Last night, Ed Schultz interviewed DCCC Chair Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland), who gave an expected pep talk about the unity of the Democratic caucus and his predictions for health care.
But then Ed followed up with a conversation with Democratic strategist Steve McMahon and reporter John Harwood of CNBC, who offered an overview of the health care debate that should give some pause to some of the panic.
Follow me to the transcript…
I’ve been critical of relying too much or even at all on the shallow judgment and phony analysis from many in the DC punditocracy, but Harwood’s assessment of the health care debate tracked closely to what I’ve been arguing for weeks.
Here’s the transcript:
HARWOOD: But, look, I think their September plan is the one they went into August with. And I‘ve got to tell you, I think so much of the conventional wisdom about the status of this debate is dead wrong. And that is to say that the House entered the recess with the votes, in the view of the leadership, the people who are counting the votes, to pass what came out of the three House committees which is very close -- 95 percent, the White House tells me—of what they want in a health plan.
In the Senate, it is apparent that the bipartisan negotiations are dead. That‘s not likely to go anywhere. But the Democrats have got 59 votes, they‘ve got Olympia Snowe, who‘s sympathetic to what they‘re trying to do, maybe Susan Collins.
They‘ve got a lot of strength to get something through the Senate.
The key is to get something through both Houses and then get to conference.
The erosion that the Democrats have had in the House from those town halls, maybe six or eight members. That leaves about 20 House Democrats against what the leadership wants to do. But they‘ve got 257 Democratic members, so they‘ve got the strength to move this.
They‘re a lot further along than they‘re given credit for. And so, I think the strategy that they‘ve been on is not working out nearly as badly as some people think.
Yes, yes, and more yes. I’ll update with video if the MSNBC website makes it available.
For weeks now, the argument against doom and gloom has been the following:
- We’re close and we’re unified. Don’t focus too much on the fight over the last 20 percent of the plan in the final committee in the Senate.
- The media has an interest in playing up perceived shifts in position from the White House to stir up controversy among the Democratic base and fulfill the Obama backsliding narrative.
- The media is not friendly to health care reform, especially the public option.
- Whatever the final product of the Senate Finance Committee, the most important point is to keep the legislation moving so it can be reconciled.
- August was just going to suck no matter what. Once we failed to get a bill done by the original pre-recess deadline, we were consigned to fighting through the slow news month without a specific plan to rally behind. Whatever the relative strengths or weaknesses of the White House messaging, the real vacuum was created by our lack of a bill since the teabaggers didn’t need to know what the final product was before they shouted it down.
- The absence of progress during recess is not a sign of defeat, but rather the product of a slow news month.
I’d throw in one final point that came out yesterday in Norm Ornstein’s op-ed in the Washington Post.
The highlights (h/t to I said GOOD DAY sir and Ezra Klein):
The Obama strategy since his election has been based on a gimlet-eyed and pragmatic assessment of the prospects and limits afforded by public opinion and the political process. A naive president would have assumed that, after a landslide victory, huge coattails, swollen partisan majorities and a high approval rating, he could have it all -- and pushed hard and early for a far-reaching, soup-to-nuts upheaval of the health-care system. Obama and his strategists understood that would not work.
[snip]
No health reform bill can be enacted unless the House and Senate each pass a version, and that has been the single-minded goal of the White House. If the Senate has to resort to reconciliation, it can only work if more than 50 Democrats are convinced that it is the last resort -- that every effort was made to compromise to include significant Republican support. Thus, the White House signal on the public option. Once both houses pass versions, no matter how disparate, a conference committee can find a way to meld the bills -- no doubt with heavy White House input -- into one plan that goes back to each house for up or down votes. There, the pressure on lawmakers to support health reform will be much greater, as will the ability to break filibusters by urging all Democrats, even if they can't support a bill, to vote for cloture as a procedural issue.
In other words, Obama has been playing the hand he’s been dealt in Congress. The problem is that Congress is slow and dysfunctional, and the legislative process does not provide cable news fodder—unless of course the fodder is somehow a “setback,” a roadblock, or at least a vote. Moreover, the sensitive negotiations that the White House needed to conduct within each chamber and even each committee prohibited the president from doing what many of us in the public wanted: some sort of dramatic veto pen wielding, or maybe even a prime time public flogging of Chuck Grassley.
But what should give all of us hope is that the state of health care reform, beyond the pyrotechnics in the press, is more or less stable and on track to success. More importantly, however, the prospects for health care are no different than they were before the August recess when four different congressional committees had succeeded in passing similar versions of universal health care reform.
In a news environment where every anonymous, unattributed quote in Politico gets circulated like mad to signal the imminent demise of health care reform—and of course, the political fortunes of Barack Obama—these quiet reassurances about the facts on the ground should matter.
Could it be that the famous photo is right? Obama’s got this?
In the meantime, I’m planning on attending a vigil for the public option to let the president and the Dems know that we’ll be watching.