Even as progressives engage in an important and fascinating debate over strategy and policy regarding the healthcare reform compromise likely to pass the Senate, it's being covered as a clash of personalities: the "netroots/nutroots" vs. the pragmatists; the wonks vs. the activists, Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake vs. the Washington Post's Ezra Klein.

Of course, a few people on the netroots left have pushed their own specious story lines, comparing the sides in this debate to 2002's liberal split over the Iraq war. As someone who passionately opposed the war (to MSM ridicule) and thinks the coming healthcare reform compromise, while disappointing, is a deal worth making, I reject simplistic lefty schematics.

If you can only read one thing about this debate, read Glenn Greenwald's breakdown of the real fissures the bill is exposing within the party (where he finds merit in Jake McIntyre's 2002 Iraq vs. 2009 HCR positions). There is a genuine and justified concern among progressives that this bill enshrines an alarming corporatist Democrat view of "reform": Make nominally liberal social-service expansions safe for the private sector. That is absolutely what is going on.

But that's as far as the Democrats and the progressive movement have taken us to date. We have a lot more work to do. In my opinion, left and center Democrats need to compromise now, make good on their campaign promise to pass the bill and insure millions more people. And then progressives need to challenge the corporatist pillars of the party in rhetoric, legislation, and in elections, in 2010 and 2012, and beyond.

That's why when it comes to the current healthcare reform bill, I'm with the bill's opponents in the long term, and its liberal supporters in the short term. In the long term, I think the work progressives have done pushing for the public option has already made the bill a better bill. They will likely get more good policy provisions in conference committee. But their opposition is also crucial as a long-term organizing, party-development strategy. It's profoundly frustrating that there's no one on the left who has the clout of Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Aetna, or Ben Nelson, D-Mutual of Omaha. Without being willing to walk away from the table, it's hard to convince the other side you mean business. I understand why some progressives are still demanding that congressional liberals leave the table if the Senate compromise is the only play possible.

I made this point throughout the summer, when liberals like Newsweek's Jon Alter, along with Matthews, were arguing that the left should surrender the public option immediately to ensure the passage of other healthcare reforms. As I said at the time, I don't know who taught those guys to play poker. If you give up on your ideals six months before the final vote, you can't expect to get much from last-minute negotiations.

I'm aware I'm violating my own rules by starting to publicly cast my lot with the backers of compromise. But I'm doing so to ensure there isn't a self-destructive rush to declare the bill wholly evil on the left. I have said it before: I'm disturbed by the stampede to abandon President Obama, and the Democratic Party, by people who sold Obama as the only progressive choice in 2008 -- people like my friends Tom Hayden and Arianna Huffington. Occasionally, I'm tempted, like the self-congratulatory folks who want to superimpose the divisions over the Iraq war, to do the same thing with the 2008 primary -- except Jane Hamsher and I were on the same side back then: on the side of staying neutral and not anointing one candidate the only progressive choice. And Taylor Marsh, who backed Clinton, opposes the likely compromise bill. So there are no simple, let alone simplistic, ways to think about this compromise.

I do believe that the lefties who bought or sold the idea that Obama was the only true progressive in '08 bear a special burden for the current disillusionment among Democrats. Obama mostly campaigned as a centrist Democrat; it was exciting (and a valid reason to prefer him) to have our first African-American nominee, but it wasn't the coming of social democracy in the U.S. I think people who sold Obama that way will be helping to dig progressives out of a ditch for years to come. It would have been great if both leading Democrats had to fight for progressive votes, but a lot of leading progressives bullied Clinton supporters and bowed to Obama prematurely.  

But one person bears a much bigger burden for this confusion than Obama propagandists, and that's Obama himself. He's breaking two campaign promises by backing this bill: He (wrongly, in my opinion) opposed the individual mandate in 2008, while correctly backing the public option. Now he's selling out on both. The latest insult is the president telling the Washington Post on Tuesday: "I didn't campaign on the public option," when in fact it was a staple of  his policy papers and Web platform.  It's an astonishing statement. His supporters are right to chastise Obama. But I don't think defeating the likely compromise is a smart way to do it.

Obama's disappointing failure to push the public option aside, I think Democrats should back the bill. For one thing, the party has to start delivering on its promises.  I agree with Tom Harkin: The likely bill (there is still no actual bill) establishes healthcare as a right, not a privilege. It expands Medicaid to at least 17 million currently uninsured Americans, and grants subsidies to many millions, perhaps 10 million, more. It makes insurance companies pay out 80-85 percent of premium dollars on care. State exchanges may also be able to accomplish something close to a public option (although that is still not clear). And while the individual mandate (and accompanying fines) is of concern without a public option, Jonathan Cohn lays out how much families from 100 to 300 percent of the poverty line will be helped by the bill, and it's extraordinary. Finally, there is no universal healthcare without a universal, individual mandate. So the progressives who are trying to sell that as the lefty "compromise" are wrong.

