH staff -- to deal with health insurers for his legislation.

Obama did not bring a Kennedy staffer on board.

Said a lot to me.

[ Parent ]
that's exactly right (4.00 / 2)
The WH didn't want a public option.  

And so progressives were put in the position of having to choose between advocating for the PO and aggressively fighting the WH, or mush-mouthing the PO (whipping for it while also vocalizing over and over the willingness to let it go) and hoping for a "health care win" for the WH.

And here we are.  Chris Hedges is 100% right that the Obama WH has effectively kneecapped whatever existed of left opposition in this country.  The WH makes all progressives choose:  support actual progressive positions, or support the optics of a "progressive" presidency.    

[ Parent ]
Yessss! (0.00 / 0)
Chris Hedges is doing yeoman's duty trying to pull the Overton Window a bit more to the left.  
[ Parent ]
Again, Chris is only stating the obvious (4.00 / 6)
It smacks of the crasser forms of Leninism, I think, to seriously suggest that we should help make things worse in the hope that people will be so miserable that next time they'll come around to our point of view.

Yes, any HCR bill, or set of bills, that can possibly pass now will undoubtedly suck compared to what's available almost anywhere else in the world, and, yes, the usual suspects may in time find their way around such improvements and safeguards as will be put in place, and yes it does pay the parasites for raping us only on alternate Thursdays, but.... There's no doubt in my mind that it will help some people who are now in dire straits indeed, and as Professor Krugman says, that's all to the good now matter what abominations accompany their relief, and no matter how partial or temporary that relief turns out to be.

Meanwhile, the larger struggle goes on. We're not gonna get to the Promised Land one busload at a time, folks. We're gonna get there all together, or not at all, and to do that, we have to attack all the smug suppositions of the folks who foisted this particular abomination off on us -- root and branch, hip and thigh -- pick your favorite metaphor for implacability and thoroughness. In the meantime, let's try not to use our fellow Americans, many of whom are worse off than we are, as hostages, even if we;ve somehow come to believe that they'll permit it.

But isn't that what you are doing in this quote? (4.00 / 1)
"There's no doubt in my mind that it will help some people who are now in dire straits indeed, and as Professor Krugman says, that's all to the good now matter what abominations accompany their relief, and no matter how partial or temporary that relief turns out to be.
"

So, we must give in to the hostage takers, because even this abomination is "all to the good" to the people who will die without the hostage takers getting their ransom? In the meantime, let's not treat these hostages as hostages.

Fuck you, I'm a hostage, and I want a better bill, or nothing.

[ Parent ]
More of a response than this deserves (4.00 / 1)
Fuck you, I'm a hostage, and I want a better bill, or nothing.

1) This isn't politics, it's invective -- which is fine, unless you're confused about which is which.

2) Fuck me? How will fucking me help you get what you want?

3) All God's adult chillun sometimes gotta do what they don't wanna do. Throwing your rattle out of the crib only makes sense if you're reasonably confident that a) you won't ever want it again, or b) that someone with more sense is out there to pick it up and return it to you.

[ Parent ]
See, here's the thing (4.00 / 3)
Over and over, the people who won't settle for this bill keep being dismissed as power-hungry, or playing a game, or they supposedly are swimming in insurance coverage and have no healthcare worries. That's when we see the pass-any-bill crowd start the concern trolling over how we shouldn't treat the uninsured as hostages.

Well, I'm a hostage. I would nominally benefit from this bill, just like all the other uninsured hostages that you are so quick to invoke. But I want a better bill, not this abomination of a corporate giveaway, welded to a horrific mandate, under-regulated and shot through with more loopholes than a doily.

The fuck you was for repeating a tired trope in a sad game of moral one-upsmanship.

I'm a hostage, and I say don't pay the ransom.

[ Parent ]
Fair enough (4.00 / 1)
This makes where you stand in the argument a little clearer. You may see this as a game; I don't. Moral one-upmanship was/is the last thing on my mind. Even this shitty bill will help some people, though, and for that reason, I think it ought to be passed. Never mind what we might have done to get a better bill. This isn't the beginning of the end, like the man said, but it is the end of the beginning. Holding your breath won't change that.
[ Parent ]
Yeah, Lord Mike tries similar in another thread. Not realizing (0.00 / 0)
that I pay so close attention to this issue because my mother was a victim of no health insurance and under health insurance. She lost her life due to the screwed up way our system works. Yet , the manipulators don't really seem to care.
[ Parent ]
We all understand (0.00 / 1)
You are an expert.  Everything you say is golden and perfect.  You've made that point plenty of times.

Perhaps you should blog about what you really think is the problem, etc. so you can link to it.  Quite honestly, I haven't seen you say anything other than claim to be an expert and use the word "negotiation" for a long time.  I assume you must have said something at least once, but I missed it.

