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The Political Deal: Who Succeeded And Who Failed

By Big Tent Democrat

You beat him down in every war, you twisted every treaty, you bellied with his wife, you played mock the Monk . . . and then you made him love you for it. --The Lion In Winter

Some may think of my title as pejorative. I do not intend it to be because I think of politics and governing as the end result of societal bargaining. In essence, we make a deal on how we are governed. The deal making comes in many forms - but in a democracy, the key step is elections. The function of a politician and a statesman is to get elected by persuading enough voters that what they will do will be superior to the other choices presented (this leaves aside the entire question of what form of political structures are most efficacious.)

So what was the bargain that has been struck in the health bill? And what politicians delivered? We have spilled tens of thousands of words on the issues, but I think it can be summarized relatively concisely. I'll try to do so on the flip side:

The substantive bargains appear to me as follows:

(1) a mandate that every legal resident and citizen have health insurance in exchange for certain new federal regulations and the creation of exchanges for the purchase of private health insurance by a discrete sector of the population.

(2) a tax on persons making 200k a year or more in exchange for funding enrollment into both the Medicaid public insurance programs and for the providing of subsidies for the purchase of private health insurance through the exchanges.

(3)the ability of states to limit the availability on these exchanges of health insurance that covers abortion in exchange for certain legislative votes necessary for passage.

Of course other bargains were struck, but these were the major ones. Is this deal acceptable? In a vacuum, I would argue that it is better than the status quo.

But we do not live in a vacuum. Given the results of the 2008 election, the legislative procedures available (namely reconciliation) and the problems at hand with health care, the bargain struck by the Obama Administration and progressive Democrats was not a good one. It was a very bad job of political bargaining. The main reason why I think so is because the health bill does not offer a viable path to solutions for the health issues in our country. I do not believe a "regulatory reform" model will work in the United States. We need a public insurance model of reform. This bill adopts the regulatory reform model which is doomed to fail.

Paul Krugman writes:

And exactly what should we blame Obama for? Here’s how I see it. [. . .] [O]n health care, I don’t see how he could have gotten much more. How could he have made Joe Lieberman less, um, Liebermanish? And I have to say that much as I disagree with Ben Nelson about many things, he has seemed refreshingly honest, at least in the final stages, about what he will and won’t accept. Meanwhile the fact is that Republicans have formed a solid bloc of opposition to Obama’s ability to do, well, anything.

Krugman accepts the "60 vote" mantra. Proponents of the "regulatory reform" framework would. But if you do not agree that the "regulatory reform" framework is the right path, then you will disagree with the "60 vote" mantra. As you can imagine, I do not agree with it.

In announcing his vote in favor of the Senate health bill, Senator Russ Feingold said:

I've been fighting all year for a strong public option to compete with the insurance industry and bring health care spending down. I continued that fight during recent negotiations, and I refused to sign onto a deal to drop the public option from the Senate bill. Unfortunately, the lack of support from the administration made keeping the public option in the bill an uphill struggle.

While Feingold's criticism of the Obama Administration is accurate, I believe that Feingold himself is more to blame for this result than Obama. After all, I do not think anyone really believed Obama was a supporter of the public option. At least I never did. A supporter of the public option (and by extension, the public insurance reform framework) would have publically and vigorously supported the use of reconciliation as the legislative procedural device for achieving a public option.

Obama never did. Again, this is not surprising. In fact, it would not surprise me if that was part of the Obama Administration's bargain with certain health care stakeholders (again, this type of bargaining is not, imo, per se bad. It is bad when you cut a bad deal.) Obama was never a public option supporter.

But Russ Feingold is one. In fact, that is precisely what he is protesting in his letter. But Russ Feingold NEVER EVER even supported the notion of using reconciliation for health care. In my view, Russ Feingold is at least as much to blame for the loss of the public option as Barack Obama - because he fought against the use of reconciliation to achieve it.

In the end, the biggest culprits for losing the battle for meaningful health care reform were the Senate progressives, who failed to push the reconciliation option for enacting it, despite having the vocal and public support of one of the leaders of the Senate, Charles Schumer. Russ Feingold, Bernie Sanders, Sherrod Brown, Al Franken, etc., the biggest failure in the political bargaining surrounding health care reform was theirs.

They will, and have been lauded by people who do not agree with them on the public option. To the folks who bested them in the political negotiation, they are "heroes." To me, they are failures. I judge politicians on how well they can ACHIEVE the policies I espouse, not just whether they espouse the policies I espouse. What good is a politician's speech if it does not translate into some tangible policy? For me, nothing. The progressive senators failed to move the ball forward on public insurance reform. They have failed to shape this bill in such a way that public insurance reform is more likely in the future.

As politicians, they have failed from my perspective. It is important that people know they have failed.

It is fun to lay it at the feet of the President, and he deserves blame, mostly due to his dishonesty in the debate. He's getting and will get blame. But so too should Feingold, Brown, Sanders, Franken and the rest.

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on December 21, 2009 (boomark / email).