So, yes, I expect I will support the compromise that emerges from the House-Senate conference committee. I hope House progressives get more concessions -- more and higher subsidies for working- and middle-class Americans, more incentives for insurance companies to compete and lower costs. But in the end, I'm with Harkin and socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders: This bill helps tens of millions of people. It moves us down the road to a genuine and legitimate public health infrastructure. It can also convince people on the fence that Democrats deliver on their promises.

But I won't participate in demonizing the bill's progressive opponents. We will need one another later on. I think the would-be so-called bill-killers are wrong -- but they're not evil, juvenile, self-destructive, solipsistic or any of the other epithets thrown around mainly by lifetime centrist Democratic apologists. They are the people who are trying to stake out a left-wing frontier to balance the likes of Lieberman, Nelson, Blanche Lincoln and Mary Landrieu, and all the Blue Dog Democrats in the House. The MSM -- and some offices in the White House -- still chuckle at the insurgent left, especially the netroots, as immature and impotent. That's a great way to encourage compromise, by the way. To the extent anyone who wants this bill to pass is still peddling this pernicious point of view, they might want to stop it.

Ultimately, I believe liberals aren't convincing when they threaten to pull a Lieberman and kill this bill, because everyone knows they care about people too much. It's a classic Solomonic choice: Put Medicare expansion or the public option in the bill, and Lieberman will kill it, because he killed his conscience long ago. Give Bernie Sanders $25 million in community healthcare clinics, as well as Medicaid or subsidies to get 20-plus million Americans healthcare -- even without a public option -- and Sanders is going to see the real human beings really helped by real healthcare. He's not going to hold out for ideological principle, and everybody knows that.

And, sure, it's hard to for liberal Democrats to negotiate with those who are making this all about ideology. But it's easier to sleep at night. This bill, if it passes, is not the end, but a beginning. I want it to pass, but I respect those who come down on the other side.

Why did so many news organizations, from old media and new, chase silly, shiny distractions? Mainly because it's easier than reporting out, and attracting readers to, big questions of politics and public policy. Right now, for instance, even as progressives engage in substantive debate over tactics, strategy and policy in the healthcare reform compromise likely to pass the Senate, it's mainly covered as a clash of personalities: the "netroots/nutroots" vs. the pragmatists; the wonks vs. the activists, Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake vs. the Washington Post's Ezra Klein. (I promise to follow this post with an examination of the two sides' arguments so that Salon doesn't merely ape the media we criticize!) Whether or not an excise tax on high-cost policies is progressive doesn't get as much attention.

When looking at the year's top bogus stories, we didn't only consider entirely false claims, like death panels. We included stories that had some truth at their core -- Climategate! -- but that got pickup and importance far beyond what the simple facts of the story rightfully earned. So check out Salon's list of the top 11 Bogus Stories of 2009 (we couldn't pick just 10!). Let us know if we missed any, or if you'd have picked a different No. 1, in my comments section, and I'll report back on my blog tomorrow (after substantively breaking down the healthcare reform battle, I promise). 

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After the segment, Franken communications director Casey Aden-Wansbury e-mailed me this:

"Hi Joan, I heard you got asked about Sen. Franken's exchange with Sen. Lieberman on Hardball just now and wanted to make sure you knew what really happened: Senate leadership has been asking all presiding officers to enforce the 10-minute rule for both sides and Senator Franken was simply following the direction of leadership. "

Duly noted. (Update: My friend Josh Marshall of TPM emails to remind me that Aden-Wansbury used to be communications director for...Joe Lieberman. Small world.) But it was still a profoundly satisfying moment. Thank you, Sen. Franken! Here's the Franken video, with a cameo by an outraged John McCain: 

No group this year operated on so little evidence, logic or rational thought; no group this year was so enmeshed in shooting itself in the foot at every turn; no group was so convinced that fiction was indeed fact; and no group exemplified the term "useful idiots" so well.

Funded, provoked, encouraged and organized by right-wing millionaires and billionaires, this supposedly "populist" movement was against everything that could actually help the non-rich in America and for everything that could possibly help the fat cats pulling their strings.

And within this group, those who carried weapons to health care rallies were the ne plus ultra of crazies.

The Salahis, (highlyunlikely)

Crazy: the way to become instantly infamous.

Joe Lieberman (DCJan)

For me, Lieberman is the craziest of them all! Three months ago he proposed for the buy-in medicare extension, and now he's against it. A crazy person certainly does say anything and everything ... and Joe Lieberman has to be crazy. Or is he merely a compulsive liar? But, aren't compulsive liars crazy, too?

John Edwards (teresa, dterrydraw, virtue001)

As for genuine crazy (and quite despite his having a rather famously LOT of money)? I'd nominate my neighbor, the former Senator John Edwards. He still doesn't seem to grasp how any-of-this could have happened to HIM, and did it really happen?...

