Press

Will Marshall in USA Today:

Centrist policy activist Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, says it’s “gut-check time for Democrats.”

Marshall is urging the White House and congressional Democrats to push forward on health care reform. He says Obama is caught in a “progressive paradox,” in which Americans still support the president’s goals but believe he hasn’t delivered fast enough.

“What surprises me most about the Massachusetts vote and the inchoate popular anger that it seems to reflect is this judgment that Obama has moved too far to the left,” Marshall said. “By and large, I don’t think that’s true. By and large, I think he has been quite pragmatic in his approach to the issues. That is why you hear a lot of moaning and groaning on the left, even talk of betrayal.”

Marshall was a key policy adviser to Bill Clinton when the Democrats lost Congress after a health care reform initiative failed in 1994. After the ’94 defeats, Clinton moved to the ideological center, cut deals with Republicans on welfare reform, and even ran against fellow Democrats in Congress when he sought re-election in 1996.

But Marshall says today is fundamentally different for Democrats. […]

“The president ought to get the (Democratic) leaders, shut them in at the White House and say, ‘We are going to pass (health care reform) because I won an unambiguous mandate for it and so did you in 2008,'”Marshall said.

Clinton, he said, “won 42% of the popular vote so he had to work with the other party.”

But Obama and the Democrats, Marshall said, “have majority support for their biggest initiative, and they ought to show a ruthless determination to govern.”

“One argument that should be rejected out of hand is that somehow a Massachusetts Senate race is somehow a national mandate on health care,” Marshall said. “It isn’t.”

Read the full article.