Health Care Home Stretch: The Base that Roared

In fact, given that Ohio is slated to lose a couple of House seats after the census, it might be worthwhile to threaten eliminating his district when redistricting comes round.

Speaking of Ohio, the more calm minded Ohioan, Sherrod Brown astutely pointed out on Rachel Maddow's show that most progressive policies in the US have started out small, humble, and incremental but once started; they are improved upon and are pretty much never able to be removed (look at Bush's failed attempt to privatize Social Security, he couldn't even get a majority of the House and Senate to vote on it).

Kucinich needs to take a lesson from (the good) Sen. Brown.

or the blogs, as it were.

Thank you so much for this.

Too many lives are riding on Health Care Reform to not pay attention to what can and must be done.

352,000 lives were lost during the eight years of the Bush Presidency, due to lack of health care.

If we extrapolate the 44,000 lives lost each year back to the end of the Truman Presidency, it's 2,588,000 lives lost and countless hearts broken.  Is it an accuate number? Most likely not. The US population was smaller 57 years ago.  Perhaps it should be rounded down to two million.  Or perhaps...I don't know....1.8 million? Maybe 1,000,0000? But how many is too many?

For them, for those they left behind, for the lives and hearts we can save - We must get this done.

Hi Al,

I know you've been very busy with the Authentic School of Journalism these past 2.5 months. Very important work, no doubt. I've been coming here nearly everyday to see what you've posted. Glad to read your voice at this penultimate moment in the healthcares saga. Yeah it has been a saga alright to many observers.

The interesting thing is that this President's simple strategy of winning with tenacity is practically sending people both right and uber left to the sanatorium. It is quite a sight to behold. Why? Because this country has forgotten that anything worth having is always a Sisyphean uphill battle. Such was the aboliitionist struggle, the civil rights struggle, the women's suffragette struggle. Internationally, the struggles have been similalry protracted, such as the anti-apartheid fight and most anti-colonial strugles in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Many of our current keyboard activists just cannot fathom what dogged persistence and "discipline'' is all about.

I was reading Alex KIoppelman's salon.com compilation of Dennis Kucinich's actual legislative accomplishments in the decade plus years he's been in congress and it was truly paltry. He's had exactly three out of 97 sponsored bills passed, which three are colossaly insignificant. So what is his purpose in congress? I hope he changes his mind and votes for this bill. He has made his ideological point. Now it's time to save some lives and inch us closer to his preferred ideal. But I don't know.

I love this story about Obama introducing Kucinich at today's Ohio health care rally (good timing for that scheduling, right?), where a person in the audience yelled out 'Vote yes!" and Obama said -- "Hear that Dennis?"

www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/15/obama-brings-dennis-kucin_n_499313.html

The O-man's got his mojo back, big time.

Meet Fresh Air.

I'm glad folks are calling Dennis on the carpet. Artur Davis needs to be called on the carpet too.

1. Dennis Kucninch is one of the least effective "progressives" you'll ever see. His career is marked by ugly racial politics and a self-serving switch on the issue of reproductive rights. So much for "principles."

2. Failure of some parts of the online left to recognize who makes up the Democratic base and Obama's base.

When we last weighed in on the Congressional machinations in Washington over health care reform around the new year, there was more heat than light coming not only from the right but from some loud and shrill corners that called themselves “the left,” many even claiming to represent “the base” of President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.&

A loud megaphone is not insignificant but it's not the same kind of power as lots of people saying the same thing. (The former being the better known parts of the online left; the latter being "the base.") Unfortunately, the media is happy to make the loud megaphone the face of the left, even if it's often unrepresentative of the broader left.

3. Who did what.

Folks at the grassroots level needed only to compare and contrast the behaviors of the different players on the left side of the dial in the US. Those that kept their eyes and hands on the ball and worked to get the best possible bill (which as with any legislation on any subject involves compromise) to move that ball down the field (especially including the White House) simply earned more respect than those who whined and pouted and offered increasingly shrill demands.

It wasn't any one moment but more the course of the whole fight where folks got to make the comparison. Kill-billers did next to nothing in the way of improving the bill. Key electeds & their staffers and established progressive organizations with on-the-ground leverage went with a "press forward" mentality that got the job done and allowed more reluctant members of Congress space to get on board.

Those words were spoken to me by President Barack Obama on Wednesday, March 10, 2010 when I met him, in St. Louis, MO, as a volunteer for Organizing for America.  My comment to him, as he put his arm around my shoulder for our photo was, "Sir, we really need Health Care Reform."

"Don't worry.  We'll get it done.", my Community Organizer-in-Chief replied.

I don't have the photo with the President yet, but I did bring a piece of art that my son-in-law did during the primaries in April, 2008, and he signed it.  [I'm in the process of figuring out how to post that]

Showing up, working for We the People, is the beauty of this organizing moment in US history.  I am grateful that I had a refuge during the campaign and beyond, right here in The Field.  I've said it before and I'll say it again:  Barack and Al are my Community Organizers, inspiring me to step up in ways I always knew I could.

