Ever since the Clinton Health Care Plan went down in flames and the Gingrich Revolution rocked the nation, progressive Democrats have been on defense and operating on the margins of American political discourse. That’s a fact. We haven’t even been permitted to dream about major policy accomplishments and, overall, our sense of what is possible has withered on the vine. It got to the point where it was considered politically incorrect to even advocate for things like single payer health care in a political campaign. And, of course, all three Democratic contenders have tepid health care plans that they like to call ‘universal’ but only by changing how that word is generally understood.
Forcing every American to buy private health coverage from giant health insurance corporations (as Clinton and Edwards’ plans do) is hardly my idea of progressive policy, except in a world where progressive policies have been written off as impossible before the debate even begins. Obama’s plan isn’t much different, except that he doesn’t mandate that you buy coverage if you want to spend your money elsewhere for some dumb reason of your own. All of the plans offer subsidies for those that can’t afford to buy the coverage, which will soon be almost all of us. This is not vision. This is not ambition. This is weak tea. But it is thought to be radical in our current political environment, where Republicans have 49 senators and can filibuster any legislation that they can remain united against. And so it is.
Some will say that this is the politics of the possible. It’s pragmatism. I think it is the politics of Democratic battered wife syndrome and I think Paul Krugman has a Stage 5 case of the affliction. In discussing the Lessons of 1992 Krugman makes clear that he learned two things from the Clinton era. I’ll reverse their order here.
So what are the lessons for today’s Democrats?
…Second, the policy proposals candidates run on matter.
I have colleagues who tell me that Mr. Obama’s rejection of health insurance mandates — which are an essential element of any workable plan for universal coverage — doesn’t really matter, because by the time health care reform gets through Congress it will be very different from the president’s initial proposal anyway. But this misses the lesson of the Clinton failure: if the next president doesn’t arrive with a plan that is broadly workable in outline, by the time the thing gets fixed the window of opportunity may well have passed.
Krugman’s vision is limited to these pro-health insurance corporation bills, and he thinks mandates are an essential component to getting every last American to give their money to these corporations. Yet, Obama has said that he would prefer a single-payer system and that it is only political realism that leads him to propose an orthodox pro-corporate bill. He is, after all, running for the presidency of the United States, not Sweden. What do you think Obama will do if he discovers that he has a filibuster proof margin in the Senate and over 250 seats in the House? Do you think he’ll want to push the same tepid concession-to-political-reality health care bill that he campaigned on? I hope not. Ask yourself, what is more important: the fact that Obama helped bring 87,400 more Democrats out to vote in South Carolina than Republicans (Bush received 276,000 more votes than Kerry there in 2004) or that fact that Obama doesn’t push mandates in a pro-corporate health care bill?
Obama promises, although he cannot guarantee, a major political realignment in this country that will sweep aside petty concerns over minor differences in shitty health care plans. He promises to give us the kind of ruling majorities that gave us FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. That is his radicalism. And that leads into Krugman’s second great lesson (although he lists it first).
First, those who don’t want to nominate Hillary Clinton because they don’t want to return to the nastiness of the 1990s — a sizable group, at least in the punditocracy — are deluding themselves. Any Democrat who makes it to the White House can expect the same treatment: an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false (at least not on Page 1).
The point is that while there are valid reasons one might support Mr. Obama over Mrs. Clinton, the desire to avoid unpleasantness isn’t one of them.
People said horrible things about FDR and LBJ but they didn’t let that stop them from getting their agendas enacted into law. And, let’s not forget that FDR and LBJ’s campaigns were a lot less radical than their post-landslide agendas. The landslides of 1932 and 1964 simply changed what was possible.
Krugman merely quakes in fear. He has no imagination for the big prize because he has been beaten to the margins of political debate and he no longer has the confidence to dream.
I’ll add one extra thing here because it is kind of funny. Vanity Fair has a big article this month about Richard Mellon Scaife’s ugly divorce, and Scaife has some interesting things to say about the Clintons.
Asked whether his infidelity is hypocritical, in light of his political commitments, he refers not to a moral principle but to his own personal history. “My first marriage ended with an affair,” he says, amused. And monogamy is not, he continues, an essential part of a good marriage. “I don’t want people throwing rocks at me in the street. But I believe in open marriage.” Philandering, Scaife says with a laugh, “is something that Bill Clinton and I have in common.”
Those are surprising words indeed to hear from a man who spent so lavishly to uncover Bill Clinton’s sexual peccadilloes and to advance the movement fueled by family values. But it would be a mistake to read the saga of Richard Mellon Scaife’s divorce as simply a story of moral hypocrisy. His treatment of women, especially his first wife, suggests a high regard for his own gratification. His commitment to conservative politics has never been primarily about upholding traditional morality; it has been about promoting policies that help to preserve his own wealth and that of people like himself. On the subject of Clinton his weather vane is now spinning wildly. Scaife speaks of a “very pleasant” two-hour-and-fifteen-minute private lunch with Bill Clinton at the former president’s New York office last summer. “I never met such a charismatic man in my whole life,” Scaife says, glowing with pleasure at the memory. “To show him that I wasn’t a total Republican libertarian, I said that I had a friend named Jack Murtha,” a Democratic member of the House of Representatives from Pennsylvania. “He said, ‘Oh, Jack Murtha. You’re talking about my golfing partner!’ ” In the midst of these backslapping memories, though, Scaife goes carbuncle-eyed and refuses to answer on the record when asked if he still thinks Vince Foster’s suicide was, as he once told The New York Times, “the Rosetta Stone to the Clinton Administration.”
I’m sure the right-wing will have their loonies out in force to attack any Democratic presidency, but those loonies might not be quite so well financed now that Scaife has made his peace with the Clintons.
