As we all know, the Democrats have had a massive loss of nerve as the result of losing one Senate seat to a Republican. (Yes, I know, it was Ted Kennedy’s seat for decades, but it’s still only one seat.)
Since then, there has been an avalanche of blog and media reporting about what the loss, as well as the Democratic reaction to it, means for health care reform and for Democrats’ electoral chances in general. And that means…. a blog roundup!
Josh Marshall laser focuses on the problem with Democrats’ reaction — or much of it:
The thing to watch tonight are Dems from the left and the right (but I suspect overwhelmingly from the right) putting out statements that the Massachusetts verdict means Dems need to pull the plug on health care reform. Here’s Sen. Bayh kicking things off in the run for the exits. Anthony Weiner was just on MSNBC seemingly sticking to his comment from this morning that a Coakley loss probably meant the end of health care reform.
People don’t like politicians who are weak and don’t know what they believe. If the bill was worth passing yesterday, it’s just as worth passing tomorrow. All the meta-politics about being for something before you were against it, knowing what you believe or not knowing, being able to get something done. It all comes down to stuff like this.
To the two examples Josh gave, you can add Dianne Feinstein and Jim Webb, who declared that Scott Brown’s win was ” ‘a referendum not only on health care reform but also on the openness and integrity of our government process.’ ” (He is wrong about that. Voters care about results, not process or partisan bickering.)
Barney Frank announced on the evening of the election that health care reform was “dead” (he backed off on that the next day).
At least some Democratic leaders seem to understand what’s needed now, but they still can’t get their act together (emphasis is mine):
Among officials on Capitol Hill there was a sense of lost opportunity. Six-and-a-half months have passed with the party holding 60 seats in the United States Senate. But the chief policy objective in that time frame — the passage of health care reform — has not been accomplished. Absent that signature political achievement, and with a climate toxic for incumbents, top party strategists were charting out a new course for a new Congress even before the final Massachusetts votes were cast.
In a push to set the stage, the White House came out forcefully in favor of getting health care reform passed into law, raising the specter of even more political damage should legislation remain un-passed.
[…]
But many in the party are skittish about signing on to legislation that has grown politically unpopular. Several House Democrats who spoke to the Huffington Post expressed wariness about the prospect of passing the Senate’s bill pro forma. Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), on Tuesday night, warned that it would not be “fair and prudent” for his colleagues to move forward on health care until the body’s newest senator was seated. …
The divergence over the best way forward could, officials warn, do far more damage to Democrats than the loss of a singular Senate seat — with infighting essentially breeding inaction. One labor official, when read Webb’s statement, responded bluntly: “The American people need results. If the situation were reversed, no Republican would ever say that. They would pass their bill.
“The million-dollar question is where are they going to go?” the source added. “If they stand up and fight for what they campaigned on, the people will stand with them. If, like some senators are already calling for, [they] run to the center, don’t hold votes because ‘it’s not fair,’ they are going to endanger their entire agenda.”
Paul Krugman underscores a point that David Axelrod made (Axelrod is also quoted in Sam Stein’s HuffPost piece).
… the campaign against HCR has been based on lies, and the only way to refute those lies (and stop them from being rolled out again and again) is to pass the thing, and let people see it in action. It’s too bad startup is delayed under the Senate bill — but even so, that’s what you have to do.
Memo to Lanny Davis: No, Lanny, if health care reform goes down, it will not be because of “[t]he purists on the left of the Democratic Party who demanded the ‘public option’ or no bill at all [and who] apparently forgot that candidate Obama’s health-care proposal did not include a public option.” First off, “candidate Obama’s health-care proposal” did include a public option. And tied for first, if health care reform goes down, it will be because of Democrats like you who, having apparently slept through the last six months, actually believe and can say with a straight face that it’s Democrats who have been unwilling “to seek common ground reform.”
Here is Exhibit A, right up in your face, of what could easily happen in 2010 to so-called “moderate” Democrats who spent months trying to make health care reform legislation more conservative instead of working to get a good, reasonable, decent bill through Congress so that Americans could see for themselves how it improved their lives:
At least one Republican might do more than cheer for Massachusetts: House GOP Conference Chairman Mike Pence is now considering a campaign of his own against Sen. Evan Bayh.
