The GOP seems to have this notion that "bipartisanship" is when Democrats slavishly defer to Republicans, which strikes a curious chord with the general right's apparent definition of "liberal bias" as "absence of conservative bias." Those of us who have been obsessively following this story from the beginning know that the left initially advocated for single-payer, and that's what many of us still want. The public option already is the centrist compromise. And the fact that not a single Republican is even willing to consider it is proof that when they say "bipartisanship," they really mean "our way or the highway."
It would certainly appear that Obama is playing into the Republicans' trap, but I'm not convinced. I see it as part of a grand and elegant political strategy.
When even Harry Reid (notorious hand-wringer he is) sees through this cheap tactic of moving the goalpost, it's understandable that progressives are dismayed that President Obama still won't take charge and do what we elected him to do. But I see it differently. I don't think he cares at the end of the day whether any Republicans support the final bill. He's a Chicago guy, and his apparent waffling (if that's what it is) is actually a pretty clever tactic: if he commits to a concrete goal and gets even one iota less than he asked for, 2012 will be a lot of "Obama can't even pass his own pet bill!" But if, on the other hand, he remains passive, then when (not if) we get real healthcare reform, he can stick to his underlying message of "this is bigger than just me" by trumpeting what Congress did all by itself. And at the same time, he can point out how the GOP just refuses to step into the 21st century, no matter how hard he works to try to bring them on board, so who ya gonna vote for in 2010?
Meanwhile, Obama's refusal to commit to a robust public option - and the rumors that he may even be favoring a trigger - has precisely one effect on his progressive base, and that's to whip us into a frothy rage. And if 2006 and 2008 have shown us anything, it's that when liberals get angry, we get noisy. No, we don't form tea parties and scream incoherences at Fox News cameras. No, we don't shout people down at town hall meetings. We're smarter than that: we put the pressure on Congress in ways they can understand. We write them, we email them. We phone them 300,000 times in one day. We organize massive grassroots movements to present them with strongly-worded petitions signed by tens of thousands, and we put scathing TV ads on the air. It's because of progressive grassroots mobilization that Alan Grayson is now the voice and soul of the liberal movement instead of just another one hit wonder like Joe Wilson (anyone remember him?). Hell, if it weren't for liberal grassroots politics, we wouldn't be talking about healthcare reform at all - because liberal grassroots politics is what got Barack Obama elected in the first place, and he knows it.
In fact, Obama knows perhaps better than anyone in Washington that the grassroots movement is the most powerful political force this country has ever seen. AHIP might be fighting, trying to turn Democrats into Blue Dog turncoats through the power of the dollar - but at the end of the day, Congress knows that even the flashiest and most expensive lobbyist-funded ad campaign is virtually impotent compared to the power of simple word-of-mouth. Obama the community organizer recognizes this fully and acutely. He knows by now that a single positive mention of the Snowe trigger will result in a flood of Tweets urging like-minded individuals to tell him to fight for a real public option. He knows that what will shape the final bill more than anything else is not what he fights for, but what we fight for.
As House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn correctly observed on Countdown the other day, the question is no longer "can we pass healthcare reform?" or even "can we have a public option?" - it's now "what kind of public option will we have?" Momentum is clearly on our side, and that alone is reason enough to remain optimistic. But we can't allow optimism to translate into complacency. Obama's stirring the progressive pot with his apparent passiveness shows us that he, at least, has faith that we will push Congress to do the right thing. When Obama appears to pull out all the stops to woo Olympia Snowe, he's not telling us to scale back - he's telling us to push harder, and that is exactly what we're doing. In short, Obama is playing us.
But at the end of the day, the joke isn't on us. It's on the GOP.