By Ed Kilgore The Democratic Strategist
Well soon know the fate of health care reform legislation in Congress. But win or lose the retrospective analysis of the health reform fight and particularly the Obama administrations overall strategy will go on for years. Thats why I think its important to refute some questionable interpretations right now before they are incorporated into the unofficial history of the debate.
Today Peter Beinart posted an
article for The Daily Beast that treats the last-minute skirmishing among Democrats over health reform as the final stage in a two-decade-long battle between Clintonians and progressives which Barack Obama brought to a conclusion by choosing to move ahead despite Scott Browns victory in Massachusetts.
This decision Beinart says changed Democrats forever.
Beinarts piece is something of a pinata: it can be whacked from any number of directions. Most obviously he mischaracterizes the current and actually very limited conflict among Democrats about what Obama should have done after the Brown victory.
Yes you can find a few self-described Democratic pundits (and he names virtually all of them) who have argued that Obama should have folded his tent or (somehow) pursued a bipartisan incremental health reform
proposal in the wake of Massachusetts. But the idea that the polling pair of Doug Schoen and Mark Penn or longtime eccentric Pat Caddell speak for the entire Clintonian tendency in the party is completely absurd.
More typical and certainly more relevant are TDS Co-Editor William Galston (whom Beinart treats as a major foundational thinker for what he calls the DLC types in the party) and Progressive Policy Institute (the DLCs think tank during all the battles Beinart describes) president Will Marshall who have avidly backed Obamas decision on both philosophical and practical grounds (
here and
here).
If you look at the actual conflict among Democrats in Congress no or possible no votes in the House nearly all fall into two categories:
Nervous Democrats from very tough districts who do not neatly fit on one side of some intraparty ideologicial spectrum and- More importantly the Stupak Democrats who are focused on abortion policy.
By and large Stupak Democrats arent Clintonian in any meaningful sense of the term; many are very liberal voters on economic issues and some in fact profess to be upset by the absence of a public option in the Senate bill and/or the presence of an insurance premium tax which many unions dont like.
To the extent that they reflect any intra-party conflict of an enduring nature the Stupak Democrats represent the losing side of a debate over abortion that pre-dated the DLC/progressive battles and has little or nothing to do with them.
At least a few actual or potential Democratic defectors on health reform do so strictly from a progressive point-of-view on grounds that the Senate bill even if its fixed via reconciliation merely ratifies the tainted health care status quo.
And so long as the Clinton brand is going to be thrown around in this discussion its worth noting that the single most crucial modification of
Obamas campaign proposal on health care reform was adoption of an individual mandate which Hillary Clinton championed.
The idea that Mark Penn rather than Obamas Secretary of State speaks for Clintonism is more than dubious.
Equally implausible is Beinarts claim that Obamas decision to move ahead on health reform represented the vindication of the Democratic left as opposed to the center. Yes most self-conscious Democratic progressives (like most Democratic centrists) are pleased that Obama is pressing ahead on health reform absent any Republican support. Thats because they consider the status quo intolerable from a moral and substantive point of view and surrender as politically calamitous as well.
But as anyone who has been paying attention should know many perhaps most on the Democratic Left are unhappy with Obama for pursuing Republican support as long as he did and sacrificing important features of health reform in the process.
And this leads me to my most fundamental objection to Beinarts analysis: his assumption that partisanship and bipartisanship -- or as it puts it elsewhere a Rovian base mobilization strategy as opposed to a Dick-Morris-style crossover strategy -- are and have always been the essential differentiators between the progressive and Clintonian factions in the party leading to the conclusion that Obama has now once and forever chosen the former over the latter.
For anyone seriously engaged in intraparty debates over the years the picture painted by Beinart is a very crude cartoon that should be offensive to both sides of those debates (as crude in fact as his characterization of
the seminal Galston-Kamarck essay
The Politics of Evasion as urging Democrats to move to the right).
It should be reasonably obvious after the last year that Obama and congressional Democrats didnt choose partisanship after the Scott Brown victory; they were forced into a purely partisan stance on health reform by Republican instransigence. And it should be equally obvious that Obamas many gestures towards bipartisanship were motivated not by naivete but by a conviction that he could best achieve crossover appeal in the electorate by exposing the radicalism and intransigence of the GOP.
Its not clear this strategy will work in 2010 but it might well work in 2012 and beyond thus building a more durable Democratic majority and/or creating incentives for the GOP to correct its current crazy course.
In any event he has not for all time chosen for Democrats a permanent posture of maximum partisanship and base mobilization and his position on the literally hundreds of other policy and political issues that Democrats have internally debated cant be shoehorned into Beinarts scheme.
Maybe the decision to go for the gold on health reform will prove to have been momentous.
But it wasnt really a hard choice given the circumstances and it certainly didnt resolve every strategic decision Democrats will make forever.
Obamas campaign proposal on health care reform was adoption of an individual mandate which Hillary Clinton championed.
The idea that Mark Penn rather than Obamas Secretary of State speaks for Clintonism is more than dubious.
Equally implausible is Beinarts claim that Obamas decision to move ahead on health reform represented the vindication of the Democratic left as opposed to the center. Yes most self-conscious Democratic progressives (like most Democratic centrists) are pleased that Obama is pressing ahead on health reform absent any Republican support. Thats because they consider the status quo intolerable from a moral and substantive point of view and surrender as politically calamitous as well.
But as anyone who has been paying attention should know many perhaps most on the Democratic Left are unhappy with Obama for pursuing Republican support as long as he did and sacrificing important features of health reform in the process.
And this leads me to my most fundamental objection to Beinarts analysis: his assumption that partisanship and bipartisanship -- or as it puts it elsewhere a Rovian base mobilization strategy as opposed to a Dick-Morris-style crossover strategy -- are and have always been the essential differentiators between the progressive and Clintonian factions in the party leading to the conclusion that Obama has now once and forever chosen the former over the latter.
For anyone seriously engaged in intraparty debates over the years the picture painted by Beinart is a very crude cartoon that should be offensive to both sides of those debates (as crude in fact as his characterization of 
the seminal Galston-Kamarck essay The Politics of Evasion as urging Democrats to move to the right).
It should be reasonably obvious after the last year that Obama and congressional Democrats didnt choose partisanship after the Scott Brown victory; they were forced into a purely partisan stance on health reform by Republican instransigence. And it should be equally obvious that Obamas many gestures towards bipartisanship were motivated not by naivete but by a conviction that he could best achieve crossover appeal in the electorate by exposing the radicalism and intransigence of the GOP.
Its not clear this strategy will work in 2010 but it might well work in 2012 and beyond thus building a more durable Democratic majority and/or creating incentives for the GOP to correct its current crazy course.
In any event he has not for all time chosen for Democrats a permanent posture of maximum partisanship and base mobilization and his position on the literally hundreds of other policy and political issues that Democrats have internally debated cant be shoehorned into Beinarts scheme.
Maybe the decision to go for the gold on health reform will prove to have been momentous.
But it wasnt really a hard choice given the circumstances and it certainly didnt resolve every strategic decision Democrats will make forever.