[ Parent ]
No, I am one person with an opinion different from yours. Your response it hat of an ass hole (0.00 / 0)
Who can't accept that difference brings into question things that you cherish about and want to believe about yourself. That you are doing all those of us who actually have to live with the decisions of progressives in Congress a favor. Perhaps, you should spend less time trying to attack me and others with whom you disagree (unless of course you see them as your internet buddy), and actually listen. The point of this comment to which you are responding, in fact, has to do with Lord Mike who says anyone who disaagrees with him wants others to be harmed and lack compassion. IF you  buy into that manipulation,a nd see that as a matter of "disagreement" that tells us a lot more about you than me.
[ Parent ]
First paragraph, sure (0.00 / 0)
Yes, that first paragraph was assholy (assholey?); I'll accept that.

But the second paragraph has the meat.  It has occurred to me you haven't really said anything for a long time, but keep acting as if you had.  You often say you've seriously researched cost controls and claim this bill won't work, but you've never explained why.  It certainly seems you have a major post in you, based on the paragraphs written here, and I would like to see what you really think the problem and solution is.

I'm be willing to listen.  I'm asking you to actually say something.

[ Parent ]
Is this diary about specific policy or about negotiation? (0.00 / 0)
If you want to look up what I ahve written on cost control google bruh3 over at mydd.com

YOu can also see what I have said about the assumptions of say how the excise tax produces cost control. The lack of enforcement mechanisms in the present legislation. The problem states ahve with enforcement mechanisms and other issues.None of which has anything to do with the thread you are engaging in me in which if anyone disagrees they "don't care" or compassionless or any of other manipulative stuff that your sides says to avoid arguing any given debatae on its merits.

[ Parent ]
I don't know what bill you're reading (4.00 / 12)
that you think has so much popular support that it would somehow be suicide to oppose it or kill it (support for "healthcare reform" generally does not translate into support for the provisions of the particular bill, which the Dems have been plenty good at misstating).  The GOP will all be voting against it and will probably take back one or both houses of Congress this Fall. If popular support mattered, we'd have Medicare for All.  The truth is that the political elite in this country - of both parties - don't give a crap what the people want.  If this were really a democracy where the popular will mattered, then things that a majority of Americans want - like accesss to Medicare - would not be deemed by our leaders to be "politically impossible".  The truth is that Obama wanted this half-assed, neoliberal corporate handout from day one and found a way to roll progressives to get it (and progressives were all too willing to be rolled).  This is not a case where the problem is the American people, it's a case where the problem is their leaders, including progressive leaders.

The bill is not only not a progressive success, it's a huge progressive failure and until folks come to accept that and learn from it, we're just going to continue to fail.  This post by Seth Ackerman does a good job of explaining why healthcare has been a huge progressive FAIL and puts it into historical context.  The post should be read in its entirety, but here's the main thrust, IMO:

[B]esides being a moral issue, the health care crisis was - to put it bluntly - a great issue for progressives. And not just for progressives, but for progressive ideas. Everyone could see the dysfunction of a system where people go bankrupt because they get sick or stay in jobs they hate just so they can keep going to the doctor. And there was always a feeling that time was on the side of health care reform: Most people who paid attention to this stuff knew that universal coverage in some form was inevitable. It was just a question of how. (The insurers certainly understood this, which is one reason why they agreed not to fight this bill.) The status quo wasn't just bad, it was unsustainable. A reckoning was sure to happen, and when it came the obvious solutions would all be progressive-inspired. After all, if America is the only country without universal coverage yet spends more than every other country; and if all those other countries' systems are more public and less private - well, the solution (or at least the right direction to go in) seemed obvious.

So health-care reform was not just a goal in itself. It was also a lever to revive liberalism, so that all the other myriad problems in this country could also be addressed. That's why this issue was so cherished by the left. Now that lever has been pulled - only to bring about a moderate-Republican bill, sold on explicitly conservative grounds, that has been unpopular almost from the beginning.

In other words, in addition to getting a truly shitty healthcare bill, we've squandered the opportunity of using healthcare to push for a larger progressive agenda.  If nothing had been done - there had been no bill - we would've, in fact, gotten another shot because healthcare isn't going to solve itself.  So it's not true that no bill would've meant waiting another 15 years.  As Ackerman points out, the current system is unsustainable, which works in progressives' favor.  

But instead of leveraging that simple truth, progressives bought the need to pass any bill and now really will have to wait years for another shot at this.  And when it comes, progressives will start the argument completely discredited because they own this shitty bill. As Ackerman says

And the result: The Democrats shot their historical wad on health care by re-introducing Bob Dole's bill from 1994 and justifying it as a free-market solution. How is that a "huge progressive victory"?

