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The Limits Of Triangulation

By Big Tent Democrat

Last week, I wrote a post noting that in order for the health bill to be even what its most ardent supporters claim it is, it would need to survive assaults on its provisions from Republicans. I argued that the structure of the law made it particularly vulnerable to Republican retrenchment and that the argument that it would become more popular and be harder to deconstruct over time was faulty because the law as structured did not create a powerful constituency. I then pointed to the fact that Republicans were already diagramming how to attack the progressive features of the bill. In purporting to disagree with my post, John Cole mischaracterized my point - which was that the health bill was not structured in a way to be transformatively progressive, as asserted by strong health bill supporters. For example, Matt Yglesias argued:

Due to the [health] bill’s almost comically delayed implementation, for several years we’re still going to have a lot of political tussling over it. And even once it’s in place, the system will continue to be debated and tweaked for years to come. But over time, I think American politics will come to look quite different and we’ll look back on this day as a turning point.

(Emphasis supplied.) I think that is wrong. More than that, I think the argument is dangerous to progressive governance, and indeed, to the health bill itself. Today, Atrios cited D-Day critiquing Yglesias' expansion on his argument. Atrios wrote:

A frustrating thing is that the administration doesn't say, "we'd like to do this but we got the best we can do," instead they say "what we did was awesome." The result is that they don't even come across as advocates for the more liberal (and quite often the more popular) position.

Atrios was riffing off of D-Day's post which said:

Matt Yglesias decides to chide liberals and tell them that they risk losing universal health care by not “cheerleading” for the Democrats enough. That’s the nub of the argument as near as I can tell. I thought Yglesias was the determinist who believes elections are a reflection of the state of the economy and the normal swings of a non-Presidential year, particularly when the current President relied on a voter base of just the people least likely to turn out in an off-year election. But I guess someone needed to take the blame. What this neglects is that more people in the country, and given the big numbers I assume not just liberals, don’t think the law that passed resembles universal health care[.

Beyond that, I think it was Atrios who wrote that the way issues are covered in the Beltway the position of a Democratic President or leader will always be deemed the hippie liberal position, no matter what. Thus, by trimming their sails in an attempt to look moderate, Democratic Presidents do more to move the Overton Window to the right than any Republican really can. It is self-defeating.

Which brings me full circle (pun intended) - the insistence on creating a "moderate" health bill while demanding that progressives clap loudly for the "most progressive achievement in 40 years" virtually insures that the "progressive" in the bill will be at risk to conservative retrenchment.

And indeed, the news reports I cited in my original piece drive home that point -- the point Cole did not address. In short, this was just my never ending refrain that Democrats need a Left Flank, both as a question of politics and policy.

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on September 27, 2010 (boomark / email).