Kos is right, but so was Ralph Nader
Let me explain why before people crush me. :-) Kos is right because the path to real reform runs through incrementalism. That isn’t how he would put it I am sure, but it is what he means. In October of this last year the President had a deal in place for a public option with a trigger. This PO would have been the Health Committee (Kennedy Dodd) PO, which was robust. Olympia Snowe would have voted for it, Lieberman wouldn’t have had to, and the bill would have been stronger, though still flawed.
Kos is right, but so was Ralph Nader
Let me explain why before people crush me. :-) Kos is right because the path to real reform runs through incrementalism. That isn’t how he would put it I am sure, but it is what he means. In October of this last year the President had a deal in place for a public option with a trigger. This PO would have been the Health Committee (Kennedy Dodd) PO, which was robust. Olympia Snowe would have voted for it, Lieberman wouldn’t have had to, and the bill would have been stronger, though still flawed.
We all know something about Snowe, right? We can trust her to keep her word. She passed the Stim bill in Feb -- the one that is working very well right now the one that saved the economy of the western world from falling into a depression for which it would have taken a world war to end -- Snowe keeps her word. That means we had the bill. We could then have gone into the reconciliation process and lowered the trigger close to 0, which would have started it immediately. All of this well before Xmas. That was the deal we had, but the Kucinichs of the world blew it up.
The progressive purists argued that we should jam the GOP, punish them for past crimes and do an opt-out Public Option; making the red states publicly choose whether to follow up their rhetoric or show the world their hypocrisy. A brilliant device designed, in my opinion, to destroy the GOP. The party would have gone the way of the Whigs and the Progressive side of the party that wanted this tool had it right, it would have worked.
But when you play offense the other side plays D, and what is also true is that Snowe wanted no part of that, and losing her as the 60th vote did two things. It put Lieberman back into play, and it slowed the process down out of the time table that was most effective for the party and the country’s attention span. Lieberman can’t be trusted to keep his word or to vote with us and we should have known it. That is why Kos is right, the incremental approach would have reaped the political rewards we needed to strengthen the bill, and a framework passed would have helped us tweak it with a low trigger, a cap on family spending, and a ton of other ideas that were in neither bill. Once you build the public option administration you use it. Kucinich and others wanted to stick it to the GOP more than they wanted to pass health care and it gummed up the work and let Lieberman out of his box, the one in which the President spent all of the summer of 2009 putting him. Lieberman is not to be trusted, I’ve said it before I’ll say it again, and of course that is why Ralph Nader was right as well.
Nader played a dangerous game, one with far reaching consequences. His position was it is better to fight a holding action against the GOP than to win with a centrist dem who won’t change anything. That the centrist dem is more of a threat than the conservatives is a complex and strong opinion, one that I am not sure I share completely but one that I refuse to reject out of hand. Nader’s actions stopping Gore-Lieberman changed the dynamic in our party. It didn’t just galvanize the base, it expanded it. Bush was incompetent and his 8 years were going to be a disaster and Nader, by basically giving him the victory, made it possible for a robust progressive movement to spring to life. We have Obama (whom I love and give a b+ too for his first year, an A if we pass health care) we have 58 seats in the senate and a majority in the house because Bush won and Gore lost, because Bush destroyed the nation.
As an African America let me say this clearly, the circumstances aligning for a black to win the white house would not have existed for decades without Bush/Cheney being in the white house. Nader was right, it was better for us in the long run to have them in, but only if we have the intelligence and the fortitude, as a party, to do the things necessary for continued success. Obama is the perfect president for the time because his egoless political ideology of best idea wins helps dems. We have now and always had the best ideas.
People like Kos who helped create wave after wave of small donors for Obama and our congressional candidates. He helped take money out of the equation for two years. We had as much or more than the GOP and it became a conversation, nationally and locally, about ideas. We crushed them. We still can and still will. Pass health care and I have us winning 5-7 senate seats in 2010. Crist’s race is a perfect example. We couldn’t beat Crist too many centrist dems would have voted for him. But Rubio is so far to the right, so far into the ultra con neo con ideology, that we will beat him by 7 pts in Florida. We will win NH, OH, MO, AZ (because McCain is going to lose that primary), NC, KY and we have shots at LA and other places as well. All of our political goals are helped by passing health care. Millions of uninsured will be helped by passing health care. The only people who won’t be helped by passing health care are the insurance companies, why do you think they are so against it, and ideologues like Kucinich. We can’t afford him and his purity right now. We have to govern. JMHO.
Peace,
JChris