We -- all of us in the progressive community -- are looking at the HCR drama through the wrong frame.
For example, here's Joan Walsh:
"Without being willing to walk away from the table, it's hard to convince the other side you mean business."
On its own, that's excellent advice. I learned it from my grandfather and it has served me well in my life.
And it naturally leads those of us in the progressive community to ask: Who among our elected officials is ready to walk away from the table in order to show that we really mean business?
Where is that one elected official on our side who is uniquely positioned to affect the legislation for the better?
Who is the progressives' answer to Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson?
If s/he's there we haven't heard from them yet -- and probably won't.
As a result, the best we can hope for is to keep the pressure on, late in the game, to get some marginal sweeteners added to the final bill -- and hope no rogues blow the thing up at the last possible moment.
Kos has smartly pivoted to this point and I agree with him. It shows me that we're healing our split. The split between "take what you can get" vs. "show you're willing to walk away."
But we're not seeing this situation for what it really was all along.
We need to understand that this was never a true negotiation. There was no table. There is no rational negotiating partner. We were in a hostage confrontation.
Here's Jean Baudrillard:
"We are all hostages, and we are all terrorists. This circuit has replaced that other one of masters and slaves, the dominating and the dominated, the exploiters and the exploited. It is worse than the one it replaces, but at least it liberates us from liberal nostalgia and the ruses of history."
That's right: at this point, late in the game, the Republicans are barricaded inside the house holding a gun to the country's head and the rest of us are trying to save the hostages -- the thousands of people who die every year because they have no access to health care. This is what the Republicans are reduced to doing in order to preserve some shred of power.
And this is not new: among other things, it's what Bush did in the Iraq War (see note, below).
If we see the situation this way then we recognize that the normal rules of negotiation do not, cannot, apply because you cannot afford "to walk away from the table."
All you can do is whatever it takes to end the stalemate and get the hostages out alive. Only then can you deal with the gunman.
If we accept that this is how they work, only then we can avoid this confrontation in the future.
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UPDATE: Those of you who are not familiar with Jean Baudrillard (and those who are) might do well to read his work. Here's a narrative snippet from Wikipedia that caught my eye and relates to this discussion:
Part of Baudrillard's public profile, as both an academic and a political commentator, comes from his 1991 book, titled for its provocative main thesis, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.
His argument described the first Gulf War as the inverse of the Clausewitzian formula: it was not "the continuation of politics by other means", but "the continuation of the absence of politics by other means".
Accordingly, Saddam Hussein was not fighting the Allied Forces, but using the lives of his soldiers as a form of sacrifice to preserve his power (p. 72, 2004 edition). [NOTE: Sound familiar?]
The Allied Forces fighting the Iraqi military forces were merely dropping 10,000 tonnes of bombs daily, as if proving to themselves that there was an enemy to fight (p. 61).
So, too, were the Western media complicit, presenting the war in real time, by recycling images of war to propagate the notion that the two enemies, the US (and allies) were actually fighting the Iraqi Army, but, such was not the case:
Saddam Hussein did not use his military capacity (the Iraqi Air Force), his politico-military power was not weakened (he suppressed the Kurdish insurgency against Iraq at war's end), so, concluding that politically little had changed in Iraq: the enemy went undefeated, the victors were not victorious, therefore, there was no war: the Gulf War did not occur.