JekylnHyde had a wonderful diary yesterday on the Week in Editorial Cartoons. Absolutely fabulous cartoons about the ups and downs of the last week. Everyone should visit the diary.
It was accompanied by a poll asking how confident each of us was that health care reform would pass. I must have come upon the poll early, because when I checked "always confident it would pass," it turned out I was alone, although reinforcements have come up.
I thought I should explain why I was so confident and dkistner was good enough to say my comment should have been a diary. So, you'll find the comment below the fold. (And just to demonstrate that this confidence is not new-found now that the legislation has passed, I point out that toward the end of January, when things looked bleak, I posted a long diary on reconciliation anticipating the end game and how it would play out.)
Great diary. Fabulous cartoons.
I'm down as "confident it would pass." Why wouldn't it pass?
All we needed to do was grow some onions and push on. Fortunately Nancy Pelosi grew some and pushed on despite the echo chamber in the media saying that the GOP's new 41-59 Senate majority argued for throwing in the towel.
We suffer from a peculiar bipolar syndrome on Kos. A lot of us are angry at how the media reports things and refuse to accept a lot of what we hear, but at the same time we buy into the 24-hour-a-day news cycle that was ready to throw Obama under the bus. Fox, CNN and the rest of the cable shows were ready to declare Obama's presidency dead because (a) House liberals wouldn't accept the Senate Bill; (b) house abortion foes wouldn't accept the Senate bill; (c) last year's House "yes's" would become this year's House "no's"; (d) the Democrats were stooping to the use of House procedures to advance their agenda which was suspicious and weak (although Republican use of Senate procedures to advance theirs was perfectly acceptable and showed the strength and confidence of GOP leaders); and (e) generally the Democrats can't walk and chew gum at the same time.
But all of that was really just a sideshow. Behind the scenes the real work was going on and this is why I was confident:
1. We couldn't afford to walk away. Senator DeMint would have been proven correct -- it would have been Obama's Waterloo and demonstrate that Democrats couldn't govern.
2. We had already passed substantially the same legislation in both the House and the Senate. That is a huge investment of legislative time and effort that no Democrat wanted to see wasted.
3. The White House had already brokered the essential agreements needed to reconcile the two bills before the Massachusetts election.
4. Plouffe (who engineered Obama's election) was brought into the White House and his first announcement was that health care had to pass or Obama would be toast.
5. Nancy Pelosi said something to the effect of: "We're going through this gate. If the gate's closed, we're going over the wall. If the wall's too high, we'll pole vault over. Barring that we'll parachute in. But make no mistake, we're going to pass health care."
6. We had the reconciliation option to work with to resolve differences and avoid another Senate filibuster.
7. And we had powerful, working majorities in both the House and the Senate and control of the White House and the executive branch.
Walk away from health care after Massachusetts? I don't think so. Obama would have been accused of spinelessness and I'm not sure I'd have come to his defense. I would have been one mighty pissed off liberal if he'd abandoned the effort.
So, with all that, it was just a matter of waiting for the dust to settle, getting the atmospherics correct (thanks Anthem) and offering the GOP another opportunity to behave like jerks (that White House bipartisan meeting was Obama's stroke of genius).
Then Obama let the Democrats on the Hill do what professional politicians do best. Purists like us argue values and philosophy. And then we start fights with each other because we can't stand to have anything less than a perfect piece of legislation (an oxymoron if there ever was one). So it has to have single payer. Or barring that it has to have a public option. Or it has to include immigrants. Or it has to exclude immigrants. Or it has to cost less. Or it has to cost more. Or it has to pay for abortions. Or it must absolutely prohibit abortions. Or something. I'm not saying these aren't important issues, but we beat ourselves to death over them.
That's not the way professional politicians behave (however they posture in public). In private they say to each other, "Look, you and I agree on nine things out of ten. Isn't that great? The GOP disagrees with both of us on all ten. Why would we help them ? How do we work this out so that we're both comfortable on item #10?" The best of them will say: "Look, I know we don't see eye-to-eye on most things, but we agree on celebrating Mother's Day. Can we find other little things to agree on and expand the areas where we can cooperate."
So, I was reasonably optimistic because that's how it's done. I was always confident that that was how it would be done this time around, too.
If there's anything that's troubling, it's that the Republican legislators have stopped behaving like professional politicians and started behaving like ideologues while playing to the gallery. That's not good for the country and it's not good that the chattering classes and newspaper columnists encourage and enable this behavior, because instead of expanding areas of agreement this behavior encourages the search for division.