Jack & Jill Politics

I’m trying to take the next few weeks off and enjoy my vacation. It’s been a crazy year, and the entire planet could probably use a break. However, I’ll occasionally break my fast when it comes to sharing what I think are worthy, insightful analyses of the healthcare bill pending in the Senate because I can’t sit by while many of the people I have respected and fought with to get us the president we have are now doing all in their power to undermine the substantial amount of good that can come from passing this bill and building on it.

At The New Republic, Jonathan Cohn runs a set of numbers showing what various levels of family finances look like under the proposed bill and with no bill passed at all, that is, status quo. He is responding to Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake who posted “10 Reasons To Kill The Senate Bill” this morning. Also, if there’s any doubt about people on the left actually proposing killing this bill, Jane’s headline should clear that right up.

Excerpts of Cohn’s work:

With the help of some figures supplied by MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, I look at how much it would cost families at different incomes to buy insurance–and how much they might owe in out-of-pocket expenses–under the Senate bill. But then I also look at premiums and out-of-pocket expenses if reform doesn’t pass, and we’re stuck with the status quo.*

Nate Silver did a version of this last week, for one sample family. This is a follow-up and it comes to the exact same, unambiguous conclusion: Reform reduces the risk of lost income dramatically, particularly at lower incomes.

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Translation: This is a hugely progressive program to bolster economic security, the likes of which we haven’t enacted in this country for a long, long time.

To be clear, I don’t think these numbers are great in absolute terms. As I argue in the article, progressives absolutely should push for better subsidies and more protection in the conference negotiations–and then, if the law passes, to work on improving the law in subsequent years.

But you can’t do any of that if a bill doesn’t get past the Senate.  That’s why prominent, reliable liberals like Sherrod Brown, Paul Krugman, Bernie Sanders, and Andy Stern all think the bill needs to pass–and why I do, too.

So let’s keep making progress, and let’s focus on the scenarios of a killed bill and a passed bill in terms of its affect on actual people, especially those 30 million lacking insurance.

In my political post this weekend I expressed alarm and confusion at lefties who want to undermine a core democratic platform item. I also pointed to an aspect of the Bill Killer argument that tests the limits of credulity. Namely, folks whining about “corporate bailouts and giveaways.”

What I wrote then:

For those who say, “but there are serious corporate giveaways.” Name me a bill that makes it through the United States Congress that doesn’t have major corporate giveaways! It’s how this system works. You can argue that the system is rotten, and we need campaign finance reform, and those are great points, but they have very little to do with the politics of the present moment. The politics of the present moment demand that those on the left who’ve fought for health care reform support this bill and build on that foundation in the future.

Well again, thanks to lamh32 for dropping this link to the great and always-real Al Giordano, who expands on the concept of the born-again anti-corporate crusader much more eloquently and substantially than I did. Some excerpts

Would single-payer and public-options still be preferable? Yes, but with the proviso that the improvement would be at the margins, and they, too, would create new problems to solve. I have yet to see a single-payer health proposal, for example, that honestly admits that removing insurance corporations altogether would cause hundreds of thousands of Americans that work for them to become unemployed. Where is the necessary plan to retrain, retool and provide jobs for those workers? Who has even mentioned it, much less developed a plan or a proposal

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In lieu of any real plan, we are offered “feel good” solutions of lashing out against corporations. Lost in that discourse: the people down below. That is what has defined the health care debate on parts of the blogosphere. It doesn’t matter to some that 30 million people who don’t have any health insurance at all will now have theirs subsidized. To them, if the insurance corporations also benefit from it, then it is a moral “evil” that must be stopped.

Also forgotten in this born-again anti-corporatism is what Alinksy, Gandhi and others have demonstrated: To create and sustain successful political movements and revolutions, you have to turn small triumphs into ever increasing larger ones. If you don’t have victories along the way and call them that, the people lose hope and motivation to back any movement or revolt.

And yet that is precisely what the bill-killer tendency (and we will surely see them behave the same incoherent way on future battles: immigration reform will be next) is pushing: This sense that nothing is progress, nothing can be defined as a win, and that winning itself is evil if it doesn’t overturn everything. Even that might be understandable if they had a coherent plan for what winning would really look like, for what kind of society and system they would build to replace corporate capitalism. But they don’t have even a skeletal blueprint yet.

One of the saddest parts about how this saga has played out is that the people on the left dissing this bill, calling it a total failure and a sellout are actually doing psychological damage to the people who need a sense of progress and victory to keep moving forward. I’m sure you’ve all heard the disgruntled grumblings and often screams of people who voted for Obama and have totally written him off, written the entire administration off because he “failed” to deliver healthcare. I see it in the comments here everyday.

On the one hand, these are people who never really listened to the candidate, never understood his pragmatism or never respected just how hard change of any kind would be. But, on the other hand, many of these despondent lefties have been driven into a state of defeatism by voices they trusted, voices now telling them, “it’s over.” There’s nothing good here. We lost.

By any objective measure, with “corporate giveaways” and all, the Senate bill is a significant, celebration-worthy step forward for the left, and movements need even partial victories in order to maintain momentum. I wonder how the bill killers think we’ll muster the political support to face other significant challenges (climate change and energy, immigration and beyond) when they absolutely refuse to acknowledge the good we’re doing now. You don’t lead a team to victory by destroying its morale at every possible step, and there’s a difference between advocating for more positive change and shitting on your own team.

And so I don’t fall victim to the same unproductive behavior, I’ll leave you on a positive note. Overall and Democratic support for the Senate bill is up, and liberal support for Obama is up, according to recent polls. Let’s keep spreading the good news, so we have the energy and motivation to keep making even better news.