I like Chris Hayes’s piece in The Nation about the Tuesday night Common Purpose meetings in Washington between the White House and progressive bigwigs because it is informative. In Philly, we’re doing Drinking Liberally on Tuesday nights (although I haven’t been in too long) and the White House never sends anybody. That’s okay, because we don’t like to mix too much politics with our cocktails.
What I don’t like about Hayes’s piece is that it perpetuates what I consider to be a developing myth. The myth is that the only reason that the Obama administration is still pushing a public option is that progressives have been lobbying so hard for it. My problem with this narrative is that it is only partially true. It is a certainty that the public option would have died if there hadn’t been a visible, motivated, activated constituency out there lobbying for it. I don’t dispute that. That’s not my problem with this storyline.
My problem is that Obama ran on a fairly well-articulated platform that included a public option. That is what he said he wanted to do. The activists are only trying to help him fulfill a campaign promise. The activists didn’t come up with this plan and most of them actually support far more aggressive reform, like a single-payer system. Most activists see the public option as a compromise position, and that helps explain why they are so resistant to making any further concessions. The plan is not the fulfillment of some progressive dream, but a half-measure that progressives are most likely to see as a bare minimum.
The unfolding narrative, however, assumes that the Obama administration has been eager to dilute their own platform in the interest of getting something done, and that they are only reluctantly being dragged across the goal line by heroic grassroots’ activists. I think, and have thought, that this is bullshit.
I don’t care if you want to dismiss this as some kind of 11-Dimensional Chess, but there are certain contours and barriers to passing legislation through Congress, and the Obama administration has been navigating them precisely in the only way I can see they could have if their goal was to pass health care reform with a public option (and keep their campaign promise).
I don’t think that the administration is clairvoyant, and I’m not saying they haven’t adjusted their strategy and perhaps even wavered a bit over time. But it’s pretty clear that they couldn’t pass health care reform without Republican support unless they figured out a way to keep the Democratic caucus in the Senate united. Until last week, the Democrats never had a reliable sixty votes, even in theory, to kill off Senate filibusters.
The administration knew they might need to pass health care reform with less than sixty votes, which is why they muscled home a provision in the budget that would allow the Senate to pass a bill at the 51-vote threshold, using the budget reconciliation process. But, they also knew it would be preferable to pass the bill under regular order at the 60-vote threshold. And if they had to go the 51-vote route, they knew it would be a much easier political sell if they could plausibly and honestly argue that they had made every effort to win over some Republican support.
Back in the winter, when the administration did their first whip-count on the president’s health care plan, they realized that they didn’t have anywhere near the number of votes they would need to pass it through the Senate Finance Committee. They knew that they had zero solid votes from the Republican caucus. If they were going to pass something through Finance, it could not include the robust public option that Obama promised in his campaign.
But, these obstacles were not necessarily deal-breakers. If they could cobble together a reliable 60-vote caucus, they could conceivably fulfill their campaign promise on a strictly party-line vote. Perhaps they could win over Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins. As it turned out, they flipped Arlen Specter and now he is supporting Obama’s plan in the Huffington Post. Yet, as their whip count of Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee showed, they did not have unanimous support for a public option in the Democratic caucus. They might get 60 votes for cloture, but they’d never get thirteen votes on the Finance Committee for a public option.
What they needed to do was to get all five committees with jurisdiction (three in the House, two in the Senate) to report out bills. If they couldn’t, the only way to fulfill that campaign promise would be to use budget reconciliation. But, even if they were going to use budget reconciliation, they wanted to make certain that the failure to pass the bill under regular order did not arise from the Democrats’ inability to report out a bill, but strictly out of Republican obstruction. That would give them the political cover and rationale to pursue the 51-vote strategy.
Four of the five committees with jurisdiction were willing and able to report out bills that fulfilled the campaign promise (and have done so), but the Senate Finance Committee could and would not. Seeing this clearly in advance, the administration knew that there was no point in drawing a line in the sand and demanding that they would not sign any bill without a public option. Doing so would have crippled the Senate Finance Committee’s ability to report out anything at all. And the goal was to get them to report out something. Therefore, major efforts were made to demonstrate that they were willing to compromise in order to (at first, when cloture seemed impossible without it) win over a vote (or maybe two) from the Republicans. The public option became quite visibly negotiable. And, to some degree it was. If they couldn’t win over any Republicans, they might not be able to obtain cloture. They had to at least consider whether there was a deal to be had that would not necessitate using the budget reconciliation process.
The fact that the Democrats now have 60 senators is just as important in bucking up the administration’s resolve in favor of a public option as the streadfast work of the party’s activists. And it was the administration that flipped Specter and got Paul Kirk seated so quickly as Teddy Kennedy’s replacement. But, regardless, the administration was never eager to ditch their campaign promise. If they ever sent a message to Nancy Pelosi to back off a public option, she never received it.
The wavering rhetoric we’ve seen has been calibrated to the political realities in Washington as they have waxed and waned. Simply looking at the task at hand, and the methods available to achieve it, helps explain everything we have seen. And now we are in a position to see the president succeed in enacting a health care overhaul that is largely in keeping with exactly what Obama promised. He’s not clairvoyant, but his strategy has made perfect sense and he deserves as much credit for that as all the activists who have worked so hard to get us to this point. The credit should be shared.