Jonathan Chait spins desperately on the health care reform outcome.  According to him, Republicans are the big losers in the debate.  He writes:

At the outset of this debate, moderate Democrats were desperate for a bipartisan bill. They were willing to do almost anything to get it, including negotiate fruitlessly for months on end. We can’t know for sure, but Democrats appeared willing to make enormous substantive concessions to win the assent of even a few Republicans. A few GOP defectors could have lured a chunk of Democrats to sign something far more limited than what President Obama is going to sign. And remember, it would have taken only one Democrat to agree to partial reform in order to kill comprehensive reform. I can easily imagine a scenario where Ben Nelson refused to vote for anything larger than, say, a $400 billion bill that Chuck Grassley and a couple other Republicans were offering.

This strikes me as an incredible, almost unbelievable, bit of revisionism.  From where does Chait get his bizarre assertion that Democrats “appeared willing to make enormous substantive concessions”?  Apparently he’s referring to Ben Nelson and the moderate Democrats in the House and Senate.  Let’s accept, for a moment, that Chait is right- that Ben Nelson would, ideally, prefer to vote for a $400 billion bi-partisan bill, than the current monstrosity that will be rammed through the public’s throat on fewer than 60 Democratic votes.  How does this get us closer to Chait’s conclusion?

Ben Nelson does not the Senate-make.  He only APPEARS to be the most powerful  senator because A.)  This bill has become broadly unpopular and B.)  The debate has moved from left to right; i.e, we started off with a bill that was much closer to the ideal of the left-wing of the Democratic Party, than it was to the ideal of the center of the Democratic Party.  Progressives were on-board, from the beginning, and the Democratic task was to move the bill to the center and pick up the centrists without losing the progressives.  That task was made easier because the bill was unpopular and because the President refused to commit to anything terribly specific.  Progressives lost their leverage when it became clear that even a moderate-liberal bill would be a hard sell to the public.

What would have changed had Republicans like Grassley, negotiating “in good faith”, convinced Nelson and Lieberman and Bayh to come aboard a more modest bill which, perhaps, preserved sections like guaranteed issue, but focused more on breaking down barriers between state insurance, than on increased subsidies,  and which didn’t seriously touchMedicare?  What if we started off with something more like Chait’s chimerical $400 billion  bi-partisan compromise.  Well, there are really two possibilities, which lead to more or less the same outcome.

Possibility one:  the bill is pretty popular with the general public.  In this scenario, progressive senators, who wanted far more to begin with, have all the leverage.  Moderates like Nelson no longer have the argument that “anything more liberal than this kill’s our careers”.  Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t.  At any rate, there are about 50 gazillion progressives and about 18 moderates, so they’re bound to try to move the compromise substantially to the left.  At which point, the Republicans probably bolt and it becomes partisan again.  And we’re back at the original Democratic calculus: i.e, if Republicans aren’t going to give us bi-partisan cover, we might as well move as far to the left as we can while still passing the bill.  So the bill moves farther to the left.

But, in this scenario, it’s not at all clear that even a bill as relatively “modest” as the current effort would pass.  For one thing, all the public inertia that’s built against the bill, in a pretty much sustained wave since it’s introduction, would be slowed down dramatically.  If the “death panels” are introduced, at the 11th hour, after a bi-partisan compromise has broken down and after public attention had waned a bit, would the average American even notice?  If the bill wasn’t as unpopular as it is now, it’s hard for me to see Lieberman or Nelson having any leverage.  Dems just go reconciliation, get their public option and maybe end up, after the backlash,  with a bill that’s no more unpopular than the current effort.

The second possibility is that even Chait’s moderate compromise is pretty unpopular, though perhaps for different reasons.  Maybe the left-wing of the Democratic Party isn’t just confined to the activists, and that actual rank-in-file Democrats draw a line in the sand somewhere to the left of the compromise effort.  In which case, again, the progressives have all the leverage, as they’re able to argue that only a more progressive bill will be truly popular.  Even though they’d be wrong, it’s hard to see how they’d be dissuaded from taking pretty much the same steps I’ve outlined above: move the compromise to the left, lose the Republicans, move the compromise further to the left, and win themselves a big political victory.

And this all depends Obama  just sitting willingly on the sidelines, throughout: that he has no preference between a centrist bill (Chait’s compromise), a center left bill (the current version), and a progressive bill (public option, single payer, what have you)- that he’s just a neutral referee arbitrating between competing factions in the Democratic Party.  That seems an incredible assumption though one I’m not surprised Chait makes, given his ideological leanings.  True, Obama hasn’t exactly gone to bat for, well, anything on health care, but the bill has never been in anything other than liberal territory.  Until two weeks ago, a public option- albeit a watered down version- looked like a genuine possibility to many commentators.  At any rate, that’s where the bill was.  He could afford to let the it drift a little bit to the right.  Or so he thought.  Had we started off with something that made Romneycare look mildly liberal, is it really reasonable to imagine that Obama would have been as indifferent a player?

Here’s the bottom-line: the Democratic Party is 70-80% progressive at the congressional level.  Progressive Democrats have the least to fear from great public outcries; they have the weakest personal interest in making deals, watering down bills, caving on their preferences.  Centrist Democrats, in contrast, are dependent on both independents, for votes, and progressives, for funding and organization.  With the numbers being what they are, and the facts being what they are, progressives were never going to let a bill much more conservative than the current effort pass.  They would almost certainly have demanded something far more liberal had the polls not turned so decisively against them.  They may still demand something more progressive, what with the threats from house progressives and Senators like Sanders. Republicans may not have won the debate- it was probably unwinnable- but the Democrats have lost it.  It verges on delusion to suggest otherwise.

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Matthew E. Miller can be contacted at Obilisk18@yahoo.com