Historian Matthew Dallek has a piece in today’s Politico extolling the virtues of dissenting from one’s party. Exhibit A: Sen. Olympia Snowe (ME), whose vote in favor of the Senate Finance Committee’s health bill has proven crucial to giving health reform a much-needed boost in the late innings.

Snowe has drawn fire from the right for her apostasy and from the left for her outsized role in the process (which, one suspects, would not be a problem had she been a strong supporter of the public option). But Dallek suggests that Snowe’s efforts, already crucial in the present context, could prove even more momentous in the long run:

Oftentimes, the consensus within either the Democratic or the Republican Party is a product of ideological blinders or groupthink — and the resulting policies are shortsighted and ultimately deeply flawed.

In recent decades, such voices of protest within a political party have occasionally proved to be far more insightful than anybody at the time cared to acknowledge or even contemplate.

Putting Snowe’s dissent in historical context, Dallek makes an interesting comparison with the creation of the DLC in the mid-1980s. He points out that while the DLC’s attempts to move the Democratic Party closer to the center angered traditional liberals at the time, it ultimately “made the party more competitive in presidential elections and erased the stigma of weakness from some of the party’s future standard-bearers.” The heterodoxy of leaders like then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and then-Sen. Al Gore (TN) still does not play well in some progressive circles to this day, but the fact is their refusal to march in lockstep with the party ended up revitalizing it.

It’s probably unlikely that Snowe’s departure from the party line on health care — not to mention Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (SC) on climate change — will be similarly transformative. But Dallek’s point is well taken: done in good conscience, thinking outside the party box can often lead to more prudent, sensible ideas — and look good in hindsight to boot.

The prospects for health reform’s passage have certainly brightened over the last few weeks. Yesterday bought a new push in the direction of reform.

A trio of Colorado Democrats — Gov. Bill Ritter, Sen. Michael Bennett, and Sen. Mark Udall — released an open letter to U.S. senators urging them to reject a filibuster and give the public option an up-or-down vote in the Senate:

Even if you oppose a public option, we urge you not to hold it hostage with the threat of the filibuster. Stand up for the people, not the insurance industry, and give the public option the up-or-down vote it deserves.

The call for an up-or-down vote on the public option is something that has been building for a while. (Our own Ed Kilgore made a similar argument in September.) The principle behind it is certainly sound: a senator can vote their conscience and against the public option, as long as they allow the plan to come up for a vote, period. By supporting this tactic, progressives could also avoid the difficulties that come with trying to pass reform through the budget reconciliation process.

Regardless of where one stands on the public option — PPI has always believed that reform was possible with or without one — the idea of letting it stand for an up-or-down vote is something everyone should agree on. Because of their reputation as pragmatic progressives (as opposed to some of the plan’s more ideological supporters), Ritter, Bennett, and Udall’s move certainly makes such a vote a likelier possibility.

From Roll Call today comes the latest episode in the tired series known as The Party of “No”:

Senate Republicans, acknowledging they lack the votes to block a health care reform bill outright, have implemented a comprehensive political strategy to delay, define and derail.

With Democratic leaders and White House officials holed up in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) office negotiating a final bill, Republicans are demanding a deceleration of the process and moving to define whatever plan that emerges as a combination of Medicare cuts, tax increases, higher insurance premiums and rising overall costs.

Such legislative nihilism from the GOP isn’t new. What’s striking, however, is how little sting their charges have. When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY.) complains that Democrats are trying to rush the bill through without GOP feedback, it rings hollow.

Perhaps the credit for that should go to Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT). Many progressives chafed at Baucus’s insistence on a plodding, methodical process that made a good-faith effort to include moderate and conservative input. The finance committee’s deliberations may have seemed painstakingly slow, but it did yield a Republican supporter — Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) — and a bill that, whatever one thought of it, could not be labeled a rushed and partisan product. In other words, Baucus’s process has, to some extent, inoculated the reform effort from Republican charges that the process hasn’t been deliberative or bipartisan enough.

We’ve seen this before, of course. In the negotiations over the stimulus bill, President Obama came under fire for bending over backwards to reach out to Republicans, as critics pointed out that few, if any, would jump aboard. Obama probably knew this, but also knew that the process, and public perceptions of it, matter. In the end, the administration got the stimulus bill it wanted with some Republican support. Moreover, Obama did it while burnishing his credentials as a pragmatic problem-solver and leaving Republicans looking like unreasonable obstructionists. The health reform debate seems like it’s following the same contours. In retrospect, Baucus may have played this right all along.

As the U.S. Senate prepares for floor action on health care reform, there’s a sudden profusion of schemes that seek a compromise on the key “public option” question by giving states a lot of leeway. Tom Carper is floating a state “opt-in” approach. Others are talking about a state “opt-out” system. The Finance Committee has already adopted Maria Cantwell’s proposal to let states use federal subsidy funds to cover a majority of the uninsured as they see fit. And the original Baucus markup vehicle included Ron Wyden’s proposal to let states do all sorts of “experimentation” with federal funds.

