By now, you are all aware that the division between purists and pragmatists among us liberals and Democrats has reached the calm shores of Delaware Liberal. Now, I speak only for myself here, but one of the reasons I feel so angry at the purists is all the good the bill does do, which the purists seem to be willfully ignorant of. Indeed, what does it tell you that an actual socialist, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), seems satisfied enough to at least pass the bill we have know, with the hope and goal of reforming it later with a public option or other alternatives? Bernie Sanders is so pure as a liberal that he actually is not a Democrat. He is honest to God Socialist! And he supports the bill.
Do you know why?
Probably because he cares about what is actually in the bill than what is not, and he has forgotten more about congressional procedure and political realities than the purists ever knew in the first place. He is the Senator that actually wants single payer, and he introduced an amendment to that end. When the Republicans filibustered the amendment, it was tabled. So what did Sen. Sanders do? Did he take his ball and go home? Did he join the Republican filibuster to kill the bill?
No. He is not throwing a tantrum or inventing a new reality in which killing the bill actually means we’ll totally get a better health care bill next year or next Congress, when Alan Grayson, Keith Olberman and Matt Taibbi are all elected to the Senate somehow. Because he is not delusional. He knows the stakes and the choice in front of us. He knows that we either pass the bill we have now, or we get nothing for a long time. And getting nothing for a long time, while costs rise, while it is still legal to deny coverage based on preexisting conditions, while it is still legal to drop your coverage if you do get sick, where it is still legal to impose lifetime caps or annual caps, and while getting sick means bankruptcy to too many…. well Senator Sanders the Socialist is actually smart enough to realize this is a no-brainer.
According to the New York Times, this is the substance of the Senate bill:
* Require that most Americans have health insurance.
* Add 15 million people to Medicaid.
* Subsidize private coverage for low and middle income people (at a cost of $871 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office), which will cover 31 million Americans who are not currently covered.
* Prevent insurers denying coverage because of a person’s medical condition.
* Prevent insurers discriminating on the basis of sex or health status.
* Prevent insurers rescinding care when someone becomes sick or disabled.
* Force insurers to include a summary of benefits that “does not exceed four pages in length and does not include print smaller than 12-point font.”
* Limit insurance company profits by forcing them to spend between 80 and 85 cents of every dollar they make on healthcare rather than salaries or marketing.
* Set up healthcare exchanges — a kind of marketplace for insurance shoppers which feature tax credits — that are the last remnants of a public option.
So when the purists say kill the bill, I have to assume that they are against all of these policies. Remember that this is politics, and when you vote against something you are against it. It is not a reasonable excuse to vote against something because you wanted a better bill. The way Washington works is that you vote for what you can get even if it is not all you want. Because if you don’t you run the risk of being portrayed as against that which you are for. And please don’t tell me that Washington should work differently, and that the Senate should be able to pass legislation with fewer than 60 votes. I agree, but there is absolutely nothing we can do right now to change that political situation, so please, let’s deal with the reality we have.
The Democrats will be attacking the GOP in 2010 for their failure to support any of those above measures that are actually in the bill. If I were a political consultant, I would also happily attack a progressive purist for the same reason if they oppose the bill. Why? Because if progressive purists do oppose the bill than I will know that they are not at all interested in governing, they are only interesting in pontificating.
It seems to me that progressives purists were brainwashed by President Bush and the congressional Republicans over the last eight years to believe that the way they operated was the way all previous Presidents and Congresses operated, and it is the way President Obama should operate. On numerous occasions I have been told that Obama could have gotten the public option if he really wanted to. That he could have twisted the arms of Lieberman, Landrieu, Lincoln, Bayh, and Nelson and forced them to vote for the public option after a good talking to. The one thing I will agree with the purists on is that Obama could have been more forceful in supporting the public option, but I understand the reason he did not. The legislative strategy that the Obama White House decided on from the beginning was to not have the Administration draft the bill, as the Clinton White House did in 1993 and 1994; rather they would set certain goals that HCR should achieve, and allow the various committees in the House and Senate draft the bill. The reason for this strategy are twofold: 1) it would involve the participation of the Congress in ownership of the bill, which would make it more likely to pass and would also limit the complaints from the 1994 fight over healthcare; and 2) would not corner the Obama White House into defending or owning a particular version of the bill, lest that version of the bill be defeated, which would have been seen as a defeat for the entire Administration akin to President Clinton’s defeat in 1994. If you keep the process floating and the bill not set in stone, it makes it harder to attack. Indeed, look at all the good provisions in the bill that never saw attack or criticisms from the GOP!