No fair.  While the rest of the blogosphere was pulling its hair at every single public pronouncement - and while the MSM called health care reform dead - you coyly decided to wait them all out, until it became obvious to the naysayers that cooler heads will prevail.

Why is this no fair?  I got bored waiting for your next post on the topic.

Frankly, I thought this outcome was always obvious, since the political interests and policy preferences of the Democrats so neatly line up in favor of passage.  This doesn't make me smart, but does expose a huge swath of commentators as incredibly dense.  Never in my life have I been so disappointed with the commentary of respected outfits, including the NYT.  In fact, today's NYT has two laughable editorials (one from David Brooks and one from an aide to Snow).

Anyway, Al, next time don't make us wait so long.

What Jim said....

Nate Silver has a very interesting post up on fivethirtyeight.com.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/03/progressives-strategic-choices-on...

It suggests that the tactics pursued by the left were probably not terribly consequential to the outcome, due to the the willingness of Blue Dogs and other parties to accept failure as an option. It rings true to me as a student of history: it is extremely difficult to get a large number of parties to agree on much of anything, and the results are often quite unpredictable or even irrational. That we have been able to get this bill is a victory and a testament to the handling of this matter by Obama(especially lately) and Speaker Pelosi.

I would like to end by saying: you're absolutely right, Al, as usual. I think, if we pull this off, we'll see an end to the lionization of figures like Kucinich outside of the "usual" quarters...

And 'progressives' are already whining.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/3/17/846827/-Your-Abbreviated-Pundit-Round-up

amk

I'm almost giddy - and actually incredulous - that we do seem to be reaching the point of passing an imperfect, but still very good, bill.  This isn't a 50 yard bomb downfield.  But - I think it's a solid 8 to 10 yard gainer.  It's a first down, it keeps the drive alive.

Forget progressive - I've never shied away from calling myself a liberal dating back to the days when Mike Dukakis ran scared from the term and I won't start now - it's a universal partisan truth, from either angle:

When you stop focusing on good policy that makes 'something' better - and start focusing first on finding a villain and figuring out how to punish the villain legislatively, you're in for a world of hurt.

The GOP and the conservative movement have been stuck in this cycle of stupid for most of my lifetime.  I don't reject out-of-hand honest conservative reliance on 'free market solutions' and yes, I think there are even kernels of truth to be found in the conservative concept that social welfare programs can sometimes breed dependence.

However, conservatives and the GOP have long since stopped caring, much less really trying, to solve any of those problems.  Ever since Reagan vocalized the Nixonian rejection of safety nets and made a cottage industry out of telling the middle class that their lot in life is the fault of the 'other', the poor, the black, the hispanic - the entire focus of conservative thought and Republican policy has been about finding a way to punish that other.  Making changes to our welfare system wasn't about giving dwellers in urban ghettos and dying small towns a hand in lifting themselves into prosperity - it was about making sure we punished them all.  Forget addressing a long, sordid history of economic, educational, and social inequality for women, minorites, etc - no one denies such inequalities existed - but it became more important to punish those who insisted on "me, too!"

I think you're exactly right, Al - this is more (will be more, we're not there just yet) than just a legislative victory for progressives/liberals.  I think it's much bigger than that.  I think it's a return to our New Deal and Great Society ideological roots - where the goal isn't to punish those that played a role in creating problems, but rather - lift up those hurt by those problems.

When I advocate for marriage equality, it's not churches I want to outlaw or religion I want to eliminate (or even dictate) -- it's fundamental equality I want to deliver.

When I demand financial reforms, it's not insulated millionaires and rapacious traders I want to punish - it's our economy generally and American pocketbooks, retirement accounts, specifically I want to protect.

So, too, it is with health insurance reform.  I have no love or attachment to private insurance, and in a vacuum, it's "tits on boar" to borrow a little homespunism... in a perfect world, it's pretty damn useless.  But- we don't live in a perfect world.  We live in a utilization based system and we're not ready as a nation to make some tough choices and face some tough realities.  And that's OK - for now, we can make what we have better.  We can level the field a bit, we can put tighter controls on the industry.  We can demand greater oversight.  We legislate a bit of fundamental fairness.  We can tinker and look for improvements in the system and experiment with new methods of delivering care.  We can lend a hand to those that cannot afford coverage.

Where the Hamshers, the Moores, etc went wrong is the fork in the road where the path to "health care reform" became less about any of those things, and more about a single-minded ideological focus bent on finding a villain and punishing that villain.

Good policy almost never comes from such efforts.

Good policy comes from a focus on fixing a problem. Yes, that does mean rooting out causes - but on a national level, you almost never find a single cause and it's never as simple as  finding one bad player.

If - I'm still too jittery to say when - if this reform package passes, it will be progressives and liberals through the Democratic party stepping back from the abyss the GOP long since fell down.  It will be an enormous victory and a sign of great things to come.

Pragmatism yes, *but* the dems nearly completely failed reform because they started from a weak negotiating position. You don't negotiate by saying "Oh, they'll never go for that, so I won't even ask", which the libdems did by not even discussing single-payer. In other words, you don't start from the Center and move to the Right. You start from the Left and move to the Center.

That, my friends, is pragmatic politics.

