[Senator] Bingaman [D-New Mexico] may be the prime example of the way some Senate Democrats seem to have approached the healthcare debate this summer: count votes first, figure out what should be in the bill later. And while you're counting, take the most pessimistic view possible. Though three committees in the House and one in the Senate have all passed versions of the legislation with more muscle behind the reforms than what the Finance Committee is working up, that doesn't seem to matter to centrist Democrats, who think those other versions won't get enough support to overcome the threat of a GOP filibuster. So, in essence, they've decided not to try. . . .
Cautious by nature and up for another term next year, Bingaman seems to be reading the political tea leaves and moving toward the conservative end of the scale, rather than standing his ground and forcing opponents to find ways to compromise. Quite a few of his colleagues seem reflexively poised to do the same.
Which underscores the problem President Obama faces as he tries to get a complex piece of legislation through a Congress his own party controls by wide margins. By conceding key arguments before they've even begun, the Democrats risk becoming their own worst enemy on this legislation. After all, if even Bingaman -- the only Democrat who sits on both committees with jurisdiction over the reform bill, whose state might need a change more than any other -- isn't a reliable vote for the public option, who is? Obama's message last year was one of hope and community spirit. So far in the Senate, though, pragmatism still rules the day.Mike Madden in Salon: "Why Senate Democrats are giving up so easily"
***
Based on those conversations, I've got some simple advice for Obama: Shut up about the death panels already. Don't keep fighting this rumor. You've lost—and the more time you spend trying to make things better, the worse off you'll be.
I understand this is hard medicine to swallow. Whatever you think about health care reform, it's hard to abide complete fabrications. There isn't a shred of evidence to support the idea that Obama's proposals create any mechanism to send old people to an early grave. Lots of other claims about the administration's health care plan are also patently false—see this roundup by the nonpartisan Politifact that thoroughly debunks a laundry list of lies that have been going around through chain e-mails. Responding to lies seems only natural. How could the White House stand by in silence while opponents make outlandish claims?But there are two problems with trying to correct misinformation. First, once people buy into a set of facts, they're unlikely to change their minds, even if presented with evidence to the contrary. In True Enough, I describe a famous study (PDF) by psychologists Charles Lord, Lee Ross, and Mark Lepper about people who hold rigid views on the death penalty. The researchers asked both fierce supporters and opponents of capital punishment to look at a stack of empirical studies that presented a mixed picture of the death penalty—some studies indicated that capital punishment deterred crime, while others suggested it didn't. After looking at the data, a rational person would have moderated her view of the death penalty—after all, the facts seemed to indicate that it was hard to know what effect capital punishment had on crime. --Farhad Manjoo in Slate-"How To Kill Those Death Panel Rumors"
Manjoo's reasoning is precisely what leads "reasonable" people to give up so easily justifying their spinelessness with arguments for pragmatism. But the flaw in Manjou's reasoning is that only about 25% of the electorate fits into the unreasonable category. The thrust of the Dems reform message should focus on the 75% of people who are not living in a hermetically sealed ideological bubble.
The second flaw is the idea that sixty votes are essential. The Republicans have shown repeatedly that they are not interested in compromise and that they will not vote for any kind of meaningful reform. Centrist compromise as a strategic objective is just plain silly at this point, and the Dems should just do what they have to do to end-run the GOP--and they don't need sixty votes. It's absurd at this point that the Dems should be held hostage by the threat of a filibuster. Why is that the GOP has no compunction about playing hardball, but god forbid that the Dems with the huge electoral mandate they won last year do it?
The third flaw in this pragmatic way of thinking lies in the assumption that Blue Dogs are primarily influenced by the opinions of their constituents. They are not. Once in office they are influenced primarily by special interests and the conventional thinking that passes for Beltway wisdom. They know most of their constituents aren't paying attention and with their advantages of incumbency can easily be snowed. It's about perception and the money to control perceptions in the media, and that's why they need special interest money. For that reason they are terribly concerned to maintain the support of these big-money special interests and they fear their threat to transfer this support to a Republican or a more conservative (i.e., corporatist) Democrat who will challenge when their seat comes up for re-election.
