Liberals across cyberspace cheered Thursday when Sen. Al Franken declined to give Sen. Joe Lieberman an additional two minutes to drone on about amendments to the Senate healthcare provision he is single-handledly making worse. Talking Points Memo got the video, here it is.
On "Hardball" today, Chris Matthews asked me whether I thought it was merely a procedural move -- Senate leadership released a statement saying all senators had been asked to hasten the debate -- or whether it was political. I said it was political, and it was a "satisfying" moment for liberals, since President Obama's team has spent time vilifying Howard Dean for opposing the bill, but hasn't said word one about Lieberman hijacking it. (I also say more about why I oppose Dean's call to kill the bill.) Here's the video:
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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:
Well, you're a hard group to fool: The No. 1 choice for Crazy among my letter writers was the same as ours: Glenn Beck. Orly Taitz was, of course, a close second, if not a tie, and lots of you mentioned Michele Bachmann, who came in at No. 3 on our list.
Here are a few inspired choices that didn't make our list:
The teabaggers (Cuchulain2007)
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!
Let me be clear: I despise what Joe Lieberman is doing to healthcare reform, in the service of his insurance industry masters and his own wounded (by the Democratic left who drove him from the party) ego. I am sad and disappointed by the prospect of a healthcare reform bill that includes neither a public option nor a Medicare buy-in for those 55-64. The bill needs both, and then some. I completely agree with Glenn Greenwald: President Obama deserves much of the blame for the debacle, for failing to fight vigourously for a public option in the first place.
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.
News came so fast in 2009 it made us dizzy: A brand-new Democratic White House team (led by our first African-American president); economic catastrophe and, maybe, tiny green shoots of recovery; legislative milestones -- a historic stimulus -- and legislative gridlock (most everything else); one war winding down but another one expanded; grass-roots anger on the right and left about a Wall Street crash that turned out fine for much of Wall Street but kept crashing for the rest of us. We had big celebrity deaths (Ed McMahon, Walter Cronkite, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, all in four weeks); big celebrity scandals (Tiger Woods, Mark Sanford) plus big celebrity death scandals (thanks to Jackson, his wacky family and his phalanx of physician-toadies). All of it was enlivened by an explosion of high-decibel right-wing paranoia and hatred that made our problems seem increasingly surreal and intractable.
But if 2009 was a year of big news, it also was most notably the year of Big Crazy. From Birthers to death panels, 9/11 Truthers to evolution deniers, it was hard to get through a week without stepping in a steaming pile of just-plain-nuts. So let Time magazine come up with its dutiful "Person of the Year," working harder each December to delight, confound, disgust or simply bore us. Salon decided to live up to the news environment of 2009 and to round up the Year in Crazy -- -- documenting the people responsible for the craziest behavior of the year.
It was very hard (in fact, we're still mulling our top pick). There's so much crazy to choose from. Then there's a whole lot of shiny, vexing and perplexing faux-crazy. Bill O'Reilly certainly went loony during his tête-à-tête with me in June, but a certain kind of authoritarian, bad-daddy nuttiness is O'Reilly's reliable shtick; none of us knows what the Fox host really believes, except that he loves his big paycheck and getting to humiliate people. We think O'Reilly is vile, but overheated as he sometimes gets, we don't think he's crazy. Same with Rush Limbaugh. His "anal poisoning" obsession aside, Limbaugh is sane enough to keep making millions and to stay in the right-wing "telling it like it is" media mainstream.
Similarly, someone like Liz Cheney -- awful but not crazy -- could casually suggest that insane Birther theories made sense because "people are uncomfortable with having, for the first time ever ... a president who seems so reluctant to defend the nation overseas." Sarah Palin, who's wacky and destructive but not crazy, except like a fox, went a little bit crazy on Facebook, warning that Obama's healthcare reform would create "death panels" to kill her elderly parents and her child with Down syndrome. O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Cheney and Palin all display behavior that's better described as brazenly opportunistic than crazy.
It went over so well that folks like Chuck Grassley and Newt Gingrich rode the crazy train for a while, defending Palin's lies. Crazy became so influential this year that the New York Times finally assigned someone to the Right-Wing Crazy beat, asking reporters and editors to watch Fox News and track the mutterings of O'Reilly and Glenn Beck and Limbaugh and the echo chamber of crazy, after the paper of record was taken by surprise by the epidemic of lethal lunacy in the Birther controversies and "town hells" this summer, and failed to cover Fox's crusade to topple White House "green jobs" czar Van Jones. (The New York Times is crazy to listen to right-wing bullies, but we're only talking about individual crazy behavior here.)
