Folks interested in the TNR-DLC-blog wars should check out Ed Kilgore's rundown of where the DLC concurs with and where it dissents from the list of policies Atrios thinks the blogosphere basically supports. Mostly, things stack up as you'd expect, with the DLC and the blogosphere concurring on near everything. The divisions, however, are surprising.

Where Atrios thinks bloggers agree that Medicare should run the Medicare drug program, Kilgore dissents that the DLC "opposed the current plan, but [we] think the problem is cost and complexity, not the basic idea of offering choice and competition, a la the federal employees' plan." Of course, cost and complexity are absolutely intrinsic to the primacy of private insurers (and I'm sorry to see Kilgore buying into the GOP spin that terms privatization "cost and competition."). So far as I know, none seriously dissent from the belief that Medicare pays more than the VA, Canada, Britain, France, or any other socialized system because it's barred from using its market power to negotiate. The current king of the free market, Wal-Mart, dominates on cost and crushes the competition by throwing their weight around, and it's schizophrenic to value the free market but bar Medicare from adapting the tactics most successful within market rules.

This is, of course, what frustrates liberals about the DLC. There's no coherent policy reason to support a Medicare Part D style structure. Even if they oppose the current arrangement, protesting that they believe choice and competition should remain ascendant essentially confines them to very similar programs. That makes for bad policy. It also relies on a willful decision to ignore all evidence from all examples of contrary systems that achieve better results. From the tiny Veteran's Administration to the majority of developed countries, denying the superiority of centralized bargaining for pharmaceuticals requires slapping your hands across your ears and "la-la-la"ing till the other discussants put away the uncomfortable facts. Indeed, while I'd be interested to see a policy defense on this count from Kilgore, my sneaking suspicion is that it's an example of the DLC's fetish for opposing anything that smacks of traditional liberalism. And, in the end, no matter how many points of agreement we all have, it's hard to be allied with a group deeply committed to discrediting the proposals of mainline progressives.