...side with the Republicans and then have to endure Mitch McConnel's smug self-satisfied smile for the next few years????  I could support any teeny advance to avoid that.

At the end of the day, the left (the real left) really had no choice but to support this bill -- the time for complaining and second guessing Obama and the House and Senate leadership has long since passed.

This isn't the ground I would have chosen for decisive battle -- that would have been financial reform -- but now that we're here it's a battle that simply has to be won, by any means available.

The real question is what comes next. Will the left have the toughness and discipline to dig in and defend what's been won?

Given our history, I'm afraid that to ask the question is almost to answer it. We could easily win this battle and still lose the war.

Denis - I'd prefer Single Payer. So would Senator Bernie Saunders, who said aloud that if he had introduced such legislation it wouldn't have gotten five votes.

This fantasy that one "starts negotiating" with the most radical position regardless of whether it has strong support in Congress or whether anyone will take it seriously is not borne out by history. If you start from a negotiating position of weakness, you just provoke ridicule and wound your position in the negotiations to come, as well as increasing the chances that no health care reform at all will get traction. That's pretty much what Hillary Clinton did in 1993 - said "my way or the highway" - and its been 17 years of nothing ever since.

A bluff is only worthwhile if the adversary believes you have a winning hand (this is why, as Nate Silver has pointed out, all the kill-billie bluffing on the Health Care bill from the blogosphere had virtually no effect on the outcome). It makes the bluffer look weak and silly and only emboldens the adversary because he then knows he his playing against a buffoon.

Al's point is well taken, and another thing to point out is that negotiations along those lines only work if all the parties who are necessary to pass it really want to get something done, and that is really not a given (let's face it, Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, Mary Landrieu, and many moderate and conservative Democrats in the House didn't want to do this at all).

It's like trying to sell a House to a potential buyer who really doesn't want to buy it by asking for twice its value. It's not going to be a big surprise when they say "go to hell"

Amazing comment! I really agree with your point about punishing or helping. For too many on the left (Hamsher and her like) healthcare reform became more about punishing health insurance companies than about helping the uninsured and that's how they now find themselves in a position of making things worse for the uninsured (by opposing the bill) because they don't see enough "punishment" for the insurance companies.

Likewise, for many on the left financial reform is more about punishing Wall Street than about what actually works as sound regulation. People want to punish the Republicans and reject working with them even when their votes are necessary for legislation to pass. And so on.

I was a huge supporter of Kucinich in 2004 but by 2008 had come to think he was still stuck in 2004 and that Obama provided the best way forward. Kucinich practices the politics of opposition, Obama of governing. Democrats are in a position now where we need to govern, but some on the left are still stuck in the politics of opposition.

Having said that, I'm glad to see Kucinich came around and will vote yes on the bill. I could not forgive him if he had voted to deny 31 million people the coverage they so desperately need.

I'm glad Rep. Kucinich is more reasonable than the people who lionize him. I, for one, prefer my heroes to be known for their deeds rather than their words.

In addition to Kucinich, Rep. Dale Kildee of Michigan, one of the infamous Stupak bloc, has also announced his support for the bill. Slowly but surely the ranks close around the president...

Add James Oberstar to the list of Stupak defections.

Tellingly, both Kildee and Oberstar made statements that they were satisfied that the Nelson language in the Senate bill was adequate, which undermines Stupak's argument.

I'm in Bart Stupak's district.  My house was the HQ for the Obama campaign in my county in 2008.  As I went door to door and made phone calls for (then) Senator Obama, I dutifully included a pitch for Mr. Stupak.  His signs stood along the Obama 2008 signs in my yard.

Makes me rather sick now.  The idealist in me wants to say that I'll never put a checkmark next to that douche's name on the ballot again.  The pragmatist in me says, go ahead an vote for his primary challenger in August, but be prepared to hold your nose a vote for Stupak again in November.

This is a very conservative district.  If it ever falls to a Republican, it will be a long long time before a Democrat ever has a chance to win it again.  No, I'm afraid there will be no protest votes from me, when it comes down to it.

At least Mr. Stupak's vote is marginally in play on this bill.  That's a lot more than can be said of even the most left-leaning Republican in the House these days.

But how I despise that man, all the same.

The Committee On Energy And Commerce of the House of Representatives has posted District numbers of people who will be positively affected by the benefits of the Health Care Reform Bill.

I am one of them.

Update:  The link did not work.  I'm not sure why.

I'll try this:

http://energycommerce.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=frontp...

thanks so much for that link!

There appears to be a similar dynamic at work with Obama's proposed reforms to the student loan system, which would take loan-making away from banks and expand grants to students:

http://studentactivism.net/2010/03/18/student-activists-converging/

This bill was on the rocks, but was revived by grassroots campaign by student activists and is now likely to be attached to the healthcare reconciliation bill.  The US Students Association will be in DC lobbying this weekend and into next week.  Great timing!

The Organizing for America folks have released a youtube video called "The Cost of Inaction" on healthcare reform.  It is beyond cool and very informative.  Lots of detailed information in about 2:17 minutes.  (I dare you not to tap your feet while watching.)

http://www.youtube.com/barackobama