As Adam noted in a post earlier today, Lieberman has confirmed that he opposed the Medicare buy-in compromise because Jacob Hacker and Rep. Anthony Weiner supported it.
That isn't surprising. Defeating liberals, in as public a way as possible, has long been a central pillar of "moderate" Democratic strategy. Blue Dogs, Conservadems, the DLC and others believe that they must do everything possible to distance themselves from liberal Democrats in order to be successful. If they are viewed as regular old Democrats, and not as a new wave of bi-partisan, moderate Democrat, then they honestly believe they are screwed. Lieberman is just an especially spiteful version of this.
Given this right-wing Democratic need to defeat liberals as publically as possible, aren't the calls from progressive organizations to defeat the bill actually the action progressives can take that is most likely to help pass the bill? And I am only being a little snarky. As Atrios wrote:
Since all the dirty hippies decided that the public option was what mattered, it was probably inevitable that it would go (I don't know this, I'm hopefully mostly kidding). Pissing off the hippies is what "moderates" do, and as most of them don't have a clue about policy anyway, if the hippies are for it then they know it must be bad.
Along those lines, dirty fucking hippies like digby shouldn't they think lowering the Medicare age is a good idea, because if so it won't happen.
In Digby's defense (not that Atrios was seriously attacking her), she has consistently made a similar argument to Atrios here. Also, at the time, I expressed my support for the compromise, too. So did Bernie Sanders, Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean.
That kind of honesty sure feels like a mistake now. Lieberman might have backstabbed everyone even if we didn't say we liked the compromise, but publically stating our support does not appear to have helped.
Don't you seriously wonder if publically opposing this bill is actually the best way for progressives to pass the bill? Or that supporting the bill now is the best way to defeat it? When one of your roles in the party ecosystem is to be publically humiliated, this sort of frustrated paranoia seems warranted. At all costs, the party must protect the wise, reasoned, bi-partisan, non-ideological centrists who helped bring on every clusterfuck we face as a nation, even if that means opposing the policies that would have prevented those clusterfucks just because those policies are supported by progressives. That certainly seems to be how Rahm Emanuel runs things, and really only marginally different than the way Emanuel's boss has been talking for years now. |