The political value of these approaches is pretty obvious: by giving states flexibility on the key questions surrounding the public option debate, health reform proponents hope to give shaky Democrats and maybe a Republican or two an avenue to get out of the way of health reform while accomodating home-state pressure from health insurers and/or providers.

This makes abundant sense in Washington. But the question must be asked: are the states ready to get into the driver’s seat on the basic design of health care systems, public and private, within their borders?

I raise the question not because of any particular doubts about the competence of states on health care policy. But it’s important to understand that these state-based approaches to national health reform will transfer much of the yelling and screaming and lobbying we’ve seen, along with the complex issues that have to be resolved, right into the center of state politics, just in time for the 2010 elections.

Most of the fears about health reform that state officials have expressedup until now have, understandably enough, focused on the fiscal impact of Medicaid mandates. But governors and legislators, not to mention candidates for state offices, may soon be grappling with the entire range of controversial health care issues. They better get ready, and their representatives in Washington better start talking to them.

This item is cross-posted at The New Republic.

Maybe Bobby Jindal is a new kind of Republican after all.

Republicans had high hopes for the Louisiana Governor, whose brains, youth and conspicuous ethnicity (his family is from India) marked him as conservatives’ answer to Barack Obama. That’s why they chose Jindal to gave his party’s response to Obama’s first address to Congress last January.

But the nationally televised speech bombed. Jindal served up GOP boilerplate rather than fresh ideas, and his delivery was off-kilter to boot. So much, it seemed, for the GOP’s Great Not-So-White Hope.

But botched speeches aren’t always fatal. Just ask Bill Clinton, whose long-winded keynote address to the 1988 Democratic National Convention was also seen as aborting a promising political career.

And Jindal, a serious wonk who ran Louisiana’s Medicare program while still in his 20s, did something rare for a Republican these days: he started making sense. Specifically, he urged Congressional Republicans to drop their purely obstructionist stance and work with the White House to pass a bipartisan health reform.

“I think now is the perfect time to pivot and say, not only here’s what we’re against, and not only here’s how we’re going to contrast ourselves, but here’s what we’re for,” Jindal told Politico. He also asserted that Republicans offer nothing positive on health reform “to our peril and the nation’s peril.”

That’s an important point. Many Republicans seem to think that carpetbombing “Obamacare” without offering a coherent alternative is politically cost-free. After all, polls show falling support for Obama’s plan to revamp health care, especially among seniors and independents.

Some progressives apparently agree that Republicans can lie outrageously and get away with it. Especially among elites, the plummeting poll numbers confirm an unflattering view of Americans as a bovine mass easily stampeded by right-wing buzzphrases – “socialism,” “death panels,” “the death tax” and the like.

Well, there’s also evidence that many Americans are watching the GOP’s antics, and don’t like what they see. By wide margins, (52-27 in this NYT-CBS poll) the public still thinks Obama has better ideas on health care than Congressional Republicans. According to Democracy Corps, a solid majority believes Republicans “are more interested in partisan politics than solving the country’s problems.”

The GOP’s nattering negativism, in other words, may be undermining public confidence in Obama’s ability to revamp the health care system, but it’s also reinforcing the party’s well-earned reputation as being unfit to govern.

So maybe Jindal is on to something. And progressives ought to have at least as much faith as he seems to in the public’s ability to distinguish serious arguments about health reform from right-wing agitprop and paranoia.

Suzy Khimm’s post at The Treatment about Howard Dean’s latest remarks on health care reform strategy shows the perils of the obsession with the public option on both sides of the barricades. After a fiery demand that progressives refuse to relent on the public option, the good Doctor allowed as how if we can’t get that, he’d be fine with legislation that just regulated health insurance abuses.

Ironically enough, Dean seems to be embracing the same fallback position as his old adversary Joe Lieberman, who’s said regulate-only legislation is all he’d be willing to support if a public option is included in a comprehensive reform bill. The problem, of course, is that absent an individual mandate to bring healthier people into the risk pool, or significant subsidies to lure them in, imposing a national system of community rating or guaranteed access to insurance on behalf of less robust Americans will likely boost private insurance premiums for everybody–not exactly an ideal outcome.

Now it’s likely that Dean is really just engaged in a tactical effort to keep progressives fired up for the public option in order to keep pressure on Senate Democrats and the White House to insist on some competitive mechanism–perhaps a “triggered” public option, perhaps strong national or regional co-ops–that’s significantly stronger than the weak state co-ops in the Baucus bill. And perhaps the reconciliation route means a “robust” public option can still be passed by the Senate. But at some point, when you keep urging people to say “my way or the highway,” you have to look down that highway to see where it leads. And if the end-point is going to be a regulate-only bill, both Dean and Lieberman need to acknowledge that may actually be no better than the status quo, and could possibly be even worse.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic