The rise in stock prices has been particularly striking in the period since Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said on October 27 that he would filibuster a Senate health care reform bill if it included a public option . . . Here's a quick breakdown of major health insurance company stock performance from Oct. 27 to Friday's market close:

* Coventry Health Care, Inc. is up 31.6 percent;

* CIGNA Corp. is up 29.1 percent;

* Aetna Inc. is up 27.1 percent;

* WellPoint, Inc. is up 26.6 percent;

* UnitedHealth Group Inc. is up 20.5 percent;

* And Humana Inc. is up 13.6 percent" -- Shahien Nasiripour, The Huffington Post's business reporter, yesterday.

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Just to put this boon to health insurance stocks in perspective:  according an Indianapolis Star article from June, Evan Bayh's wife, Susan, "owns from $500,001 to $1 million in employee stock in WellPoint, the Indianapolis-based insurance giant on whose board she sits."  That would mean that the value of her personal holdings in that one health insurance company alone, in the last six weeks alone (since Lieberman and her husband began meancing the public option), would have increased by a value of between $125,000 and $250,000.  As part of the bonanza of health care industry board positions she magically received since her husband became a Senator, Susan Bayh is given a quarter-million dollars each year in stocks and stock options from Wellpoint.  That's just a microcosm for considering how well Obama's so-called "special interests" have done as a result of this health care bill.

One should acknowledge:  the mere fact that the health insurance industry and the market generally sees this "reform" bill as a huge boost to the industry's profitability does not prove, by itself, that this is a bad bill.  Contrary to what I've seen said in various places, I haven't advocated for the defeat of this bill.  I've said from the start that there are reasonable arguments on both sides and that one must weigh (a) the corrupt, mandate-based strengthening of the private insurance industry, the major advancement of the corporatism model of government, the harm this is likely to do to some who are now covered and some who cannot afford the forced premiums, and the chances for a better bill if this one is defeated, versus (b) the various substantial benefits to many people who do not now have and cannot obtain health insurance and the risk that defeat of this bill will mean preservation of the status quo.  Weighing those factors is difficult and, at least for me, produces ambivalence. 

I've also been fairly repulsed by the 2003-like swarming, bullying efforts of the President's loyal supporters (both in the White House and from Beltway journalists and their partially cloned liberal bloggers) not merely to dispute, but to demonize and personally discredit, the bill's progressive critics as insane, crazy, childish, idiotic and drugged-out, Naderite, purist liars who -- we now learn today -- are the equivalent of "global warming denialists."  Whatever else is true, progressive opponents of the Senate bill (virtually all of whom offer strategic arguments for improving it, not for preserving the status quo), have been making well-informed and substantive critiques.  I don't want to overstate this:  there has been some very responsible and informative debate among these various factions, the insults have flown in both directions, and it's understandable that passions run high on an issue of this significance among opponents, particularly as the process mercifully draws to a close.  Still, it seems clear that campaigns by White House loyalists in government and the media to destroy the personal credibility and malign the character of the President's critics -- and to depict "the Left" as shrill, unSerious losers -- obviously aren't confined to the Bush years or to Bush supporters.

But whatever else one might want to say in favor of this health care bill -- and there are compelling arguments to make in its favor -- the notion that Democrats have "stood up to the special interests who prevented reform for decades" is too blatantly false, insultingly so, to tolerate.  As even the bill's most vocal supporters acknowledge, the White House's strategy from the start was to negotiate in secret with those very special interests in order to craft a bill that they liked and that benefits them.  If one wants to invoke the Obama-era religious mantra of "pragmatism" to argue that this was a shrewd strategic decision necessary for getting a bill passed, that at least is coherent (though not, in my view, persuasive).  But this bill is unquestionably one of the greatest boons in recent history for  the private health insurance industry and other "special interests" that have long been opposing "reform."  It's a major advancement for the corporatist model on which both parties rely.  It should lead a rational person to want to buy large amounts of stock in Goldman Sachs and Citigroup in anticipation of the upcoming "reform" of that industry.  Whatever this bill is, "standing up to special interests" is not it; quite the opposite.

Palin took to Facebook in August to warn of a system "in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care." And she warned of "the Orwellian thinking of the president’s health care advisor, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel." Not two months earlier, a leading LaRouchite described Emanuel -- who's actually a leading medical ethicist and staunch advocate for those approaching the end of their life -- as "President Obama's leading representative on a Federal 'death council' drawing up a list of medical procedures to be used to deny care to elderly, chronically ill, and poor people, whose lives are considered of less value."

Ultimately, the genesis of the whole "death panel" idea didn't matter, at least not nearly as much as the notion itself. It had been bubbling up on the right before Palin got to it, coming from every conservative's favorite source for completely distorted information about healthcare reform, Betsy McCaughey, not to mention from Republicans who warned of "euthanasia" – much of the hysteria based on an innocuous provision that would have ensured coverage for completely voluntary counseling about end-of-life decisions, which middle class and wealthy families routinely obtain.

Luckily for the right, the press was there to help them spread this message. Some media outlets were better on this story than others, pointing out that what Palin and others had said was flat-out wrong, but the story was irresistible fodder for many, especially on television. The amount of coverage granted to the claims only added to the insanity, whether there was a debunking included or not. Television news was, of course, the worst offender -- CNN, for example, did fact-check the allegations at times, but because it was covering the story so often, there were also all too many times when what Palin had said was just reported as news; the actual facts weren't included. On the night that the former governor debuted the "death panel" term, CNN anchor Campbell Brown said only: "The debate over healthcare reform getting ugly. Tonight, Sarah Palin posted a long statement on her Facebook page calling the Obama plan, quote, 'downright evil.' She says it would force her disabled son to stand in front of an Obama death panel in her words."

Meanwhile, prominent conservatives were doing their level best to promote the idea of death panels as real. On his radio show, Glenn Beck said, "I believe it to be true." Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich went on ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos" and backed Palin, saying, " You are asking us to trust turning power over to the government, when there are clearly people in American who believe in establishing euthanasia, including selective standards." And Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley stole the spotlight for himself when he said, "We should not have a government program that determines if you're going to pull the plug on grandma."

The influence this kind of coverage had was unmistakable. One poll conducted less than two weeks after Palin popularized the term found that 86 percent of Americans had heard about "death panels," and 30 percent -- including 47 percent of Republicans and 28 percent of independents -- believed the claims about them.

Those numbers were disturbing by themselves. But the saddest part is that all this hubbub obscured one simple truth: There aren't any death panels in the Democrats' legislation -- but private insurance companies ration care all the time, and sometimes the results are fatal.

While Kilgore is associated with the New Democrats and I consider myself a New Dealer, his description of the contrast is similar to mine:

To put it simply, and perhaps over-simply, on a variety of fronts (most notably financial restructuring and health care reform, but arguably on climate change as well), the Obama administration has chosen the strategy of deploying regulated and subsidized private sector entities to achieve progressive policy results. This approach was a hallmark of the so-called Clintonian, "New Democrat" movement, and the broader international movement sometimes referred to as "the Third Way," which often defended the use of private means for public ends. (It's also arguably central to the American liberal tradition going back to Woodrow Wilson, and is even evident in parts of the New Deal and Great Society initiatives alongside elements of the "social democratic" tradition, which is characterized by support for publicly operated programs in key areas).

This is accurate, including the point that the neoliberals are inspired by Woodrow Wilson's relatively conservative New Freedom rather than the New Nationalism of Theodore Roosevelt or the New Deal of his cousin Franklin. Kilgore is also right when he says that rival factions are sometimes too quick to dismiss the philosophical foundations of the rival camp:

But ideology, however muddled, is part of what makes most politically active people tick. And if we don't talk about it -- and about differences in strategic thinking as well, which should be the subject of future discussions -- then all we are left with to explain our differences on this issue or that is questions of character. And anyone paying attention must recognize there's far too much of that going on. "Progressive pragmatists" -- the camp with which I most often personally identify, as it happens -- often treat "the Left" condescendingly as immature and impractical people who don't understand how things get done. Meanwhile, people on "the Left" often treat "pragmatists" as either politically gutless or personally corrupt. This is what happens when you don't take seriously other people's ideological and strategic underpinnings; whatever you gain in ignoring or minimizing differences in perspective or point of view is lost in mutual respect.

As long as Kilgore's New Democrats treat his social democrats as failed New Democrats who are too naive about politics, and as long as his social democrats treat New Democrats solely as unprincipled corruptionists, there can only be a dialogue of the deaf.

The center-left can learn from the right. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, William F. Buckley Jr. and the circle around National Review tried to promote a "fusionist conservatism" that would unite Cold War hawks, social conservatives and free marketeers in a single philosophy. But the attempt to create a common conservative public philosophy by blurring important differences was a miserable flop. By the end of the 1980s Buckley's so-called movement conservatism had been sidelined by three distinct and energetic schools of thought on the political right: neoconservatives, libertarians and the religious right.

