In posts yesterday and today, Ben Smith, Glenn Greenwald, and Chris Bowers explore whether the imminent passage of health care reform with nearly unanimous support from the progressive base -- even though it does not contain a public option -- is a vindication of Rahm Emanuel's strategy of taking progressives for granted and courting centrists.
This question isn't as simple as it first seems.
As Bowers points out, it seems to be based on a faulty assumption. In the wake of Scott Brown's election, Rahm Emanuel wanted to dramatically scale back the health care reform bill. Emanuel didn't get his way. So it's hard to see how he could be vindicated.
But it's also true that many progressives (myself included) at one point conditioned our support for this legislation on the inclusion of the public option. Our bluff was called, and we lost that battle, at least for this bill.
So was Rahm vindicated because we lost on the public option? Were we vindicated because Obama didn't follow Rahm's advice to scale the bill back?
I think the answer is probably that these are the wrong questions to ask. At least for me, the far more interesting question than whether Rahm was vindicated or not, or whether progressives have been vindicated or not, is whether the substantive direction we are heading is one that progressives can be comfortable with.
And on this question -- whether we are moving in the right direction -- the answer seems to be a clear yes. It might not be as fast as we'd like, but things are moving.
Compare the 1990s to today. Back then, conservatives were able to constrain the range of the possible with impunity. Health care reform? Forget about it! Indeed, back then, they weren't just constraining the range of the possible, they were setting the agenda. Remember welfare reform? How about impeachment?
Flash forward to today and they are defense. Not offense. They may still be limiting the range of what's possible, but they are not setting the agenda.
True, we did not get a public option, but we are going to get a health insurance reform bill that covers virtually every American citizen and puts in place a patients bill of rights on steroids. It's not perfect: outside of Medicare, the middle-class will be entirely dependent on a system of for-profit medicine; there will still be major cost issues; there will still be many undocumented residents without insurance, underscoring the important of dealing with immigration reform; we will still have an unwieldy patchwork of government programs to deliver insurance to much of the population.
But even though the bill is not perfect, for the first time in our nation's history we will have enshrined into law the notion that everybody ought to have health insurance -- and that's a major accomplishment. We can argue about whether it accomplished as much as possible, but it is nonetheless a big deal -- and it's not something that could have been done if progressive goals really were taken for granted.
So the reason why health care reform has such strong support from progressives is not that they can be taken for granted, it is that health care reform does deliver on an important progressive goal.
Think about this way. While losing the public option was unquestionably a defeat, if this bill on balance is a defeat for progressives, then at least in defeat we've managed to get near-universal health insurance.
In the closing years of the 1990s, one of the biggest progressive victories was the acquittal of President Clinton in his impeachment trial.
In the opening years of the 2010s, our first progressive victory will be health care reform legislation expanding coverage to most of the uninsured and protecting those who already have insurance. It doesn't fix every problem, and it will need constant improvement, but if this really represents the marginalization of progressives, then we're making progress.