If you’re a progressive, Scott Brown’s victory shouldn’t upset you. This should. Ta-Nehisi?
I get the optics of bipartisanship. I also get the need to show you aren’t in the pocket of liberals. As a liberal I’m fine with that–as long as it works. So if Obama needs to tell the country that Chuck Grassley is seriously working for health care reform, even as Grassley is calling him “intellectually dishonest,” it’s fine if, among other things, we’re going to get health insurance for Americas at 400 percent above the poverty line. If he does that and gets nothing, it’s just inept.
But if we lose health care, having given up on single-payer, having given up the public option, have given up the Medicare buy in. If we lose health care having watched Harry Reid claim Joe Lieberman was “the least of his problems” when he should have known he was among the biggest. If we lose and still have to suffer lectures on fake centrism from Evan Bayh, as a liberal and an Obama supporter, you’re left wondering what it was all for.
I don’t agree with Anthony Weiner renewing the call to kill the bill. As I’ve said, I live around exact kind of people who need this bill the most. But I don’t know how you look at this process and conclude that it was well-managed by Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi or Barack Obama. I feel like I’m watching a long, extravagant, wedding ceremony and increasingly getting the sense that someone is going to be left at the altar.
This entire process seemed bungled and mismanaged from the start. The GOP’s lone strategy was to stall. That’s it. Drag out the process so in the end, enough Dems would get cold feet. That’s why they blinked in the face of the public option and the medicare buy in. It’s a lesson in pathetic leadership, and if you’re a liberal, it’s frustrating beyond belief. It’s almost as if the idea of a super majority was so good it became impossible to believe– so impossible, that Dems in the senate were too afraid to exercise that authority.
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