The headline is unsubtle, and we live in a subtle world, so that means that it is not entirely fair. But I think it is safe to say that meaningful health reform is dead and that the attitude of partisianship the Daily Kos represents is a major contributor to its death. Details below the flip ...
First, it now appears that meaningful health reform is dead in the water. Harry Reid has delayed the passage of the bills, which gives opponents more time to the spread lies like "page 16 of the health care bill outlaws private insurance" and to use their money to browbeat or buy congresspeople.
Furthermore, Reid is apparently going to take the public option out of the Senate bill, ostensibly because he doesn't have fifty votes for it. Even if the public option survives in the House -- something that is not certain, as between Blue Dogs and cowardly freshmen, there may be enough votes to kill it -- it almost certainly won't survive the conference committee. If there aren't fifty votes today, why would there be fifty votes after the conference committee?
And that fifty votes is where Daily Kos comes in. The attitude of the netroots, lead by Daily Kos, has been one of partisianship before ideology. Yes, the slogan has always been "more and better Democrats", but the "more" portion of it has always taken precedence. Even when the collective Daily Kos has gone after Democrats, it has largely been on the grounds that the Democrat in question wasn't a proud Democrat, not that they had the wrong position on issues. Being a proud Democrat has been defined as being partisan, not as being right on the right issues.
More, the prevailing ethos for a long time was to attack the ideological interest groups as being both ineffective and pursuing the wrong model -- that of valuing ideology over partisianship. I am not saying that those arguments were entirely without merit, but I do believe we took them too far. What a Democrat does has to be as important as how partisan they are in doing it. While we want to be a big tent, a tent without walls is called a field. We are much closer ot a field and than a tent.
Obviously, Daily Kos has never adhered only to the "more Democrats" line exclusively. But it's prevailing ethos has certainly emphasied it over ideological concerns. And that is a great failing. We now have a popular president and sixty Democratic Senators and we cannot get even a weak public option passed. Some of the people the netroots and Daily Kos have worked the hardest for appear to be on the wrong side of this issue, just as they have been on the wrong side of other important issues. Part of the reason why that is so is because we have neglected ideology for so long in favor of partisianship. The thought was to get a majority and even sixty Sneators. On the important stuff, we could make sure that they vote with the wisheds of the party. But we never bothered to define what was important stuff.
When Crashing the Gate came out I I wrote about it:
I think that Kos and Jerome don’t recognize that and that failure represents a serious flaw in their arguments. Tactics and strategy are just tools — tools that work for the DLC and the Schuemers of the world just as well as for anyone else. With the Democratic Party in the hands of ideologically moderate to conservative politicians like the DLC and Schumer and Clinton and Emmanuel, I don’t see how ignoring ideas and ideology is going to get us a more progressive country. Telling the same organizations and the people that they represent, people who have already been betrayed by the Democratic Party, that if they just sit down and shut up and not try to replicate the success of the NRA that everything will be all better is not a terribly convincing argument.
Markos and Jerome are dead on about the failings of the consultant class and the timid strategy of the Dems. But they are setting progressives up for failure of they insist that the ideas come after the victory. Especially if they insist that the factories that generate progressive ideas — outside groups — are to be destroyed or treated as if they, and not the DLCs of the world, are the enemy.
Again, the netroots and Daily Kos have done a great deal of good over the last six years. But we have failed to help carve out the intellectual arguments necessary to define what it means to be a Democrat. We have helped elect a lot of Democrats, but we haven't really insisted on any meaningful pledges as to what, at a minimum, a Democrat should support. Worse, we have actively disparaged and worked against the notion that it is important to have such tests for Democrats.
Even if I am wrong about the failure of health reform -- and, God, do I hope I am wrong -- I still think the process has highlighted the flaws with the current Daily Kos model. It is telling that the House and the Senate didn't even bother to listen to single-payer advocates when they were creating their bills. They could do that because at no point have we, as a part loyalists, made it clear that support or single payer was important enough to guide our votes and our donations. Even if the House bill is ultimately adopted, even if our current best case scenario plays out, it is still worse than it could have been. And that is in part because we have cared to much about the "more" and not enough about the "better".