Exactly.  Don't give me laundry lists of small gains against conservadems.  Healthcare was a game changer if only progressives would've had the courage and imagination to do more than negotiate the best they could get right now from conservadems and neoliberals.  But, hey, the President thanked progressives so that's something!

Of course, the hard work of building a social movement for true universal healthcare will go on and I believe in the end it will be victorious, but it will go on having lost a great deal of energy to this circlejerk in Washington that has netted us nothing but a mandate that makes our opponents better funded and lets official Washington - and its progressive enablers - off the hook for the next several years, having congratulated themselves on "solving" healthcare (at least until the inevitable Medicare cuts come rolling in and then they'll congratulate themselves on having "saved" Medicare).

This was an excellent post Chris. Great discussion (4.00 / 2)
We don't all agree on every detail or every political maneuver but I think we all want the best outcome possible for the people.  

In the end.  I believe the Senate bill will be passed with fixes which will still leave it inadequate.  I think over the long term it will entrench the private insurance industry into a position that it can only be excluded by a collapse of the present economic and political structure of this country.  Of course that is seeming more likely every day.  

To that end I would point all of you to the fact that no industrialized nation with a successful and effective health care system has a for-profit health insurance industry.  We most likely will have a truly unique and "American" health care system.  But, ironically, that's what we have now.  Isn't it?

"Oh. My. God. .... We're doomed." -- Paul Krugman
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c...">http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c...">http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c...

Lets not rely on total collapse shall we. Its doesnt attract the voters. (0.00 / 0)
a collapse of the present economic and political structure of this country.  Of course that is seeming more likely every day.  

But now we have a frame to understand more posts.

--

The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky

[ Parent ]
Hoorah, brilliant post. (0.00 / 0)
I am so glad that we start to work together to actually get something done, including removing conservadems, so that the oft expressed demands of the people to the kind of government they want can be met.

Primary conservadems, remove the anti democratic filibuster.

--

The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky

losing the forest for the trees (4.00 / 7)
Wow.  All these comments about the positives and negatives of the health care bill and not one about the way it rolls back women's access to abortion.  I honestly don't understand anyone who claims to be progressive and yet doesn't consider it a line-in-the-sand principle that we not achieve victory at the expense of a core Democratic constituency and core Constitutional rights.  It makes me wonder what else is tradeable for progressives -- and that's how the oligarchy maintains power in this country, by splitting us against each other.      

And so now we have a health care bill that nibbles at the edges of the health care problem but also splits major traditional Democratic constituencies against each other.  The newly Cadillac-taxed middle class against the newly subsidized poor.  The working poor against Dems who are now forcing them to divert money from food and actual medical expenses into premium expenses for junk insurance (70% actuarial value is a joke -- speaking as a former health insurance executive myself.)  Non-union vs. unionized workers.  Pro-choice women vs. other Dems who want those women to "take a hit for the team" or "put their own interests second to the greater good."  And the left-leaning libertarians who for damn sure don't want the IRS knocking on their door because they haven't written a check to Anthem.  

While NOTHING targets the wealthy or the insurance companies or the way the health insurance industry (because of time-value of money) also enriches Wall-Street.  The wealthy will still have insurance affordable to them, the best health care they can buy and no additional burdens imposed.  The insurance companies have no haircuts imposed on their profit margins.  Wall Street will continue to invest the premiums paid and reap the management fees, etc. for doing so.

Yes, the Medicaid expansion is worthwhile.  Yes, it's good to eliminate exclusions for pre-existing conditions (though  I'm certain the industry will figure a work-around on that one, as they will with the ban on rescissions too.)  

But over the long term this bill is a giant disaster when it comes to building a strong and deep Democratic base grateful for Democratic policy-making.

That we're fracturing over it even now, before it's taken effect, is only a sign of the larger cracks to come.

Whether the problem was one of negotiation or one of activism (or both)-- more than that it was a problem of getting caught up in tactical battles without adequate strategic preparation.  So we have some tactical wins and some tactical losses.  But I don't think we have anything like a strategic victory.

 

thank you (0.00 / 0)
this is the most clearly written and convincing post i've seen against this bill.  i was leaning towards resignation before that The Bill is The Bill and will be The Law, but i'm not sure what i think now - which is a great feeling, actually.  

Thanks.

[ Parent ]
Here's a big reason why the public-option-or-nothing strategy failed (4.00 / 2)
Interference from the pass-the-bill camp.

I don't think the pass-the-bill camp people mean to be sell-outs to the insurance industry, though I do think that their position will lead to that whether they like it or not.  And we all agree that a public option is at least nice, if not necessary.  But there were two big problems with what the pass-the-bill camp was doing:

1. They were being dismissive of a major point of having a public option.  I think it's ironic that the pass-the-bill camp clings to the individual mandate, which penalizes ordinary Americans for perhaps selfishly abusing the health insurance system, and yet they're willing to cut loose the public option, which "penalizes" (if you can call competition as such) the insurance industry for willfully and maliciously abusing the health insurance system, for the benefit of corporate profit statements and at the expense of all of us.

