Just Call Me A Health Care Reform Pollyanna!

Terribly bad, dark day in liberal precincts. Through gross incompetence, the inability to fully-comprehend Joe Lieberman's dark malice, Harry Reid managed to hand all power to that same Dark Prince:

Worse yet, the months of dithering on the bill accomplished the worst possible scenario: the whiplash effect of raising, and then subsequently lowering, expectations. The neverending litany of mixed messages coming from both the Senate and the White House left the left-of-center Democratic base with false hopes that emanated from the false starts of those entities, who vacillated between bold and contemptibly timid.

The GOP, for what it is worth, was always through with you, despite your numerous attempts to find ways to please them and appeal to them. This will still get scant, if any, Republican votes, no matter how much the bill was neutered in response to their criticism. And they will still, after all this, find ways to call you dangerous socialists about 23,000 times between now and November of 2010.

The "independent voter", meanwhile, has seen the spectacle of the past several months. They have seen Senate Democrats, "led" by their Majority Leader, adopt six different bargaining positions a day, where reports of negotiation (and/or capitulation) were met with an immediate forceful denial from some spokesperson, only to be confirmed within hours.

They have concluded that Democrats cannot govern worth a damn. They may well be right.

So, congratulations, guys. It takes a tremendous amount of skill to singlehandedly imperil a Congressional majority and return bargaining power to a political party that has been spending the last five years circling the drain. Perhaps John Boehner and Mitch McConnell will send you a "thank you" card.

Terribly bad stuff, but, oddly enough, I lean towards optimism on all this. I think I’m optimistic because I’m still in relatively-good health and so have less to lose than less-fortunate folks (like almost everyone around me).

This health-care reform legislation will be clearly and immediately seen to be an unworkable fiasco, and so round two will start, ASAP. Serious progress, if it ever comes, will have to await even larger LIBERAL-Democratic majorities (no more Blue Dogs). And those large majorities could well come, because health care is in a state of chronic and advancing crisis. The health-care crisis is just going to get worse, unless the core issues are addressed (and they haven’t been, although the reform, such as it is, is a step in the right direction). People will continue to die from neglectful and expensive health care.

If I’m lucky, I’ll continue to evade trouble long enough to see some serious legislation get passed.

I like Ed Kilgore’s Option 2, at this link:

(1) Forget about Lieberman and go after Snowe and/or Collins. It would obviously be satisfying to most Democrats to deny Joe Lieberman the opportunity to be King of the Senate and Arbiter of Health Reform, or more to the point, the chance to screw up or kill the legislation down the road....

(2) Give Lieberman what he wants and then fix the legislation later. The key argument here is that the very items Lieberman is objecting to--an option for some younger Americans to buy into Medicare, and any sort of public option--are budget savers which could without question be added later (say, next year) via the budget reconciliation route, which only requires 50 votes....

(3) Threaten Lieberman with loss of his seniority unless he votes for cloture. Without question, it was a major mistake for the Democratic Caucus to allow Lieberman to maintain his seniority after the 2008 elections without an ironclad pledge that he would support the Caucus on all procedural votes, including cloture votes....

(4) Reframe the bill to use reconciliation. This is the strategy many progressives have been urging all along, for the obvious reason that it gets rid of the need for more than 50 Senate votes and also would make it vastly easier to craft a Senate bill that's close enough to the House bill to avoid friction in a House-Senate conference....

(5) Go back to the drawing board. Before resorting to any of the above unsavory options, health reform supporters will undoubtedly make some effort to devise yet another compromise that can obtain that 60th vote without losing existing supporters....