Welcome to the first official day of our Socialist Nightmare. President Obama signed the health care reform bill today and the Senate also begins debate the reconciliation sidecar bill. So, are you ready for an open thread?
Chris Matthews owes Rep. Alan Grayson an apology. In January, Chris Matthews dismissed the scoop given to him by Alan Grayson about how the final push for the health care reform bill would be achieved: reconciliation.
Anybody can make a mistake. Certainly any pundit who tries to predict the political future will make dozens on any given day.
But to sit there and harangue a Member of Congress and all but call him crazy for laying out for you the actual game plan that turned out to hold the key to the passage of an historic piece of legislation? And to do so as a former Congressional staffer supposedly “in the know” about these things?
Americans watching the health care debate were confused for weeks on end about reconciliation, and they looked to insiders like Chris Matthews to explain it to them, with the help of guests who could provide the inside story.
Here, Matthews had the inside story handed to him on a silver platter, weeks before the rest of the traditional media were able to pick up on it (though weeks after those crazy netroots types had it), and not only does he drop it, he kicks Congressman Alan Grayson in the teeth for trying to serve it up to him.
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Whoa, I just watched the video again and Tweety was more arrogant than I even recalled.
But I’d like to single out one person who deserves more praise than he’s going to claim or is likely to get: Steve Benen himself. After Scott Brown won, Democrats’ first reaction was panic. The analogy most often drawn, though it in retrospect seems deranged to compare the loss of a Senate super-majority to the loss of both Houses, was to Clinton’s situation, and his reaction, after the Republican victories of 1994. Steve stepped in on January 20—just a day after Coakley’s loss, a full week before the State of the Union—with an alternative: “pass the damn bill,” and then amend it via reconciliation. I believe he invented the slogan, though Kevin Drum picked it up a few hours later. I know that he flogged it, immediately, relentlessly and repeatedly, through good news and bad: see, for example, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. It became proverbial. It became the popular title—and, thanks to alert fans, the easy-to-remember URL—of Steve’s pithy, powerful strategy memo making the case for moving forward. It cemented Democratic opinion around the idea that failure was not an option—and, more important, that incremental reform counted as failure.
I’ve spent a lot of time lately researching what Thomas Schelling called “focal points”: salient or obvious places to rally at, meet at, or aim towards. Focal points solve what are called coordination problems, the kind of problem that when each member of a group wants to go where a lot of other people will be going but nobody has a clear idea where that might be. There are many applications. In warfare, or politics, the main takeaway lesson is that a determined and courageous leader, regardless of whether he or she is a brilliant strategist, can by conspicuous presence and force of example make the difference between a successful attack, a panicky rout, and everything in between. In this campaign, Obama provided the rhetoric, Pelosi and her people the toughness and legislative legwork, and Andy Stern and others the grassroots pressure. But “pass the damn bill” provided the focal point: not failure, not incremental reform, but the imperfect, landmark bill that the Senate had already passed. Once that was set, and only then, incremental reform or putting off the whole process started to seem cowardly and crabbed, a strategy almost impossible for a serious Democrat to justify. Steve’s explicit and successful model was William Kristol’s 1994 memo, which made all-out-opposition into the tragically successful focal point for Republicans faced with Clinton’s health reform plan.
Reportedly, Benen’s memo was passed around to every Congressional office. Now, I’m wondering, why don’t we see Steve Benen on Meet The Press or This Week?