I suspect the main reason Republicans continued to use obstructionist tactics to stall the vote, even after it was a done deal, was that they were hoping that forcing Robert Byrd to come to the Senate every day to suffer through procedural shit in ill health would result in him being too sick to vote, or worse, dead. They failed; this morning, Byrd voted for the health care bill and touchingly dedicated his vote to Ted Kennedy. But I think that the Republicans also realized that delaying tactics bought them time to increase the acrimony on the left. Every day this dragged out, the more rooted the narrative about the Crazy Left vs. the Reasonable Liberals took hold—-the same narrative that was established during the Iraq War run-up. The problem with that is that it’s dangerous—-pre-existing roles to snap into discourage people from looking at the facts and making their decisions that way. And every day that this process drags out, the more entrenched the “sides” get, and the more they look to the unique times when their “side” was right—-kill the bill people are claiming the left and taking moral authority from debacles like Iraq and NAFTA, people who say that the Senate bill is far from great but needs to be passed are referencing Ralph Nader, who is making this all worse by running around doing kill the bill stuff using racist language.
This entrenchment has resulted in nothing but digestion problems. Jonathan Chait is crowing triumphantly to see The Left get egg on their face by being wrong on this issue. But it’s really not that simple. Many of us with pretty radical politics on the whole are not engaged in this “kill the bill” rhetoric. I’ve been a little cowardly and not posting too much on the actual Senate bill because I don’t want to deal with the “kill the bill” crowd—-or worse, people starting to talk third parties and other such nonsense—-but I have been tweeting in support of getting through this process with our wits about ourselves, including reminding people that, contrary to mainstream media insinuations to the contrary, the House does matter. The continued dismissal of Nancy Pelosi’s power has left me really uneasy, because I detect more than a whiff of unintentional sexism to it, though part of the reason that people overlook Pelosi is that she’s a publicly unassuming person. That, and there’s also the way that the House is treated like the rabble compared to the Senate. Anyway, the point is that I’m The Left—-I hate corporate sellouts, I think the war in Afghanistan is a bad idea, I’ve got big time socialist leanings—-and I’m far more into the “eh, we’re not going to get anything better by killing it, and killing it would be criminally negligent, so let’s calm down” camp.
The reason is that I read arguments like this or this or this and think that they make their case, full stop. One of our bloggers at Pandagon—-Auguste—-has written before about how he pays 19% of his income to an insurance company, and so the anger that you may have to pay 8% of your income to an insurance company rings a little hollow to me as a complaint. That would be a massive cost savings to Auguste, should he be able to benefit. (Right now, this is mostly aimed at the uninsured, so people who are going through employers have a different shakeout.) I agree with the defenders that we have to work with the Senate we have, and not the Senate we want. I also agree that it’s premature to blame “The Democrats” for this, which unfairly punishes the majority of Democrats who were pushing for a way more progressive bill but were stymied by conservatives. Howard Dean is playing gadfly on this, but I have to point out that he was a cheerleader for increasing the rolls of Democratic politicians by recruiting conservatives. Well, conservatives are going to be conservative.
If we want better legislation, we need better politicians. And if you think health care is a daunting task, then fighting for better politicians is going to defeat your patience at every turn. The netroots has only been around for like 6 or 7 years, and only really been a player for 4. Taking over a party takes longer than that, and that’s all there is to it. I think there’s a tendency to fight for scorched earth tactics designed to get a lot of results in a very short period of time, and a defeatism when that doesn’t work. I’ll admit that impetus baffles me, because a lot of us are into politics because we love the game, and so we should have the disposition for a long term fight. And by “long term”, I mean taking a truly radical stance, which is that political means alone will not get us where we need to go, but that we have to change society itself. We shouldn’t despair of this task; we have had remarkable achievements in a short period of time, which is why Obama got to be President in the first place. But we need to understand that there will never be a time to rest on our laurels, and therefore it’s not some sort of betrayal of our deeply held beliefs to allow that “better than nothing” is better than nothing.
That said, I think that the tendency of defenders of the Senate bill has been to scold instead of understand, and that’s also worrisome. The links I provided do try to rein it in, arguing on points and not resorting to the DFH intimations, and that’s because Ezra and Sir Charles certainly count themselves in the DFH fold, as people who think that there’s a moral argument for social welfare and that the DFHs were 100% right on Iraq. But unfortunately, as I noted above, some people are absolutely ecstatic at an opportunity to take a giant piss all over the DFHs, even though a lot of us are far from being “kill the bill” sorts. (But I’d say that we may even be scarier DFHs to the cluck-clucking “moderate” crowd, because we’re not happy with how conservative the U.S. in general is, and are looking for massive social change to get our way.) This is only going to entrench the anger of people who want to kill the bill, and make them more suspicious of the motivations of those of us who are generally on their side, but think killing the bill is a bad idea.