Each movement was willing to focus on some issues rather than others, as the price of being part of a hoped-for lasting Republican majority. The neocons, for example, specialized in hawkish foreign policy, the libertarians in deregulation. But the distinct schools on the right remained more or less internally coherent; they never degenerated into single-issue movements. Neoconservatives to this day, reflecting their Cold War liberal origins, tend to be relaxed about big domestic government and social insurance programs. In the Bush years, for example, the Weekly Standard published a critique of Social Security privatization. And many libertarians and religious conservatives are isolationists who disagree with the GOP's hawkish foreign policy.

Each of the three schools of thought on the right has a comprehensive vision of all of society -- foreign policy, domestic policy, morality -- even if its operatives choose to emphasize only the issues most important to them. Each vision, moreover, is incompatible with the vision of the other right-wing factions. Libertarians would not want to live in a world designed by neoconservatives, who in turn would not want to live in a Christian fundamentalist theocracy. In short, there is no such thing as "American conservatism." There are three rights, which have a shaky alliance of convenience under the umbrella of the Republican Party. Instead of a broad church, there are three denominations.

Is it time to admit that the American center-left, like the American right, is divided into groups of people who may agree on defeating the Republican Party but otherwise disagree on fundamental values and goals? Kilgore identifies two groups -- "New Democrats" and "social democrats." I prefer to call them "neoliberals" and "New Dealers." Perhaps "progressive" could be used for the New Dealers, if neoliberals who call themselves "pragmatic progressives" would agree to surrender the term.

Along with the neoliberals and New Dealers, I would identify a third significant faction to the left of center -- ideological Greens. While remaining true to the conservationist heritage of the two Roosevelts, New Dealers need to distinguish themselves from pessimistic, technophobic and antinatalist Green Malthusians. You can't be a New Deal liberal and view poverty in either the American South or the global South as a problem of too many dark-skinned people instead of too little social justice and too little economic development. You can't celebrate FDR's Tennessee Valley Authority as a symbol of economic and social progress and condemn it as a monstrous assault on the purity of an idealized natural world in which humans, unlike other animals, are intruders. And because one of the achievements of the New Deal was to use federal investment to promote electrification, the automobile and industrialized agriculture, you can't be a New Deal liberal and weep for a vanished early-industrial world of steam railroads, trolleys, tenements and locally grown food. (For opponents of coal, Greens seem to share a surprising nostalgia for the densely populated, transit-based cities of the ephemeral steam engine era.)

If we distinguish neoliberals, New Dealers and Greens from one another, then the center-left coalition, at the level of first principles, is not a marriage of two partners but a ménage à trois. It resembles the ménage à trois on the right that unites libertarians, Christian conservatives and neoconservatives. Recognizing that there are indeed distinct and fundamentally incompatible public philosophies to the left of center does not prevent cooperation among the schools for common purposes. The three factions can work together to maintain a Democratic majority, just as the neocons, libertarians and social conservatives disagree on first principles but unite in elections to support Republicans against Democrats.

Democrats should learn from Republicans how to manage a ménage à trois.

"This Congress, this leadership, is so tone deaf and so hell bent on propping up a policy that the American people doesn’t (sic) want, that they’re willing to basically flip the bird to the American people on this issue and slip it in in the dead of night," Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said after the vote, expressing a sentiment that's become common on the right. You can bet, too, that Steele and others will have similar things to say if that Christmas Eve vote happens as scheduled -- the farther reaches of the right might add some anti-Christian charges against Senate Democrats, to boot.

What Republicans aren't saying, though, is that they bear as much responsibility for the schedule as Senate Democrats do, maybe more. True, Majority Leader Harry Reid could just decide to blow his self-imposed deadline and not get the bill passed before Christmas. But if Republicans would drop delaying tactics they're currently using, or agree to give up some of the debate time they're allowed under Senate rules, the votes would be conducted at more normal hours and with enough time for everyone to get home for Christmas Eve. At this point, it's clear that the bill will pass -- at least this time around, we'll see what happens after the House and Senate confer -- and that the delaying tactics are only that.

There is a possibility that Senate Republicans will decide to allow the final vote before the evening of the 24th; there were reports that they were discussing that possibility Monday. But now that they've dug in, they'd face an angry base if they did back down.