At the very least, Edwards has earned the "Most Deluded" & "What Were You THINKING?" awards for 2009.

--dterrydraw

Did we miss anyone? I should admit that I was nominated more than once, for many outrages, most notably being that I thought it possible to pick the No. 1 Crazy in a year like this. It was hard, I admit, but Glenn Beck made it kind of easy!

But I'm also worried about the left's rush to abandon the likely healthcare reform compromise. The fight isn't over; Senate progressives should try to get a better bill; if the likely disappointing bill passes, House progressives should fight like hell to get the public option and other measures to expand insurance and cut costs back into whatever bill is on the table.

However: I have seen a cavalcade of lefty surrender in the last two days, with people who ought to know better insisting it's time to defeat the Senate bill (which means the current proposals wouldn't go to conference, to be improved by the House) rather than compromise. And I really don't get it. On MSNBC's "The Ed Show" Tuesday, Arianna Huffington argued that progressives should kill the compromised Senate bill, and I ... well, I asked what that would accomplish. And I still don't know. Some of the complaints are starting to remind me of progressives who backed Ralph Nader in 2000, because there was no difference between George W. Bush and Al Gore. (Text continues after video, below): 

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I have been here on Salon since mid-summer, haranguing Obama and the Democrats to fight for meaningful reform and a robust public option. While few people were really paying attention, in July, I voiced my disappointment with Obama's failure to lay out core principles of his own healthcare reform plans. During the summer of "town hells," I repeated that lament; I think Obama's silence, rather than empowering his Democratic caucus, left them exposed and let the rowdy right define his bill with their own signature insanity: Socialist death panels and mandatory high school abortion clinics, here we come.

So Obama has much to answer for. But that's behind us. Now we have the reality of the already inadequate Senate bill needing 60 votes it won't get. And so we've got President Lieberman dictating the terms of the bill. It's disgraceful, when you look at what the Democratic base has voted for since 2006 (when Lieberman was forced to run as an independent when he lost the Democratic nomination).

I can get very stirred up by all of that. But I can also say this: The core provisions of the Senate bill -- expanding coverage to perhaps 30 million people; doing away with insurance company discrimination against those with preexisting conditions, preventing them from cruelly throwing the insured who suddenly need coverage off the rolls, and abolishing caps on insurance coverage (caps would seem to be the opposite of insurance) -- those are important accomplishments.

I admit: I'm afraid that building in an insurance mandate, but not any kind of public option that might bring down costs, could make this whole plan backfire. Maybe it will turn out to be a huge giveaway to the insurance companies, and taxpayers as well as the newly insured will rebel against Obama and the Democrats for passing it. That's a real worry. I have made that case myself in arguing for the public option over the last few months.

But I also can't look away from the possibility of helping insure another 30 million people and protecting a whole lot more from discrimination and abandonment when they need insurance most. This may be the best choice we get for a long time. And I have been challenging myself and other people to answer the question: Has there ever been a time liberals have defeated a basically liberal but disappointing set of reforms, only to be able to implement something more liberal later?

And I don't know of anything like that. When liberals and conservatives united to defeat President Nixon's guaranteed-income Family Assistance Plan, I know people like me thought they were doing the best they could to protect welfare families from possible encroachment on their benefits. But years later, a guaranteed income seems like socialism. That was before my time; but I also remember when electing Ronald Reagan, while disappointing, was going to herald an era of lefty rebellion; but that never happened either; we got George H.W. Bush and then Bill Clinton's accommodating triangulation, which hid his social democratic aspirations so well that no one could find them. And after the defeat of Clinton's healthcare reform efforts, Democrats came back even more timid this time around -- 15 years later.

I'm also not convinced by arguments that Democrats can kill the bill, and then use the failure of healthcare reform in 2010 against the Republicans. They have shown no capacity to hang the GOP with "the party of no" label it deserves. Instead, after holding the White House and Congress for the first time in almost a generation, they will have shown themselves unable to pass meaningful reform. People can argue to kill the bill on its merits, but don't try to argue that it's good politics. Obama will look like a failure.

Make no mistake: Obama is caving to Blue Dog Democrats, Joe Lieberman and the insurance lobby. But if you don't like that, then go into the districts of those faux-Democrats and work against them. Work harder for campaign finance reform. Start thinking about getting behind a genuinely progressive primary opponent for the president in 2012. (I think it's too early for that myself.) And for now, continue to lobby Congress to improve this bill. But vain boasts about how progressives can kill the bill, start over, and blame Republicans for the failure to pass reform are not convincing.

One footnote on the video: I was a little too hard on Howard Dean. I believe he's approaching this with integrity, and he may be right about a bad bill being worse than no bill at all. I still see a little bit of the Dean/Rahm Emanuel feud at work here, though, and I'm not ready for the Democrats to round up the circular firing squad quite yet.