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How to pass the public option
Over the last month, I've seen occasional freakouts from the blogosphere about Obama's position on the public option. Obama keeps saying-- as he has since the health care reform debate began this year-- that he wants, supports, would prefer a public option. But throughout this debate, he has refused to call a public option a necessity for the bill. He has refused to rule out public option alternatives-- he and his surrogates consistently refer to the public option, at best, as the "best way" to achieve their goals. He has refused to say he will oppose a bill that lacks the public option. Leaks about Obama's plans for next week indicate this is not likely to change.
This has lead to some consternation among the blogosphere. Whenever Obama reasserts his position that he will not kill the health care bill just because it lacks a public option, we see a bunch of blog posts and comments talking interpreting this as meaning that the public option is "dead", and that Obama MUST DEMAND a public option or they will never vote for a Democrat again.
I want to take a moment to talk about why Obama is unlikely to do that, why Obama probably doesn't need to do that, and how we get the public option passed anyway.
[Continues]
Consider Obama's situation. Don't bother holding any sympathy for him-- just try to understand what his perspective must be.
If Obama does not get the health care reform he promised passed, he is through. This is both his signature domestic issue, and he first "real" test of his ability to pass legislation. If he can't pass this, cannot make progress on this in some form, this implies he cannot do anything ever. The DC internal culture will pick up on this implication and repeat it until it becomes real. The narrative of two Democratic Presidents in a row undone by health care legislation will be too much to pass up. Obama will become, like Clinton, "The Incredible Shrinking President". The media will never take him seriously again. The Congress will never take him seriously as a threat again. He'll probably win reelection in 2012-- who would the Republicans run against him?-- but he'll also almost certainly lose the midterm elections in 2010. It won't be 1994 again exactly, but since (if he can't pass health care) he'll have a newly energized Republican opposition, a newly hostile media environment and progressives abandoning the party in droves, it will probably turn out the same way-- with a radicalized Republican party controlling the Congress, and a President no longer controlling the agenda but at best attempting to shape the agenda the Republicans lay out. Obama's moment to enact change in America will be over.
Now consider what happens if the health care bill passes, but there is no public option. There will be consequences-- real consequences. Progressives will be angry. People will leave the coalition, some never to return. There will be seats lost in the midterm elections: progressive institutions and websites, no longer convinced that Blue Dogs are preferable to Republicans, will shift focus from simply "elect more Democrats" to policing which Democrats deserve to get elected, and although these efforts may not be enough to successfully primary many of the blue dogs it will certainly be enough to get a number of blue dogs out of office. I am certain that Obama would be personally disappointed at the public option's failure.
But nothing would happen even remotely like the fate Obama faces if no bill passes at all. Whatever larger consequences faced him, he would simply move on to the next item on to his agenda-- weakened in popular support, but significantly strengthened in his dealings with the Congress. He would be in a position to be able to deal with those other consequences as they came.
No bill passing-- and if a bill doesn't pass before the midterm elections start in earnest, there will be no bill-- is the worst possible outcome for Obama. No threat we can make, no consequence for either himself, the Democratic agenda or the nation outweighs the cost from Obama's perspective of no bill passing. He can't let that happen. Everyone in DC knows this, which means if Obama makes a threat to kill the bill DC might not even consider it credible.
And so anyone hoping Obama will start making threats to kill the bill if his demands aren't met-- look, Obama supports the public option. He can campaign for it or pull strings for it, he may even find a way to pleasantly surprise us when he "rolls out his new health care reform strategy" this weekend. But threats to kill the bill, that is one thing that just isn't going to happen. This isn't "11-dimensional chess", and it isn't a betrayal. It's just the reality of Obama's political situation.
So if we want the public option to pass, what we have to do is change the reality of that situation.
Obama will not oppose a bill-without-a-public-option. He can not.
We can.
The only reason why we're talking about the possibility of a bill without a public option at this point is the Blue Dogs. The Blue Dogs aren't all that significant in terms of either political power or the percentage of America they represent. But in this one case they have leverage we don't, because they can do the one thing Obama can't let happen: they are the swing votes in the Senate, and they can can kill the health care bill. And so right now the bill is moving in the direction they want (the Baucus disaster was probably never about making Chuck Grassley happy, it was probably just about Ben Nelson), because they are making a credible threat that the bill won't pass with the public option included.
