The debate about Senator Harry Reid ought to begin here. We all know the case against him. The Las Vegas Sun (which along with the Las Vegas Gleaner and Desert beacon is one of my main stops when I want to understand Nevada politics) has done a profile on him presenting this thesis: without Harry Reid, you don't achieve health care reform.
People who don't like the bill don't have any cognitive dissonance here. But people who do like it have to confront the possibility that for all its deficiencies, Reid's work -- including tactical moves that many of us (me included) didn't like -- may have been essential to its adoption.
To those of you who deride PPACA and the reconciliation fix, giving Reid credit for their passage makes him all the more of a villain. For those of us that don't, especially those who want him to lose in November, the Sun article offers a serious challenge.
I'll copy only this much from the article; there's much more. It starts with a high-level meeting of Democrats.
“People ought to put away their petty differences and get health care done for the country,” Reid said, according to those present.
It was an unusually forceful statement from a man who speaks so softly he sometimes goes unheard.
“I think Harry has this right,” Obama said. “Let’s get this thing done for the country.”
Days later, Brown won the Massachusetts special election, ending the Democrats’ 60-seat Senate majority. The clear path to health care reform — a task Washington had pursued off and on for a century — vanished, leaving Reid to chart another in the new political landscape.
Reid was unflinching during the long health care debate: the somber, steady workhorse alongside the more passionate House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the more popular president. He worked a quiet insiders game to accomplish what many saw as impossible.
I will not step down from one position: I do not think that he should be our Senate Majority Leader, and it has everything to do with his being from a purple state where he simply can't stray far from the middle. I'd rather see Durbin or Schumer, his likely successors if he either loses his seat or his position, simply because they can do what needs to be done without worrying that it may end their own career.
And yet, by and large -- not to my satisfaction nor I expect to many of yours -- Reid did do what needed to be done, at least to get the sort of incremental reform that we've achieved, and it may well not have been possible without him.
Reid's biggest achievement was wrangling all 60 non-Republican votes for the Senate Bill. Without that, with what we know now about where the House stood, it's likely that we did not have the path to Reconciliation open to us. The teabaggers did their job well, poisoning public opinion against the public option. I think that the health insurers themselves will ultimately be the ones to sell the public on it -- with their rate increases and more tricks like what they just tried to do with children with pre-existing conditions -- and it's hard to see where we could have gotten enough votes. It's easier to see how, from this somewhat raised policy plateau, we could do it next year.
The low point for me, in my estimation of Reid, was in his agreement to reappoint Joe Lieberman to his HS&GA Committee Chair. That had better not happen again, not in that spot, not in Obama's re-election year. Joe has been relatively quiet lately, since he stuck the shiv in the public option and Medicare reform, but we can't let that make us forget. And yet here's the counterfactual that we'll never know how to answer: Reid's horrible decision to keep Lieberman in that Chair may well have been key, after all, to winning this battle. I hate that notion more than I can say -- and I'd like to think that if Lieberman left the caucus maybe he would have had to take left in health reform to stay politically viable -- but the fact is that making his decision lead where Reid (and Obama) evidently hoped it would lead.
Like most on the Left (and I'm certainly not as far out there as many here), I have an uneasy relationship with the party's moderates. It takes a lot to get me to the point of wanting to see them gone no matter what -- as I felt about Ben Nelson, Bayh, Lincoln, and Lieberman -- but I can certainly get there. And yet Reid is not in their category. He's been the prime gatekeeper to keep things from going too far to the left, but I'm not convinced that he is creating as opposed to recognizing reality.
The fact is that, to an extent that most here (although my guess is not most of those commenting here) agree was productive, he got the job done. Hell, he got the job done even at a time of deep personal misery and crisis due to his wife's and daughter's injuries in that car crash. Some of the respect I have to admit for him is grudging, but I have to admit that he helped advance a cause that I care about. He made a positive difference in the end.
I look forward to your views -- with some trepidation.