By the time you read this, a whole heaping pile of ink and bytes will have been spilled about how we got to where we got in the Health Care Reform debate. A lot of the vitriol will be (rightly) directed at President Obama, whose strategy seems to have been to run and hide under the bed for fear of confrontation. Even more will be heaped on Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson for almost derailing the bill. I wanted to focus on something else.
Let’s be realistic. There wasn’t much chance that Joe Lieberman or Ben Nelson would have stood with a Republican filibuster for real. If they had, they would have been hanged alive in the Senate. It may be a genteel place, but I don’t think they would have avoided it. Instead, they understood how to read the tea leaves. Everyone knows that even when Olympia Snowe flirts with supporting the reform bill, the GOP’s ideological purity requirement would have every single Republican senator lined up to vote against every piece of the bill and every cloture motion. Therefore, it would only take one member of the Democratic caucus to defect to completely torpedo reform. Both Lieberman and Nelson seem to be pretty good at the one-upmanship game so they played it to their advantage. Lieberman gutted most of the really strong reform for the corporate overlords who rule his soul (seriously, the worst thing to happen to the Democratic party for the past forty years has been the sellout of a whole wing of it to the corporatists. Who needs Republicans when you have guys like these?). Nelson hid behind his abortion views but ended up punting on them anyway. His haul was the massive barrel of pork he got for his state. Have you seen what they gave him? In a nutshell, he’s putting the federal government on the hook for his state’s Medicaid costs resulting from the bill. Nicely played, Senator.
The loss here is that, as usual, liberal senators were not able to read the tea leaves themselves and get in the game early. Once it was obvious that the Republicans weren’t going to play ball and that the White House was more content to hide under the bed than provide any real leadership on this thing, action should have been taken immediately. We should have seen three or four liberal senators stand up and say (loudly) that they would filibuster any bill that did not contain a strong public option, Medicare +5 rates, and all the other stuff that would have actually, you know, reformed our health care. Even though compromise would have been required, holding steady on this threat probably would have let us come out of this thing with a strong bill. Instead, liberals took their seat on the sidelines and let the tea leaves float by, and this is what we’re left with: an opportunity wasted and the wrong people in the drivers seat.