What we have to do is make a credible threat back that the bill won't pass without one. We have to make the only threat that Obama will be legitimately afraid of-- that we control the swing votes in the House, and we can kill the health care bill. We need to make it clear that it is not just some legislators or labor operatives who oppose a bill without a public option, but the progressive community, the grassroots. We have to make it clear our support is not unconditional, that we have a line that we won't let be crossed. And if the Democrats cross that line, we have to campaign against the bill, and we have to kill it. We can do that. We have 64 House members on our side at the last count I saw, and these members are more essential to the bill than the flaky Blue Dogs were to begin with. We have to make sure those 64 house members stay solid and that their numbers swell. We have to make sure that they're serious that they'll hold to that vote up to and including voting down a reconciled House-Senate version of the bill, if the public option is taken out in conference. We have to make enough noise that when Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi stand up and say, look, we can't pass this without the public option, it's clear that they are speaking for an actual movement and not just partisan legislators being difficult.
If we do all this, the bill will not pass without us-- and it won't matter whether Obama has issued a veto threat or not.
Presidents don't write legislation anyway! At best, Obama is a negotiator in this process. Right now that means negotiating between his own goals and the Blue Dogs. But if we're as willing to campaign against and eventually defeat a bill we don't like as the Blue Dogs are, then the landscape changes. At that point there is one group that doesn't want the public option, one group that is demanding it, and Obama is negotiating between these two groups-- and whether you trust him or not, he is a negotiator that, in policy terms, is on our side. At that point the odds are better than not that a health care bill with the public option becomes law.
And if a public-option-free bill actually dies because we opposed it? Well, from our perspective, actually that's not such a bad thing. The thing is that the bill we've got right now, once you pull out the public option, isn't all that great. Most of the good things about it depend on the public option for full effect, most of the rest could have been put in in stronger form if we hadn't negotiated our principles down to the bone so we can keep the public option in. If the public option isn't in, those compromises aren't worth it, and we might as well start over. (Personally, I think I for one might even like the Wyden bill better than I like Healthy Choices Act with the public choice removed!) And if a legislative defeat happens, that's probably what will happen-- they'll rework the bill and try again. It's maybe even the case that if the bill dies because we killed it, we're more likely to like the results next time than if the bill died because Obama, working alone, killed a compromise too far (since in the former case the bill died because it was "too moderate"; in the latter case the narrative will be that the bill died, like Clinton's, because of "democratic overreach", and therefore the next bill and all of Obama's agenda will have to be scaled back).
We can do this. And if we want the next seven years to go any different from the last two months, we have to. We have to stop waiting for Obama to do everything for us, and start participating in the process ourselves.
This has lead to some consternation among the blogosphere. Whenever Obama reasserts his position that he will not kill the health care bill just because it lacks a public option, we see a bunch of blog posts and comments talking interpreting this as meaning that the public option is "dead", and that Obama MUST DEMAND a public option or they will never vote for a Democrat again.
I want to take a moment to talk about why Obama is unlikely to do that, why Obama probably doesn't need to do that, and how we get the public option passed anyway.
[Continues]
Consider Obama's situation. Don't bother holding any sympathy for him-- just try to understand what his perspective must be.
If Obama does not get the health care reform he promised passed, he is through. This is both his signature domestic issue, and he first "real" test of his ability to pass legislation. If he can't pass this, cannot make progress on this in some form, this implies he cannot do anything ever. The DC internal culture will pick up on this implication and repeat it until it becomes real. The narrative of two Democratic Presidents in a row undone by health care legislation will be too much to pass up. Obama will become, like Clinton, "The Incredible Shrinking President". The media will never take him seriously again. The Congress will never take him seriously as a threat again. He'll probably win reelection in 2012-- who would the Republicans run against him?-- but he'll also almost certainly lose the midterm elections in 2010. It won't be 1994 again exactly, but since (if he can't pass health care) he'll have a newly energized Republican opposition, a newly hostile media environment and progressives abandoning the party in droves, it will probably turn out the same way-- with a radicalized Republican party controlling the Congress, and a President no longer controlling the agenda but at best attempting to shape the agenda the Republicans lay out. Obama's moment to enact change in America will be over.
