This morning I met with a former economic advisor to George W. Bush.  He's a nice guy and I'd just name him here except that I didn't plan on blogging about our meeting and didn't tell him I'll play it safe, not name him and just ask you to trust me that he's a Republican who worked for the president, is interested in politics and knows a thing or two about it.

At one point he mentioned Bush "ramming" something through congress, uysing party discipline to get his way.  Since we were having such a good chat I went ahead and vented my frustration at our side's seeming inability to do the same thing.  "Why does their 50 seat majority work and ours doesn't?" I asked.

His answer was interesting.

"Your southern Democrats have more in common with Republicans than they do northern Democrats."

Maybe it's true and maybe it isn't but the guy has dealt with congress and he believes it.  I think I believe it too and I think that the Republicans count on it.

Sometimes we on the left need to be told to calm the heck down.  We do get excited and when something really strikes a chord with us, we can get downright enthusiastic and even angry. Sometimes, we don't need to calm the heck down though.  Sometimes, we're right.  Sometimes, we don't win for having compromised and sometimes those who have told us to calm down need to come back and admit that we were right.

Joe Lieberman is a great example.  We were criticized for even supporting a primary challenge against him in 2006.  When the primary challenger, Ned Lamont, actually beat him Joe Lieberman ran as an independent and won his seat. Liberals who were criticized for supporting Lamont's challenge were then criticized for supporting the Democratic nominee during the general election.  It was all about the war, said the critics, but if you look beyond Iraq, Joe Lieberman is a good Democrat, one of the best in fact. We were told we were tossing a good liberal out of the club over one issue and even if it was a major issue like the war, we were told what a bad idea that was.

Lamont's supporters responded that Lieberman wasn't really all that liberal.  We knew, for example, that he was a social conservative. We knew this because of his anti-Clinton speech during the impeachment.  We knew it because of his over-the-top concern over the content of movies and video games.  We knew that the guy was no liberal and so we persisted.  Lieberman won.  And what did we get?  He endorsed McCain in 2008.  Another war thing, he said. Now he's pushing back on health reform.  We can't afford it, he says.  Why do it all at once?  In 2006 it was "don't dump Lieberman and our chance at health reform and the rest of our agenda over the Iraq War."  In 2009 here he is, getting in the way of the rest of our agenda.

Can we have an apology from our critics for that?

Lieberman, who was forgiven by the Democrats in 2006 and given the committee assignments he wanted also betrayed the civil libertarians on the left when he led the charge to gtrant immunity to the telecom companies -- something that then-Senator Obama went along with and another issue where folks on the left were told to simmer down and take it because, as odious as granting legal immunity to telecom companies who may have illegally betrayed their customer's secrets to the government might be, it wasn't worth turning it into a major electoral issue.

One thing I haven't seen is a good post mortem on the fall-out of giving legal immunity to the telecoms.  I do know this -- we're still not aware of the extent of the domestic spying program and we don't even know if it's still ongoing. Obama has so far done nothing to lift the veil of secrecy around this and the issue doesn't even seem to be on his radar. A lot of people around TPM thought this was an important issue last year.  We were told, not without reason, that we should eat the defeat on FISA because Obama would make things right later on.  But here's what we go: the FISA law revamped to make the program retroactively legal and... well... nothing else.  Seems like the time to have fought on that issue was back in 2008 when it wass being decided.

Now we're being told by some not to get all hung up on the public option for health care and there seems to be a good chance that we'll get a bill with something called a public option (maybe regional co-ops) that won't be anything like what the left envisions (a government program that you can choose instead of say, the Aetna your employer is offering) and we'll be told to eat it, at least more people will be covered.

It's not that I'm against compromise. It has its place, for sure. But the left needs to start extracting some gain for its compromises.  On FISA what happened was that the program was retroactively legalized and it continues and nobody will ever be punished for it. A truer compromise would have been: companies get immunity, program is halted, full accounting is made to the public. A compromise is when everyone gets something.

On healthcare, the public option IS a compromise.  It is square in the middle of our current system and single payer.  It's just a choice.

Or maybe it's time to just end the practice of lecturing the liberals.  The left wing of the party has just been right too many times.