I wouldn’t hire this guy to defend me, because he makes pathetic arguments. But I am just going to focus one one of them. He cites Dick Morris on the meaning of triangulation:
“The essence of triangulation is to use your party’s solutions to solve the other side’s problems. Use your tools to fix their car.” Clinton, Morris shows, adopted the longstanding conservative goal of welfare reform as a top item on the Democratic agenda, but developed progressive policies, including higher funding for child care and stronger financial support for working families, to pursue that goal.
Armando perfectly makes my point about what triangulation is, and what it is not. For Morris, it is about solving your opponent’s problems. In other words, it’s about adopting their agenda. And that is precisely the distinction I am making between ordinary horse-trading in the service of your own agenda and triangulation. It’s there, right from the right-wing Clinton analyst’s mouth.
I will add one additional gripe with Armando’s post. He claims that the Democrats’ fortunes improved as a result of triangulation (or, at least, he strongly implies that). Yes, he acknowledges that Clinton’s second term had a robust economy, but he seems to downplay that. But, I’d argue that Clinton left office with a very weak party in his wake. I’d argue that the liberal base of the party had atrophied to a dangerous degree and that they were demoralized. Don’t forget how narrowly Gore defeated Bill Bradley in New Hampshire, or that Gore selected Lieberman as his running-mate. Don’t forget that the country nearly elected an idiot instead of Gore, who should have won in a walk even with the burden of Monica Lewinsky hanging around his neck. I thought it was almost an article of faith among progressives that Howard Dean revived a slumbering progressive base in this country that had been put to sleep by DLC bullshit.
Uh oh. Time to get the popcorn.
It’s another BooMan-Armando shootout.
Does all criticism come back to being an Obamabot?
Dude. That’s like so 2008.
I rarely read Armando, but in this case BooMan is correct. It’s with good reason that the DLC is known as Republican-lite, and is despised by a lot of Progressives.
And here’s the thing.
There are two main reasons to dislike the DLC.
It’s more complicated than that because the two things overlap (see corporate money means you don’t have to cultivate the base).
Armando rejects the second point entirely and even argues the opposite.
Rahm isn’t a progressive. He’s an operative. Notice that he advised scrapping HCR and was overruled. He then followed orders and got it done. So much for Rahm running everything.
Rahm is a very useful adviser. Just listen to what he says and do the opposite!
I agree with Ta-Nehisi.
Rahm works for Obama. Not the other way around.
Anything he does it’s because Obama either told him to do it, or is allowing him to do it.
So I don’t get the consternation surrounding Rahm. I don’t like him either. But he’s not the sole reason for all of Obama’s missteps. Some of that is his own, some of that is the effectiveness of the wingnut opposition and some of that is the aforementioned DLC-moderate Blue Dog bullshit.
My two cents.
BRAVO!
and that is all 🙂
Before we go accusing other people of pathetic arguments, when will you address the fact that your byzantine predictions of how the health care debate would pan out were based on a false assumption (Obama put the PO high on his agenda) and did not come true?
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2009/10/24/02318/458
You just linked to a piece I wrote about how the strategy changed once we got 60 votes (in late-September). Prior to that, it was assumed that the bill would fail a cloture vote and that any reforms would have to be done through reconciliation. Yes, they kept putting feelers out to Snowe, but she didn’t bite beyond voting for the Finance bill.
Here’s what I told people.
I said that we didn’t have the votes to pass a public option through the Finance Committee nor through the Senate at a 60 vote threshold. Therefore, it was wrong to criticize the administration for not clamoring for a public option while the matter at hand was passing a bill through Finance and then the Senate on the first pass.
If there was going to be a public option at all, it could only come in in one of two places. Either it would be added in Conference or it would be added in the Budget Reconciliation process. Neither of those things would happen until after the Senate had first passed a bill without a public option.
I argued that it would kill the cause of getting a public option in the late stages if we lost a vote on it in the Senate in the early stages, In other words, don’t include it in the base bill and don’t introduce an amendment on it that will fail a cloture vote.
All along, the president pursued a strategy that tracked with what I was saying. He didn’t insist on a PO but he said he would prefer one. While focus was on the Senate, where talk of a PO was premature and counterproductive, the House was busily ramping up to pass a robust public option that had no chance of passing in the Senate. The idea was not to make House Dems endanger themselves for shits and giggles, but to create a meeting point between the House version (robust public option) and the Senate version (no public option).
Then Harry Reid came under so much pressure to fight for the public option that he introduced it in the base bill. This effectively ended any chance for the PO, although the delay and the fatigue and the polls on health reform had pretty much done that job already. Once Reid introduced the PO in the base bill, the House responded by passing a non-robust public option. Why? Because they no longer needed to stake out as much ground to meet in the middle. But a non-robust public option was the intended meeting place. (Reports of the administration promising no PO in July or August are inaccurate. He promised no robust public option).