Now consider what happens if the health care bill passes, but there is no public option. There will be consequences-- real consequences. Progressives will be angry. People will leave the coalition, some never to return. There will be seats lost in the midterm elections: progressive institutions and websites, no longer convinced that Blue Dogs are preferable to Republicans, will shift focus from simply "elect more Democrats" to policing which Democrats deserve to get elected, and although these efforts may not be enough to successfully primary many of the blue dogs it will certainly be enough to get a number of blue dogs out of office. I am certain that Obama would be personally disappointed at the public option's failure.
But nothing would happen even remotely like the fate Obama faces if no bill passes at all. Whatever larger consequences faced him, he would simply move on to the next item on to his agenda-- weakened in popular support, but significantly strengthened in his dealings with the Congress. He would be in a position to be able to deal with those other consequences as they came.
No bill passing-- and if a bill doesn't pass before the midterm elections start in earnest, there will be no bill-- is the worst possible outcome for Obama. No threat we can make, no consequence for either himself, the Democratic agenda or the nation outweighs the cost from Obama's perspective of no bill passing. He can't let that happen. Everyone in DC knows this, which means if Obama makes a threat to kill the bill DC might not even consider it credible.
And so anyone hoping Obama will start making threats to kill the bill if his demands aren't met-- look, Obama supports the public option. He can campaign for it or pull strings for it, he may even find a way to pleasantly surprise us when he "rolls out his new health care reform strategy" this weekend. But threats to kill the bill, that is one thing that just isn't going to happen. This isn't "11-dimensional chess", and it isn't a betrayal. It's just the reality of Obama's political situation.
So if we want the public option to pass, what we have to do is change the reality of that situation.
Obama will not oppose a bill-without-a-public-option. He can not.
We can.
The only reason why we're talking about the possibility of a bill without a public option at this point is the Blue Dogs. The Blue Dogs aren't all that significant in terms of either political power or the percentage of America they represent. But in this one case they have leverage we don't, because they can do the one thing Obama can't let happen: they are the swing votes in the Senate, and they can can kill the health care bill. And so right now the bill is moving in the direction they want (the Baucus disaster was probably never about making Chuck Grassley happy, it was probably just about Ben Nelson), because they are making a credible threat that the bill won't pass with the public option included.
What we have to do is make a credible threat back that the bill won't pass without one. We have to make the only threat that Obama will be legitimately afraid of-- that we control the swing votes in the House, and we can kill the health care bill. We need to make it clear that it is not just some legislators or labor operatives who oppose a bill without a public option, but the progressive community, the grassroots. We have to make it clear our support is not unconditional, that we have a line that we won't let be crossed. And if the Democrats cross that line, we have to campaign against the bill, and we have to kill it. We can do that. We have 64 House members on our side at the last count I saw, and these members are more essential to the bill than the flaky Blue Dogs were to begin with. We have to make sure those 64 house members stay solid and that their numbers swell. We have to make sure that they're serious that they'll hold to that vote up to and including voting down a reconciled House-Senate version of the bill, if the public option is taken out in conference. We have to make enough noise that when Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi stand up and say, look, we can't pass this without the public option, it's clear that they are speaking for an actual movement and not just partisan legislators being difficult.
If we do all this, the bill will not pass without us-- and it won't matter whether Obama has issued a veto threat or not.
Presidents don't write legislation anyway! At best, Obama is a negotiator in this process. Right now that means negotiating between his own goals and the Blue Dogs. But if we're as willing to campaign against and eventually defeat a bill we don't like as the Blue Dogs are, then the landscape changes. At that point there is one group that doesn't want the public option, one group that is demanding it, and Obama is negotiating between these two groups-- and whether you trust him or not, he is a negotiator that, in policy terms, is on our side. At that point the odds are better than not that a health care bill with the public option becomes law.