The outspoken conservative could effectively clear the Republican primary field and give his party a top-tier opponent for one of the best funded Democratic incumbents in 2010.
Pence issued a statement on the Massachusetts race, saying the “American people are telling Washington, DC enough is enough. In this special election in Massachusetts they have sent a deafening message to the political class.”
And how is Evan Bayh going to counter that message, now that he has no concrete improvements in his constituents’ lives that he can credit to that new health care reform bill that he helped to pass in the summer or fall of 2009 — because of course there is no health care reform bill. It doesn’t exist, thanks to senators like Bayh. Sorry, guy, no one to counter the Pence campaign’s lies; you’re out of a job.
Conor Friedersdorf at The American Scene sees the Massachusetts election results as a sort of Rorschach test in which everyone can see exactly what they want to see:
In the annals of bullshit, analysis of what Massachusetts voters “meant” by electing Scott Brown to the Senate must be breaking stank and volume records faster than the resurrected bodies of every Manolete kill that time God confined them to the same corral. Before it’s all over, we’re going to need Hercules, a four-news-cycle supply of whatever Mark McGwire was taking, and the largest shovel available in the Bay State . …
It is particularly amusing to see folks call the outcome stunning in one breath and aver in the next that they can explain why it happened mere hours after the fact, without any new data save the result. This is especially grating when it’s so obvious that the election turned on all the issues that were most important to me, that the outcome so clearly vindicates my world view, and that the wisest course in light of the results is for both parties to do exactly what I’ve been advocating for all along.
Jim DeMint boasts to reporters that Massachusetts voters decided to elect Scott Brown out of admiration for his “Waterloo” strategy to “break” Obama by stopping health care reform:
“I’m not looking for vindication but I do believe that was a call to arms early in this race. I was one of the first who was willing to take the president on directly on an agenda that I thought was out of control,” DeMint said Wednesday. “So I certainly don’t regret saying it.”
In fact, DeMint is so pleased with his cleverness that he said it again:
Invoking the Napoleonic metaphor once again, DeMint warned the president and Democratic leaders to scale back their ambitious agenda in the wake of the Massachusetts election.
“If the president and the Democrats don’t get the message from Massachusetts, it will be their Waterloo,” he said.
Once more, because some people still don’t understand why we cannot just scale back health care reform, Ezra Klein explains it again, analogizing it to buying a house:
Let’s say you want to buy a house from me. And at the last minute, your portfolio take a big hit and you realize you have less money than you think. “Pare it back,” you say. What do I do?
I can’t just rip out the foundation. Then there’s no house at all. The frame is important, too. So is the plumbing and the wiring. I can’t leave that stuff half-finished, or the place is unusable. I can downgrade the lighting fixtures, but they won’t save you much money.
Fundamentally, the things that make the house expensive all exist in concert with one another. The things that exist on their own — track lighting, say — no one really cares about. You can decide not to buy this house and instead buy a cheaper house. But you can’t just make this house cheaper and still expect it to function as shelter. So too with health-care reform.
There is an alternative, though:
If you want to pare back, you need a different approach altogether. You could reduce the cost, the size of the bill, the complexity of the legislation, and the number of regulations by just expanding public programs that helps the most vulnerable groups: Let people over age 50 into Medicare, expand Medicaid to people under 200% of the poverty line, and pay for it through a tax on the rich. The second-best alternative to the Senate bill is not a pared-back version of the Senate bill that doesn’t work. It’s a bill that does work, and doesn’t carry the baggage of the current legislation.
I’ll end with some reassuring words from Greg Sargent, meant to allay the fears Nancy Pelosi raised when she said she doubted the House would pass the Senate bill:
Pelosi’s claims are going to sound awful to those who want the House to pass the Senate bill already. But let’s be as clear as possible: Pelosi did not rule this option out.
The key is that Pelosi said the bill can’t pass the House “at this time” or “right now.” What’s more, this doesn’t address another possibility being studied by House leaders right now: Passing the Senate bill while simultaneously creating a mechanism that would make it possible, or even mandatory, to fix the bill later through reconciliation, meaning those fixes would only require 51 votes in the Senate.
If such a mechanism were created, it might — repeat, might — induce enough House Dems to reconsider, making it possible for them to pass the Senate bill. No one knows how feasible such a mechanism would be. But it’s being studied as we speak.
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