What Should Have Obama Done?
Posted on Tue Dec 15, 2009 at 10:49:00 AM EST
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Ezra Klein asks as if the answer has not already been given a number of times. I wrote about it below, in the context of when the health care reform battle was lost but let's repeat the point - President Obama should never have allowed Max Baucus to hijack his timetable for health care reform. Because once he did, the reconciliation card was taken off the table.
This was important for two reasons. First, having the real possibility of reconciliation for health care reform would have given Obama and the Democrats bargaining power in the regular order (60 vote) negotiations. For example, if Lieberman (or Nelson or Lincoln or Landrieu) pulls his stunt in October, then you could very credibly say, 'well Joe (or Ben, etc.), we'd love to have your input in this bill, but we can't meet your demands. We'll have to do the bill via reconciliation.' As we all know, the big objections from these folks was about public insurance programs - all easily doable via reconciliation (as is Ezra's precious Exchange btw). This would be a very credible threat. Second, if they remained recalcitrant, then you DO do a bill by reconciliation.
Of course, what Ezra will NOT tell you is that he prefers the Lieberman bill to the bill that would emerge from reconciliation. You see, despite the protestations to the contrary, while the Village Bloggers had no objection to the public option (like Obama), they also don't really give a damn about it. That it is out of the bill is not really a problem for them. As I wrote earlier today, Ezra came clean on his lack of interest in the public insurance programs:
Ezra Klein finally lays out his cards on what he thought was the important part of the reform in the health care reform proposals:
Reconciliation, in other words, tips the bill towards an expansion of the public sector rather than a restructuring of the private sector [. . .] To be very clear, this is not a trade I'm eager to see reformers make. You lose too much in reconciliation, and gain too little. The exchanges are too important, and so too are the insurance regulations and delivery-system reforms. But if Democrats end up in reconciliation, this bill is going to get a lot worse from the perspective of its skeptics.(Emphasis supplied.) Ezra was never against expanding public insurance programs. But he never thought much of them. In a sense, the bill that will be enacted is what Ezra wanted (coincidentally, it is what President Obama wanted.) Again, I do not begrudge him his opinions. I just disagree with them. I do begrudge his disingenuity in his writings and TV appearances as a "public option supporter." He never really cared about the public option. His ideal was not single payer. It was Wyden-Bennett. (Of course, both had an equal chance of passage - ZERO.) He should have been more forthright about that.
In the end, honesty will answer our questions. Ezra was not interested in strategies that would achieve reform via a public insurance option. He was interested in reforms that created the Exchange. That's fine. That's where Obama was too. But let's stop playing this game of "what could he have done?" They know very well what Obama and the Democrats could have done. They chose not to. Which is fine with the Village bloggers and I am fine with it being fine with them. The disingenuousness is getting quite annoying though.
Speaking for me only
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