When we got to the end of the line, we did not even have the votes in the House for a weak public option, although we theoretically had them in the Senate at the 51 vote threshold.
I doubt too many people who followed my analysis think I steered them wrong about what was happening and why, and how things ought to have been differently by the PO’s supporters and by Harry Reid.
So the President just allowed Harry Reid to go vigilante? I’m sorry, I just do not buy that, especially if you are operating under the assumption that the President was keenly strategizing for a public option.
But maybe I just don’t understand what you wrote in the piece I linked to:
“Let me tell you something. If Harry Reid went up to the White House with a plan to pass a public option and the president did not like the plan, you never would have heard about it. Reid never would have taken the step to float putting the public option in the base bill if he didn’t already have a green light from the White House.”
To me that reads as Reid had Obama’s consent to put the PO in the bill when he did so. Without Obama’s consent it would not have happened.
Sorry, I don’t think Obama was the foiled advocate of the public option that you do. He may’ve preferred it but it was obviously not a dealbreaker.
No, it was not a dealbreaker.
And, if you notice, it wasn’t a dealbreaker for a single progressive member of Congress or for 90% of Democrats polled on the eve of passage.
If the president had made it a dealbreaker, he would have been siding with an incredibly small percentage of Democrats on the far left.
If you remember, by the way, the word that leaked out at the time was that the White House was reluctant and deeply skeptical about putting the PO in the base bill, but Reid convinced them to go along.
I don’t believe that is exactly what went down. I think Reid did it because of his poll numbers back home and the incredibly pressure he was getting from the base, and the WH just wanted to be sure it wouldn’t scuttle passage of a Senate bill. They went along with it against their better judgment to help Reid.
But, it did mark the end of any chance of getting a PO because it allowed it to be defeated prior to conference or reconciliation. And that is exactly what I argued the administration had been trying to avoid all along.
You can make a solid argument that Obama didn’t fight hard for a public option. That’s true. But the time to fight for one was always after the Senate passed its bill. That was my argument all along. People arguing that Obama didn’t want a PO didn’t understand that a president who didn’t want one wouldn’t have the House pass a strong public option through five congressional committees and a weak one through the full House. You don’t play with members’ careers like that for something you don’t want. But, the votes were never there on the front-end, and it was always a longshot that they’d be there in the end. I never told anyone different.
“wouldn’t have the House pass a strong public option through five congressional committees” should read “wouldn’t have Congress pass a strong public option through four congressional committees.”
Well, sure Reid was motivated by his poll numbers. But lots of Senators scurry around on that basis.
I can see why you would want to leverage the House against the Senate in Conference. But at the point of the Senate passing the bill, there was plenty of demand for a public option from the Senate Dems (not just online progressives). I don’t know if not including a public option at the start was an option at the time. Reports seem to indicate that at the time the Obama Admin wanted the trigger in the bill. In part because of his love for bipartisanship and Snowe. (HuffPo) And Rockefeller and Schumer and other Senators wanted the PO in the bill.
Reid worked on including the PO in the Senate bill for almost a full 2 months after introducing the opt-out. Reconciliation was discussed with Landrieu, Lincoln and Nelson by Reid (TPM). Either the Obama Admin should’ve stuck to what you believe was their original strategy (that Reid defied), or they should’ve backed up Reid more effectively. If you’re going to play the PO hand, you should do it all out.
You paint Obama’s strategy as dating from before he even took office. If you think that’s true then letting Reid alter the strategy at the last minute was a colossal mistake and indicative of a surprising lack of faith in themselves. I can think “oh Booman’s strategy was genius, wish they’d done that.” But what I have before me is what actually happened. And it wasn’t that.
the original plan was to pass it in late July right before the August recess, likely without Kennedy and possibly Byrd’s vote available. That’s why they did what they did with the Gang of Six. August upset the plan. Then, in late September they got new life when Kirk was seated. That allowed them to pass a bill without a public option at the 60 vote threshold. At that point, it became about rounding up Nelson, Lincoln, Landrieu and any other holdouts amid very bad polling for the overall bill and decreasing favor for the public option.
What changed was that over time, the bill got more and more unpopular and the public option became more and more of a proxy for the whole bill.
By the time the Senate got around to voting again, the House had lost a couple ‘yes’ votes and the list of vulnerable Dems had expanded dramatically.
By March, they were just fighting to keep the whole thing from collapsing.
The mechanism was in place for a last minute push on the public option, but the margins were so close, no one was willing to risk it.
In any case, the biggest problem was delay and the polls (on health care and on individual races). But it was the wrong move to put the PO in the base bill. They should have passed the trigger that Snowe wanted and then reached a middle ground with a robust PO from the House. And if that failed, they could have gone to reconciliation.
But progressives were apoplectic about dealing with Snowe and absolutely enraged at the idea that Reid wouldn’t put a doomed PO in the base bill. They were more interested in getting a roll call so that could hold people accountable than they were in passing a PO or any health care at all. That’s what pissed me off.