It was a sound legislative strategy and it also reviews the kind of President Barack Obama is. He is not like Bush, who was “The Decider.” Obama is not a dictator. As Andrew Sullivan has coined him, he is “The Presider.”
Obama clearly sees the presidency as a different institution than his immediate predecessor. This is a good thing, it seems to me. Bush had imbibed a monarchical sense of the office from his father and his godfather (Cheney). The monarch decided. If you were lucky, you’d get an explanation later, usually dolled up in propaganda. But the president had one accountability moment – the election of 2004 – and the rest of the time he saw the presidency as a form of power that should be used with total boldness and declarative clarity.
At times, Bush’s indifference to the system around him bordered on a kind of political autism. And so one of the oddest aspects of Bush’s presidency was his tendency to declare things as if merely saying them as president could make them so. The model was clear and dramatically intensified by wartime: the president pronounced; Congress anemically responded; the base rallied. At the start, it felt like magic, but as reality slipped through the fast-eroding firewall of reckless spending and military misadventure, Bush’s authority disappeared all the more quickly – because his so-certain predictions were so obviously wrong. The Decider had no response to this. He just had to keep deciding and asserting, to less and less effect, that he was right all along. Hence the excruciating final months. Within a democratic system, we had replicated all the comedy and tragedy of cocooned authoritarianism.
Now look at Obama. What the critics misread in his Inaugural was its classical structure. He was not running any more. He was presiding.
His job was not to rally vast crowds, but to set the scene for the broader constitutional tableau to come to life. Hence the obvious shock of some Republican Congressman at debating with a president who seemed interested in actual conversation, as opposed to pure politics. Last Tuesday, there were none of the bold declarative predictions of the Second Bush Inaugural – and none of the slightly creepy Decider idolatry. Yes, Obama set some very clear directional goals, but the key difference is what came next: a window of invitation. The invitation is to the other co-equal branches of government to play their part; and for the citizenry to play its. This is an understanding of the president as one node in a constitutional order – not a near-dictator outside and superior to other branches of government. It is a return to traditional constitutional order. And it is rooted in a traditional, small-c conservative understanding of the presidency.
If Bush was about the presidency as power, Obama is about the presidency as authority. It’s fascinating to watch this deep difference in understanding slowly but unmistakably realize itself in public actions. Somewhere the Founders are smiling. The system is correcting itself after one of the most unbalanced periods in American history. But it took the self-restraint of one man to do it.
It seems that purists who complain about Obama and his leadership on healthcare view the presidency still as Bush did. And hopefully it means that they do not know any better, rather than being a willful choice of wanting a Democratic dictator that would act like Bush, just with liberal policies rather than conservative ones. In fact, that has been the most ironic and frustrating thing about this who debate. These purist progressives want Obama to act like Bush, and then at the same time say Obama is Bush-lite or Bush-same. The irony escapes them as well as the reality of what Obama has done in office. Would Bush ever negotiate an international climate deal? Pass a jobs-focused economic stimulus? Reform the nation’s health care industry? Set withdrawal dates for both Iraq (2010) and Afghanistan (2011)? There are a myriad of other progressive actions taken by Obama that Bush would laugh at (and which Nemski will cover in a later post), but that truth is lost on progressive purists. Because they have all lost perspective.
Here is my suggestion for purists who are frustrated by or disappointed in Obama: get more progressives like Alan Grayson or Al Franken or Bernie Sanders elected to the House and Senate. That is really the only way the change you want will happen. Sure, you can tear down Obama if it makes you feel good, but all that will accomplish is the election of an idiot-conservative wingnut named Sarah Palin or Newt Gingrich. Think I overstate my case? Well, what happened in 2000, the last time you purists were all petulant?