And if a public-option-free bill actually dies because we opposed it? Well, from our perspective, actually that's not such a bad thing. The thing is that the bill we've got right now, once you pull out the public option, isn't all that great. Most of the good things about it depend on the public option for full effect, most of the rest could have been put in in stronger form if we hadn't negotiated our principles down to the bone so we can keep the public option in. If the public option isn't in, those compromises aren't worth it, and we might as well start over. (Personally, I think I for one might even like the Wyden bill better than I like Healthy Choices Act with the public choice removed!) And if a legislative defeat happens, that's probably what will happen-- they'll rework the bill and try again. It's maybe even the case that if the bill dies because we killed it, we're more likely to like the results next time than if the bill died because Obama, working alone, killed a compromise too far (since in the former case the bill died because it was "too moderate"; in the latter case the narrative will be that the bill died, like Clinton's, because of "democratic overreach", and therefore the next bill and all of Obama's agenda will have to be scaled back).
We can do this. And if we want the next seven years to go any different from the last two months, we have to. We have to stop waiting for Obama to do everything for us, and start participating in the process ourselves.
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This post started as a comment to the article about Obama's labor day "roll out" next week, but then I decided I wanted to talk about things in a slightly wider context. Hopefully people will find it worth reading.
I'll note, if Obama's health care policy reboot next week turns out to be more hardline than I expected and some of what I wrote here turns out to have been unnecessary, I'll be incredibly happy to be proven wrong. But it's not what I expect to happen. And I think that if we make plans that wholly depend on Obama doing everything exactly the right thing in order for things to work, then we're doing something wrong.
Also note, if it isn't obvious, I'm using "blue dogs" here as a general label for conservative Democrats and not a specific reference to the house caucus.
September 2, 2009 5:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for taking the time and energy to post this.
There's much here I'd like to respond do, but need to leave for meeting - however, have you considered a viable, positive process that could be used to achieve the type of participation by supporters (in and out of public office) in promoting HCR with a public option within the next week? If so, would like the ability to review.
What do you think Obama et al. should say when he addresses Congress?
I strongly support HCR and public option. In July President Obama did state he would not sign bill without public option!
Have to run, more later and again thanks.
Rec'd
September 2, 2009 6:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hi, thanks!
however, have you considered a viable, positive process that could be used to achieve the type of participation by supporters (in and out of public office) in promoting HCR with a public option within the next week?
It's hard to say, however I think there are several promising projects along these lines already in the works. The best example I can think of is the DFA/BoldProgressives ad running against Chuck Grassley in Iowa and DC. This is an ad targeted at a Republican and not any Democrat, but I think the message to Democrats is still clear and it stands out as interesting to me because (1) it's something people can participate in now, by donating and (2) it is an explicitly pro-public-option message, more so than it is a general pro-HCR message.
I think the AFL-CIO has the potential to be very useful on this, if they start specifically organizing for the public option in a way that the non-union grassroots can participate in. If the "Obama plan" does not necessarily imply a public option, then what we need is some way to allow people to participate in HCR in a way that makes it clear they're not just generic HCR advocates, they demand a public option. I'm about to try to head to a rally seeing Feinstein and Boxer off to DC-- am I there as a public option supporter? Or an HCR supporter? Who knows? If we had explicitly pro-public-option rallies or volunteer networks the message sent by volunteering or demonstrating would be clearer.
What do you think Obama et al. should say when he addresses Congress?
I haven't really put much thought into this because it doesn't feel like something I can do anything to influence. At this point I find myself preferring to focus on things I have at least some small amount of influence over. But I think the most important thing Obama can do at this point is explain the health care plan, public option included, and clear up some of the public misunderstanding of this plan-- preferably in the least wonky way possible.
September 2, 2009 8:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
In July President Obama did state he would not sign bill without public option!
BTW, do you have a link for this? I'd be curious to see it, I guess I must have missed it. Thanks
September 2, 2009 8:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
c.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/07/obama-demands-the-bill-i-sign-must-include-public-option.php?ref=fpa
And please, post your experience at the rally.
Thanks.
September 2, 2009 9:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hey,
So the rally was interesting. I unfortunately missed the beginning because I needed to stay later at work than I'd initially hoped, but I got to see about the second half, when they were basically just passing around the microphone to various community leaders.
One thing that struck me as interesting was that looking around at the signs at the rally-- I should note at this point that this was in San Francisco-- almost every sign except for the preprinted ones from OFA was calling for either single-payer/HR 676/"Medicare For All" (the biggest banner there was for HR 676) or the public option. This crowd, at least, knew what it wanted and was hardcore on government-run health care. I also couldn't help but notice just about every single one of the speakers called for universal health care. Nobody observed that none of the bills currently under consideration in Congress (other than HR 676, which I think we can all agree isn't really under consideration) actually achieve universal health care.
