The Left's Tenacious Advocacy for a Public Option

Ummmmm, That would be single payer, you know, like Medicare?

Or how about government run, you know, like the VA system?

The "public option" is NOT 'very leftist'!

Cheers.

The specter of Democrats reverse-filibustering their own President's plan is what has kept the public option alive, even if one could argue that "alive" is akin to a persistent vegetative state.

Contrast this to yes-man approach of the Congressional GOP in the early Bush years, and I personally find a lot to like about the Democratic model of the Congressional party serving as a sort of whip against the political expediency that will be the norm in any White House.

Will Rogers' famous quip about belonging to no organized political party still holds true today. That's why it's always better to have Democrats running congress, regardless of who is in the White House. They do nothing but fight among themselves over everything, whereas Republicans always fall into lockstep. Or, as was the case in the Bush years, goose-step.

In 2005, I thought it would have been a good idea for conservative Republican members to publicly threaten to oppose any Social Security bill that did not include private accounts. There were multiple problems with this, not the least of which that the Congressional leadership was too spineless to bring a bill out of committee. But another was that conservatives in the House and Senate, with no strategic prodding or muscle in the blogosphere and the activist groups, never made the threat that would have rendered a "compromise" bill dead on arrival.

The problem, there, wasn't a lack of muslce in the blogosphere, though; it was a complete lack of public support for the notion. Social Security is rightly described as "the third rail of American politics," and the public had already turned against the Republicans in general by that point anyway. I don't know that it's fair to rest that matter on "spinelessness." There has to be some more-than-passing public support for something.

That's where the top-down model of "agitation" by the conservative base falls short.

The left has to build grassroots movements from the ground up. Such movements are always unpopular when they begin, and are often outright despised. It's a long, slow process of bringing people around, but once they're brought around, they tend to be very firm in their convictions, because genuine grassroots movements that appeal to reason and to fairness don't take hold unless people find some merit in the arguments. The gay marriage thing is a perfect example of this. Support for it wouldn't have polled out of single digits 25 years ago. Today, support for either gay marriage or gay civil unions is an overwhelmingly majority view, and the hardcore opposition to it is centered in older Americans and concentrated in the elderly.

There isn't anything like this on the right. What are labeled--mislabeled, in my view--"grassroots"  conservative movements are really just the product of tons of Establishment money. Big Money using the public to pimp for its own interests. That's all the teabagger movement is. Astroturf. Whereas the liberals' causes begin with little support, even fewer resources, and have to build themselves up over time, a conservative "movement" usually has millions available to it the day it launches. That's a great comfort, if you're a conservative, of course! But when you start at third base, it poisons any effort at truly reaching people. Appeals to fear and the exploitation of ignorance--the basis of the teabagger "movement"--can only go so far, because eventually, someone points out there are no "death panels," Obama really is a U.S. citizen, and isn't a Muslim, isn't a socialist or the new Hitler, and so on, and it all falls apart.  That isn't to say illusions can't go a long way. They reelected Bush in '04. But they have limited usefulness (Bush's support collapsed almost immediately after that).

I appreciate Ruffini's interest in the relative roles of liberal and conservative blogs, but I disagree with every one of his many conclusions, starting with who kept the public option alive -- it was liberal senators and the Nancy Pelosi wing of congressional Democrats.  The Backus committee passed a weaker bill because it is loaded with "blue dog" Democrats.  There also is the fact that polls show that the public option is very popular.

Liberal blogs played a bigger roll in defeating Social Security reform.  The strategy followed by TalkingPointsMemo simply was to ask Senators and Congressmen whether they supported the reform.  The reform was so unpopular among their constituents that even Republicans had trouble supporting it in public, knowing that their constituents would be made aware.  The other problem with Social Security Reform was that it was based on a big lie.  The trust fund was not going to go broke any time soon, and small revenue enhancements would keep it solvent indefinitely.  There wasn't actually a problem that needed "solving".

By contrast, everyone knows that health care costs are rising and that our current system is untenable over the next decade.  Even if the Democrats' proposals are wrong, something has to change.

Ruffini is wrong to say that Republicans proposed Social Security reform without private accounts.  Private accounts were the entire proposal.  The idea was that you could put a fraction of your Social Security account into investments of your choosing -- such as the stock market -- and do better than the trust fund.  Looking back, we should be glad that didn't happen.