I understand. It's better to have these interests on your side than on the other side, and their first priority is their political survival. The idea that this argument centers on principle or on the merit of the policy is daft. It's about getting re-elected and that has mainly to do with where the money to get re-elected is coming from. And this is where Obama and the DNC have to let these pols know they have their back and that party support is more important for re-election than special-interest support. They have to let these Senators know that they will not get DNC support if they don't get behind the DNC's agenda on major issues and that, in fact, the DNC will support Dem challengers in the primaries.
If survival is all they understand, they have to be persuaded using threats to their survival as a motivator. This Senate gentleman's club ethos has become an absurdity, and the larger Democratic Party's interests don't benefit from it, so the Party has to find ways of subverting it when it undermines the Party's agenda on big issues, especially when the most unaccommodating Senators come from small states that don't represent the broader constituency that supports the Dems' agenda.
And Obama has to send much stronger signals about what is essential to that agenda, and the public option is not to be negotiated away.
The public option is a concrete policy proposal, but it's also a symbol. Wonkish pragmatists don't understand symbolism. They have to be made to understand it, and they have to be educated to understand that symbolism is a very powerful tool that can be used to advance a pragmatic agenda. The GOP understands symbolism or mythos (See also here) and has worked with it effectively for years. It's astonishing to me that the Dems have not figured this out yet.
It must have something to do with the overly rationalist, wonkish culture that shapes Dem strategic thinking. They seem to be in their own self-reinforcing bubble of "savvy" ineffectiveness, at least when it comes down to getting anything done besides getting elected. They are really, really bad when it comes to developing inspiring narratives around which the broad public can muster. It's looking more an accident than conscious strategy that Obama inspired the American electorate and inspired such excitement. Because they sure haven't done much to work with it since last November. They have so much to work with, and yet they seem incapable of exploiting the enormous resources in the fundamental attractiveness of the issues they support and in the person of their president.
So far the Dem effort to frame healthcare reform has been pathetic, but it can change. And that's what this fight for the public option symbolizes--whether the Dems are going to figure out how to fight for what's right rather than just giving in to pragmatic defeatism.
***
UPDATE: I just read Greenwald's column that explores a similar theme, but his take is that while the White House has no problem twisting the arms of those in the progressive caucus along the lines I suggest above, they won't do it with the Blue Dogs, because they don't want to. I'm not there yet, but he could be right:
The attempt to attract GOP support was the pretext which Democrats used to compromise continuously and water down the bill. But -- given the impossibility of achieving that goal -- isn't it fairly obvious that a desire for GOP support wasn't really the reason the Democrats were constantly watering down their own bill? Given the White House's central role in negotiating a secret deal with the pharmaceutical industry, its betrayal of Obama's clear promise to conduct negotiations out in the open (on C-SPAN no less), Rahm's protection of Blue Dogs and accompanying attacks on progressives, and the complete lack of any pressure exerted on allegedly obstructionists "centrists," it seems rather clear that the bill has been watered down, and the "public option" jettisoned, because that's the bill they want -- this was the plan all along.
The Obama White House isn't sitting impotently by while Democratic Senators shove a bad bill down its throat. This is the bill because this is the bill which Democratic leaders are happy to have. It's the bill they believe in. As important, by giving the insurance and pharmaceutical industries most everything they want, it ensures that the GOP doesn't become the repository for the largesse of those industries (and, converesly, that the Democratic Party retains that status).
My guess is that it's not so monolithic and that there is dissension in the Obama camp, and that this kind of thinking Greenwald criticizes is typical of the Rahm Emmanuel camp. Where does Obama himself stand? Who are the anti-Rahm progressive partisans within the administration? How can their hand be strengthened? Can we start a dump Rahm movement? Can we organize in such a way to communicate clearly and compellingly that this kind of approach will lose?
Again, it's not about conservative vs. liberal; it's about who's for the general welfare and who's for the special interests, and Emmanuel is clearly in the latter camp. It's not about being centrist or realistic at all. And, really, where does Obama stand?