The atmosphere was friendly, lots of chatting, people cheering at a lot of stuff (especially any mention of Ted Kennedy or universal health care). There were no health care opponents present. A few minutes in a bearded guy leaving handed me off a hand-made sign made from a repurposed manilla folder-- I'd not had time to make one myself-- that said "PUBLIC OPTION" on one side and "SINGLE PAYER" on the other. I kind of liked the implicit message of the sign being set up that way, like these things are two sides of the same c... manilla folder? He didn't say anything, just handed me the sign and walked off... I thanked him and started holding it in the air. I do have to admit toward the very end of the rally I covered up the "SINGLE PAYER" side with another flyer-- since you could of course only see one side at a time I wasn't sure what message I was expressing to the people behind me, and there didn't seem to be a way to quickly alter the sign to express the sentiment "I support incremental progress in the conceptual direction of single payer health care initially beginnning with the creation of an opt-in government-run insurance provider." :P
There was a lot of networking going on, lots of people from various groups wandering through the crowd and handing out cards and flyers.. I at one point was handed a slickly produced flyer by a group with a name something like "liberty and socialism party". One whole side of the crowd was taken up by a row of signup sheet tables (and one ironing board... which if you think about it is a good surrogate for a folding table, I'll have to remember that one) and representatives of the rally's organizers (the rally was held by OFA, HCAN and ACORN jointly). There were some people with ACORN trying to get people to sign a signup sheet marked with the HCAN logo... I didn't sign it because I wasn't sure what it was. I did sign a "petition" of OFA's which, if I understood the speaker correctly, was to be delivered to the California congressional delegation... I'm not sure if that's actually what it was or if they were just harvesting my email address. Joke's on them, they've already got it. The OFA rep, seeing my manilla folder ("PUBLIC OPTION" side facing her), was very quick to assert "public option! We support the public option".
The best speaker during the time I was present was this incredibly angry woman who must have been over 70 and was with a group whose name I didn't catch but was something like "California Seniors' Alliance". She had one line something like "the public option will work ... I should know, I'm on medicare". She spent a good portion of her speech railing against the Medicare Part D "donut hole".
You could really tell this was all taking place in San Francisco. I could clearly smell pot at one point. There were sleeping homeless people dotted at random points on the outskirts of the rally cuz, well, this was the little plaza in front of city hall and that's just where the homeless people in SF sleep. They didn't ever seem to have noticed the rally's presence-- I assume they were there before the rally started, and they didn't move when everyone left. There were a few moments where it felt kind of surreal to listen to speakers calling for health care for the poor and destitute and uninsured with, y'know, a sleeping homeless guy seven feet to your left seemingly unnoticed by anyone.
September 3, 2009 3:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
mcc,
Thanks for the report on rally. I hope you see this and consider posting this as stand alone or at least sending to TPM directly so they can have this information. We need more factual reports on these meetings from people who were actually there.
Again, appreciate.
September 3, 2009 10:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks, mcc, for a post that reflects a lot of thought and hard work pulling together multiple threads of the politics involved.
I'm not sure the grassroots can generate the kind of leverage you're talking about in the next week or two. As I've noted for months, too few of us in Team Bluestate have put their shoulders to the wheel for health care reform. At best, we're still playing catch-up but finally starting to mobilize more. A last big push could help counterbalance the final push Team Redstate is planning.
I just don't know if it will be enough.
September 2, 2009 11:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
I agree entirely with the part in which you analyze Obama's position and why he can't insist on the public option.
I very much think there is a possible bill without a public option that I can support, in the sense that a bill that ends cherrypicking and properly subsidizes the poor and the young getting catastrophic insurance can bring advance even without it.
What I cannot accept is a process in which a properly-formulated public option never comes to a floor vote in the Senate. The people need to know who is with them, and who is with the insurance companies, and the process will have failed, whatever the final bill, if that vote never occurs.
By the way, THAT is the way to get the public option passed: there will certainly be 51 votes for it at crunch time, if not 60. And if not, we will know whom to go after in their next re-election campaigns.
September 3, 2009 12:42 AM | Reply | Permalink