It should be abundantly clear that a public option is as necessary a component for cost control as the individual mandate.  And yet it was the mandate, the more corporate-friendly of the two, that became non-negotiable even for supposed liberals.  If you find yourself siding with corporations over ordinary Americans, can you really still call yourself a liberal?

2. They were undermining our bargaining tactics by attacking our position.  If you're at a negotiating table and you're telling the other side that you have to have a PO or else you'll walk away, it doesn't help to have your buddy burst in screaming about how you can't walk away and you have to take the crap no matter what.

All through this process the pass-the-bill camp were doing this strange dance where they were essentially saying, "It's good that the liberals are saying it's PO or nothing, but they can't really believe that."  As david mizner said above, don't get mad at us for actually meaning what we say.  Not to mention that I find this whole "lie about what you're willing to do" not only repugnant but doomed to failure.  As I wrote before, not having the passion to follow through on our threat seriously undermines that threat.

The pass-the-bill crowd wants to have it all ways.  They want us to threaten to kill the bill if has no PO, but they don't want us to actually do it.  And then they criticize us because our not following through on our threat makes that threat meaningless.  But if we do follow through on our threat, they slam us as heartless Naderesque bastards who don't care about the poor uninsured people that they're about to unwittingly enslave to the insurance industry.  And then we all degenerate into an entertaining but ultimately unhelpful argument about who cares more about health care.

It also doesn't help that some of these pass-the-bill people are incredibly condescending and disrespectful, and are some of the same people that bashed the shit out of Nader voters instead of trying to respectfully coax them back into the fold.

The pass-the-bill camp needs to start acknowledging and respecting the kill-the-bill position as something more than stupid or egotistical.  It's bad enough that the Democratic establishment dumps on us dirty liberal bloggers; it's even worse to find the same thing going on within the liberal blogosphere.

"No matter how easy it is to be cynical, political power still flows from appropriate leveraging of popular support rather than some Nietzschean struggle over the will to power." (4.00 / 1)
I'm not sure if this is accurate, but it would help for you to clarify rather than addressing a straw man

1. Your statement appreciates that individual people have agency.  It does not appreciate that 'culture' or 'society' writ broadly exist and affect electoral and legislative politics- i.e. that you can have hegemony which secures and leverages consent from individual people without actually serving their interests.  In this world, there is no Fox news, there are no rightwing churches, there is no difference between being a Union member and not.

2. Your statement discusses levels of power and some among several mechanisms for how power has operated, but it doesn't account for the exercise of agency within elite politics.  For example, the Congressional Progressive Caucus ruled out Single Payer as even a bargaining tactic prior to negotiations even starting among the different factions in Congress and the White House to the best of my recollection.  This might have been a good strategy or it might have been a bad one, but it was a choice as well as the result of structural factors.  Personally, I think it was a bad strategy because if you ask for three quarters of a loaf and you have less power, you might get a third, but I'm not there.  

3. For me, what is most troubling about your statement is that it asks us to have a lot of basic faith in the democratic nature of a system that very, very, very recently generated 8 years of Bush.  Torture.  violence.  War.  Murder.  Huge tax cuts for the rich.  Attempts to privatise everything - down to the reconstruction of the (American) city they destroyed! Either that was the result of effective leveraging of popular support, or something went haywire.  I would argue a combination of the two, but more of the latter - there CAN be a disconnect between elite politics and mass politics - even with the kinds of mechanisms you talk about and even if you accept the points above, you can still end up with end results that don't match what you might expect from the mechanical operation of leveraging popular opinion.

4. Your argument is very narrow in who it considers part of 'the people.'  I have to raise this because it's personally important to me as the child of two people who emigrated to the United States and who has witnessed firsthand what happens to non citizens, undocumented people, etc.  I have never seen what happens to be people in other countries first hand thorugh direct warfare as in iraq afghanistan, and many other places but there is a big problem with being satisfied with this narrow a vision of what it means.

But I also have to raise this because if you consider the world as a whole and the way that power works in the world as a whole, the operation of Nietzchian will to power, sanctions, economic motives, domination of various sorts and other factors is more salient than leveraging popular support.  What connects this to the topic of your post is that IT IS THE SAME PEOPLE - the American Government - who are doing this.  So even if these people have a split mind - as the American elite often has - liberal democratic at home, dominating abroad - it still means that both of those features are inside of them, that under certain circumstances one emergees or the other.  So the self-certainty with which you raise the idea of a neat operation of effective political feedback is hard for me to fully trust right now.  Maybe some day.

Don't believe you discovered water because you walked outside in the rain | 143 comments
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