We're not sure what explains the sudden explosion of crazy. Is it deep, destabilizing economic insecurity? The looming 2012 apocalypse? Having a black president? No one knows for sure. All we know is that within the GOP's base, and on certain frontiers of the left, as well as the wacky-science crowd, crazy is hot this year. Crazy sells. It's the year of crazy liberation! Say it loud, I'm nuts and proud.
So over the next few days we'll honor 10 people from the Year in Crazy. Leave your nominations and votes in our letters section, and you could help us pick our No. 1. Meanwhile, hold on to your sanity, because we think it's coming back strong in the next few years. We've been trying to popularize a few catchphrases -- Sanity: It's patriotic! Sanity: Just do it! Sanity: It's not just for breakfast anymore! -- and you can add a few of your own in comments, too.
But the crazy will be here all week, trying to reassure you in this holiday season that you're not alone: All of our families look downright sane compared to the cavalcade of crazy we endured this year.
Influential liberals have begun arguing a funny kind of liberal Catch-22: The health insurance "public option" is already so diluted, it's no longer worth fighting for. Got it? Because liberal Dems got played by conservative Dems, they should forfeit the entire game.
Crazy as it sounds, it might also be true.
American Prospect co-editor (and Clinton administration health policy advisor) Paul Starr kicked off this line of reasoning in the New York Times Nov. 28. "Liberals should be prepared to give up what is now a mere symbol for changes in the bill that would deliver affordable insurance more effectively and quickly to the millions of Americans who desperately need it," Starr wrote. Starr's preferred changes included moving up the bill's start date from 2014 to asap -- which is practically and politically smart -- and establishing federal "regulatory authority to prevent insurers from engaging in abusive practices and subverting the new rules" that prevent discrimination based on age and preexisting conditions. Those were great ideas but they should have come along with a public option, not instead of one.
But now that a so-called Gang of 10 -- five liberal Senate Dems, five conservative Senate Dems -- has begun meeting to seek a public option compromise, the argument for substance over (public option) symbol is getting real traction. Two "compromise" proposals have been floated: Letting Americans as young as 55 buy into Medicare, and ditching the public option for a proposal to let individuals use their own money, or federal subsidies, to buy into the federal workers' plans administered by the Office of Personnel Management -- the same plans offered to Congress and the president.
Letting older but still Medicare-ineligible people buy into the popular public plan for seniors seems like a clear win. (Although Democrats seem to know how to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, so without details, it's hard to say that conclusively..) People aged 54 to 65 are the hardest hit by our current system -- they're most likely to be denied care or dropped by insurance carriers for health troubles, all while also being hit hard by layoffs. Plus, adding a big chunk of "younger" folks to Medicare seems like a way to stabilize Medicare as well as -- assuming the experiment is successful -- gradually make a case for "Medicare for all."
The proposal to let the uninsured buy into the same federal programs that Congress uses has political appeal, but even more implementation problems than lowering the age for (possibly self-funded) Medicare eligibility. The biggest problem is that it leaves the private insurance system basically untouched, unless the OPM began negotiating more fiercely.
At any rate, the power of both proposals is in their implementation, so it's too early to declare either of them good or bad. Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden told Rachel Maddow Monday night that the liberal Senate negotiators' goal is: "We want to be able to give an ultimatum to the insurance industry: You treat the consumer right or they're going to take their business somewhere else." We'll see.
I'm coming to reluctantly accept the conventional political wisdom that a flawed bill is better than no bill for the Democrats and President Obama, mainly because Democrats have shown no talent for making the GOP pay for its obstructionist tactics. Hard-liners like MSNBC's Ed Schultz -- I was on "The Ed Show" today debating this issue -- seem to think liberal Democrats could make political hay out of the GOP's defeating healthcare reform in 2010. But since they've been unable to make such a case in 2009, I'm not sure why it would work next year.
At any rate, here are a few of the more interesting summaries I read today:
From Jonathan Cohn in the New Republic, on what liberals should demand for compromising on the public option.
Ezra Klein on the same question.
