I’m not panicking yet about the outcome of the health care debate, but I think we’ve all learned quite a bit about the Democratic Party in the last seven months that we might not have known, or might only have surmised, during the Bush Era.
I think we all expect and can understand that politicians are foremost concerned with their own reelection prospects. And, so, it isn’t any special surprise that there are Democrats who hail from conservative states and districts who are going to buck the Democratic agenda on controversial issues from time to time. For example, we’re lucky to have pro-choice senators from North Dakota because abortion is a highly contentious issue in that state. If they go soft on issues like parental notification or abortion coverage in a public option, I don’t think that is anything we shouldn’t have expected, even if we disagree with their positions wholeheartedly. Politicians normally have a keen sense of which votes will put their career in true jeopardy, and we should not be shocked when they duck those types of votes.
What is surprising, is that there has emerged a kind of ideological opposition to even the lukewarm kind of health care reform that Obama ran on as a candidate for office from a significant bloc of Democrats in both the House and the Senate. It seems to me that the fact that the people had ample opportunity to size up Obama’s health care proposals in both the primaries and the general election, and that they strongly preferred Obama over his competitors, should relieve most Democrats of their anxiety over whether supporting his plans will cost them at the ballot box.
Now, I know that despite Obama’s strong showing nationally that he did very poorly in states like Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Tennessee. I can understand why Democratic politicians from those states might feel that there is little to no mandate for Obama’s health care reforms in their districts. But what we’re seeing goes far beyond any instinct for self-preservation. We’re seeing evidence that a lot of so-called Democrats are actually more concerned about corporate profits than they are in making sure that every American has health care coverage.
Even this isn’t so terribly surprising in the sense that we knew that we had a lot of pro-corporate Democrats in the party. This is basically a legacy of the Democratic Leadership Council and the influence of the Clinton administration. But, even with the DLC’s love of free trade and its pro-growth bias, they have historically given more than mere lip-service on the issue of the medically uninsured. Health care coverage has been as issue that has united Democrats of all ideological stripes.
We knew that a heavy pro-corporate tilt existed in the Democratic caucus. That’s why single-payer was never on the table and that’s why no one other than Dennis Kucinich even bothered to pretend that it might get anywhere in Congress when they were running for the Democratic nomination. That was a concession to political reality that was made right up front. Obama has said repeatedly that single-payer would be the best system if we were starting from scratch, but he never would have won the nomination or the endorsements of the majority of his colleagues if he had run on introducing a single-payer system in this country.
Yet, I don’t remember any elected Democrats coming out against the watered down health care proposals of Obama or Clinton or Edwards during the primaries. But, now, with a health care bill under consideration in Congress, we see these ‘centrist’ Democrats coming out of the woodwork to oppose even a public option. What this shows is that a lot of Democrats have been running a fraud on the members of the party. They want us to support them and work for their election because the Republicans are worse, but when the testing time comes, they are not with us.
It’s funny that it’s not enough to have sixty senators and 255 members of the House, because the only possible solution is to elect more Democrats. We might be able to make a small amount of progress by primarying out a few bad actors, but that’s difficult to do and only plays around the margins. We can probably manage our problems in the House, but the U.S. Senate is hopelessly conservative. The only answer is to elect another five or six Democratic senators and hope we can overwhelm these ‘centrists.’
