Over at The Democratic Strategist, PPI Senior Fellow Ed Kilgore responds to my post on the public option. The impetus for my piece was the blogger Digby’s claim that the public option has “long since gone way beyond a policy to become a symbol.”
Ed notes that my post missed something important: that Digby is treating the public option as a symbol largely because that is what its opponents have done. Even in its weakened state, the foes of a public option have kept bashing away, transforming it into “a matter of pure power politics” that progressives like Digby believe the left must engage. From there, Ed argues that there is, in fact, less dividing progressives on the issue, that “if and when it’s sacrificed, it will be a matter of relative indifference to some of the ‘robust’ PO’s strongest supporters.”
I hope he’s right. For my part, my concern regarding the politics of the public option springs not from the fight over it but from what comes after passage. After acquiring such outsized status on the left, the absence of a public option — or the presence of a version barely recognizable to its supporters — in the final bill could well send progressives into despair over the administration and its achievement.
And that would be a shame. As Ezra Klein notes today:
It might have been a necessary thing from an activism point of view, but convincing liberals that this bill was worthless in the absence of the public option was a terrible decision, wrong on the merits and unfair to the base. The achievement of this bill is $900 billion to help people purchase health-care coverage, a new market that begins to equalize the conditions of the unemployed and the employed, and a regulatory structure in which this country can build, for the first time, a universal health-care system. Thousands and thousands of lives will be saved by this bill. Bankruptcies will be averted. Rescission letters won’t be sent. Parents won’t have to fret because they can’t take their child, or themselves, to the emergency room. This bill will, without doubt, do more good than any single piece of legislation passed during my (admittedly brief) lifetime. If it passes, the party that fought for it for decades deserves to feel a sense of accomplishment.
Mike Lux at Open Left also touches on this in a post today, posing the crucial question: “The deal on health care is about to get done: will progressives come out of it feeling like we got the first major progressive policy since the 1960s passed, or feeling like they got sold down the river?” If the public option becomes the standard by which health reform is judged, and there is a weak one or none at all in the final bill, then the latter seems likely. It would be nothing less than a tragedy if the progressive backlash against Obama and this Congress were to come on the heels of the passage of the most consequential progressive legislation this country has seen in decades.
