We all try to read the tea leaves, but we don’t all come to the same conclusions. For my money, there was no point in lobbying Kent Conrad and Blanche Lincoln to vote for a public option amendment to the Senate Finance bill. Conrad wasn’t voting for it, and Lincoln wants to limit the number of times she has to vote for it. If the administration thought they could pass the public option through the Finance Committee, we wouldn’t have had any Gang of Six and we wouldn’t have discussed triggers and co-ops. The legislation would have sailed through back in July and would already be signed into law. So, why would anyone expect the administration to lean on lawmakers at this point in the process? The votes that matter haven’t happened yet.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Another point I don’t see made often: the act of publicizing White House pressure may well backfire.
It’s pretty simple psychology. No one wants to admit that they caved into pressure, regardless of the source. So if the administration truly wants to influence legislators, little would be gained by letting the world know that they are imposing pressure.
Discretion matters.
A good general keeps as many armies in reserve until he needs them. That way he can apply fresh troups when and where he needs them – and keep the oppo guessing as to what his next move is.
This is a game of chess – with false leads, feints, distractions, poisoned pawn attacks, misdirection and attempts to lure the opposition into unsustainable positions. Then you strike.
What matters is what ends up happening in the real world. The rest is process. And those who want Obama to go headlong to the front don’t understand the process and can be likened to kamikazee pilots who end up ditching at sea because they ran out of fuel before they even found a good target.
The problem is, the Finance committee bill will likely become what the process now revolves around. Letting idiots like Max Baucus be central to the process might turn out to be a big mistake. We’ll see.
I don’t think so.
No one really likes the Finance Bill. If it were capable of bringing over two or three Republicans, it probably would become the basis for the Senate bill. But, it can’t. It has done all the work it can do.
Of course if Boo turns out to be essentially right, Baucus turns out to be the sacrificial lamb in the whole affair.
Remember, when Baucus first unveiled his plan, it had a public option. The problem was that he couldn’t get 12 Democrats out of 13 to agree to that. Without even being able to pass it on a party line vote, he had no choice but to do something less. And, it wasn’t until last week that we had a solid 60 votes for cloture, so he had to proceed as if he needed Snowe.
Honestly, I think reconciliation was always thought of as the only way to pass his plan until Kirk got appointed. Now they have a shot of doing it through regular order.
Reconciliation is probably still a very real plan. They may have to work on a “just in case Byrd can’t vote” assumption. Hope not but…
I entirely agree, except with your implication that this was the only possible strategy. This was Obama’s and some congresspersons’ particular strategic choice. Reading Boo’s take, it seems like it could be a spectacularly successful one. Everything of course will be judged by the outcome. As I’ve said before, it is a very costly strategy in terms of eroding support and enthusiasm for Obama and his allies, at least while the process is going on.
This whole epic has given me a much clearer grasp of what “political capital” means. Obama has pretty much gone all in on this one.
With not a single Republican signing on to me this becomes a fairly straight forward problem – what is the best bill the president and Democrat leadership could put together from the ranks within their own party? Reconciliation is inevitable given the Republican stance. If Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi had been strong advocates of true health reform the Finance Committee could have been ‘stacked’ without Baucus and the other “Blue Dog” Democrats to ensure passage of an ‘acceptable’ bill. All is possible with a strong majority and a readiness to dispense with tradition. What’s happening now isn’t a result of foresight and planning, it’s just the typical haggling of common traders trying to get the most money for their votes. Certainly this isn’t something being played out by the likes of chess masters!
Let’s not mistake the pawns for the real players!
Every informed citizen wants real health reform but it’s not going to happen. Those who still believe in the possibility are merely deluding themselves. Passing a bill is not a game of chess, it isn’t war – it’s politics with its own rules, traditions, and reality. Your desperate need and desire for the people’s elected representatives to do the right thing, to only do what is obvious, just and ethical, has put you in a place where you’re now denying the truth. You’ve been betrayed. To be sure sacrificing in chess can be part of a larger strategy, but the careless loss of a key piece in the opening game generally leads to an early loss. Certainly a good general keeps reserves, but only to salvage a defeat or to pursue a defeated enemy. It is his actions during the battle, and more importantly still, his actions before the battle which are the true keys to victory.
America has lost this attempt for true health reform. There’s no U.S. cavalry looming on the horizon, no starting over, no leadership for change. When asked about the eviscerated health reform bill coming out of the Finance Committee President Obama has been quoted saying, “The committee’s work represents a milestone. We are now closer than ever before to finally passing reform.” Step back and take a new look at what has gone before – his secret deals with the pharmaceutical lobby, his efforts to deny any real need for a public option to be part of the final bill, his refusal to even consider single payer – President Obama is not suddenly going to start pushing for real reform at this late stage. Max Baucus’s bill is what he wants. This is where we truly stand, stabbed in the back and doomed to slowly bleed to death on Mammon’s altar.
Okay, let’s step back and look.
Success should be defined by whether or not the president signs a bill that is substantially the same as what he promised on the campaign trail. It should not be measured against single-payer, since that is not what he was attempting to do.
Obama has now advanced farther than Clinton. He has succeeded in getting all five jurisdictional committees to report out a bill. Four of them do more than he asked for, by applying a mandate. The fifth, does far less than he asked for, by not providing for a public option. Not only has Obama succeeded in his immediate task, but he won the support of the very interest groups who killed HillaryCare. This was done by agreeing not to let the government negotiate the prices of Medicare Part D prescription drugs. It’s over a 100 billion giveaway to the drug companies. But it doesn’t change current law, and it makes it much easier to pass a bill. As for the insurance industry, they’re on board because even with a public option they will get millions of new customers. That’s okay. That’s what he ran on.
This bill will pass, and it will have at the very least: portability, guaranteed access regardless of preexisting conditions, no more recissions, and subsidies for the poor. It most likely will have a public option, too, but it may not be a public option with reimbursements tied to Medicare. That’s mainly a budgetary problem, and, as such, is very likely to be revisited later on when the government goes looking to save money.
The Baucus bill will pass next week, but it will be an instant orphan, as it has almost no support in the Democratic caucus, and absolutely no support from the Republicans (with the possible exception of Snowe). I highly doubt that it will serve as the base bill, although elements of it will certainly be incorporated.
So, where is the betrayal? Where’s the failure? Isn’t this exactly what he said he was going to do?
If there’s a real public option in the final bill it will be because of a small core of Democrats who refused to buckle to the Establishment and refused to sign on without one. Obama, as his quote makes perfectly clear, has never put his weight behind the public option and continues to push for any bill so long as it can be passed and called ‘reform’. This hands off ‘what-ever-you-decide’ approach absolutely does not tally with the campaign of “change” he ran on.
I know this isn’t the easiest thing to understand, but the administration would not be here right now if they had told the Finance Committee that it was a public option or nothing. We’d be headed to reconciliation after a deadlocked Finance bill, just like what happened to Clinton when Moynihan refused to pass his health bill out of Finance. Back then, though, he didn’t even have a fallback for reconciliation.
If this bill ends up costing the middle class more for health insurance, it will be a failure of epic magnitude for the democratic party. That is probably why they keep trying to put off the effective date until after ther 2012 elections.