Folks,
We are stuck here with Lieberman flipping us the bird yet again. Possibly with the aid of our other unfavorite son of the Obama world, namely Rahm Emanuel. The White House (and perhaps many Senatoral Dems) have the "pass something" fever, and are eager to score points (so they think) by perfectly threading the partisan needle and boasting of their new laws on the evening news to the 95% of the country that doesn't follow this stuff closely enough to know any better.
And this is great news for John McCain progressives. Because this is still a battle mostly within the Democratic party, and we still have something our intramural opponents want.
In short, leadership -- especially a competitive guy like Rahm -- wants to point to achievements and to get pictures with themselves signing something momentous. And this isn't just vanity - after working for nearly a year on something, you'd want your victory lap as well. You'd need the sense of having accomplished something for all that effort and heartache.
Of course, progressives also want this. And a real victory for the country in rebalancing the needs of all of our citizens, and all of the sectors of the economy. Piles of cash have been given, and not simply as business write-offs or through hobby foundations, but people's actual living funds. Unfathomable amounts of time have been given, in the frustrating pursuit of multitudes attempting to make one or two saddeningly small men step outside their tiny religion or overinflated ego.
But it is nearly the holidays. More than anything, I am sure all of these people want to move on. Obama is realizing he'll need to start giving out money again in order to try and revitalize the economy if he wants a ghost of a chance of having a Congress he can even nominally work with after 2010. Other problems are tugging on leadership's sleeve to be solved. They very much want to score their points and move on.
And here is where we come in. It is time for us to ask our progressive friends to kill this bill off wholesale unless either the individual mandate is stripped out, or some kind of alternative to feeding all of that money into the private insurance system is put forward. And having a Federal agency co-signing the checks doesn't count.
We know that the Republicans will join any filibuster that is offered to them, because they already understand that the failure of Democratic leadership can do nothing but hurt them in 2010. Two, three progressive holds tops are what are needed in order to generate the threat needed for us to re-enter the game on the level of Snowe, Lieberman, and the rest.
If this sounds like a Republican strategy, it is. And that is because we are nearly a Republican threshold, namely a belief that the status quo is better than the changes being proposed. It is also worth considering the value of time - how much better than the status quo does this bill have to be in order to justify dragging this debate out into February or March, with the knowledge that regulation of the industry will still cause all manner of Republican delay and intransigence.
All the above is given due to my impression of the current bill. It is an opinion, although the tactic seems to follow directly from the premise that the bill is no better than, and perhaps worse than, the status quo. Please feel free to talk myself (and many others here) down.