Here's Firedoglake Action's Jon Walker on flaws in the plan to open federal workers' coverage to the uninsured.
And here's Talking Points Memo's frequently updating Health Care Wire.
A few people in my letters thread today claim to see "sour grapes" and "I told you so" in my post saying progressives have only themselves to blame for feeling betrayed by President Obama. Ain't no sour grapes -- I voted for him, of course -- but there is a helping of "I told you so," I admit, left over from the 2008 primary battle. And Tom Hayden's bleat of betrayal in the Nation today – Alex Koppelman writes about it here -- forces me to confess it.
Hayden's delusional Obama endorsement in March 2008 made such an impression on me, I can quote whole sentences from memory. Well, one whole sentence, the first: "All American progressives should unite for Barack Obama." Oh, and I remember that he said Obama's "very biography" and his campaign's "very existence" would cure cancer, make my hair silky smooth, and cause pretty, pretty unicorns to dance in my backyard, too.
OK, that last part isn't true.
But I felt like I was in some kind of Maoist reeducation camp, being urged to struggle mightily and cheerfully for Chairman Obama.
So yeah, that old "I told you so" demon drove me back to reread Hayden's Nation piece -- co-signed by Danny Glover, Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher Jr. (but redolent of Hayden's manifesto-writing style) -- and boy, it's even worse than I remember. For those of you saying it's not fair to blame progressives for deluding themselves about Obama, please read this, and then try to make the same argument. Some of my favorite lines below:
"All American progressives should unite for Barack Obama. We descend from the proud tradition of independent social movements that have made America a more just and democratic country. We believe that the movement today supporting Barack Obama continues this great tradition of grassroots participation, drawing millions of people out of apathy and into participation in the decisions that affect all our lives. We believe that Barack Obama's very biography reflects the positive potential of the globalization process that also contains such grave threats to our democracy when shaped only by the narrow interests of private corporations in an unregulated global marketplace. We should instead be globalizing the values of equality, a living wage and environmental sustainability in the new world order, not hoping our deepest concerns will be protected by trickle-down economics or charitable billionaires. By its very existence, the Obama campaign will stimulate a vision of globalization from below….
"We intend to join and engage with our brothers and sisters in the vast rainbow of social movements to come together in support of Obama's unprecedented campaign and candidacy. Even though it is candidate-centered, there is no doubt that the campaign is a social movement, one greater than the candidate himself ever imagined…. We have the proven online capacity to reach millions of swing voters in the primary and general election. We can and will defend Obama against negative attacks from any quarter….
"We take very seriously the argument that Americans should elect a first woman President, and we abhor the surfacing of sexism in this supposedly post-feminist era. But none of us would vote for Condoleezza Rice as either the first woman or first African-American President. We regret that the choice divides so many progressive friends and allies, but believe that a Hillary Clinton presidency would be a Clinton presidency all over again, not a triumph of feminism but a restoration of the aging, power-driven Wall Street Democratic hawks at a moment when so much more fresh imagination is possible and needed. A Clinton victory could only be achieved by the dashing of hope among millions of young people on whom a better future depends. The style of the Clintons' attacks on Obama, which are likely to escalate as her chances of winning decline, already risks losing too many Democratic and independent voters in November. We believe that the Hillary Clinton of 1968 would be an Obama volunteer today, just as she once marched in the snows of New Hampshire for Eugene McCarthy against the Democratic establishment."
Oh, and I searched the whole thing: Not one word about Afghanistan. Not even the word "Afghanistan."
I want to be clear here. I am not saying, and I never said, that Clinton was more progressive than Obama on any of these issues. But Hayden, Michael Moore and too many progressives claimed, with zero evidence, that Obama would be more progressive than Clinton. He wasn't, and he isn't. There were many reasons to choose Obama over Clinton, but that he was the better progressive was never one of them. Certainly his Cabinet choices -- including Clinton herself -- are no more progressive than hers would be. Claiming a President Clinton would preside over "a restoration of the aging, power-driven Wall Street Democratic hawks at a moment when so much more fresh imagination is possible and needed" seems particularly silly today (and using "aging" as a pejorative was a poor choice from Hayden's particular demographic, but old habits die hard).
Struggle mightily and cheerfully to forgive yourself for your self-delusion, Tom Hayden and friends. OK, my "I told you so" moment is officially over.
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