The Annals of Always Doing the Right Thing…

posted at 3:53 pm on December 13, 2009 by CK MacLeod
[ Healthcare ]    printer-friendly

…after exhausting all of the other alternatives – an American tradition perhaps worth latinizing into a national motto, even if it was first articulated by an Englishman – may soon have a new entry, if Bill Kristol’s speculation on a Health Care denouement proves prescient:

[I]t might be that the easiest way for everything to collapse in the next couple of days would be for a gang of six or whatever to emerge–say, Lieberman, Nelson and Blanche Lincoln, and John McCain, Olympia Snowe, and Judd Gregg–who would agree to work together in the new year on bipartisan legislative efforts to pass sensible incremental reforms with substantial bipartisan support. Word leaking out of one meeting of such a group would put the Reid legislation out of its misery.

The idea – which Kristol asserts is strongly in the interest of the Democrats and the President – underlines the great missed opportunity of Obama’s first year, in which, for whatever set of reasons, whatever overdetermined disadvantages of the new president’s advantages, an overreaching effort to avoid wasting a crisis turned into a great waste of effort and an extended crisis of overreaching.

Imagine if, in victory, instead of closing out the defeated, divided, dispirited Republicans, the President and his people had on their own own insisted on such a “bipartisan legislative effort” on health care and the rest of Obama’s agenda, entering the negotiations with a show of grace and generosity, but from a position of tremendous relative strength. Did the Obamaites squander a rare historical opportunity to re-align American politics – akin to Reagan’s missed opportunity in 1984 or Bush’s following 2002 – or was the possibility of such a re-alignment always a mirage, and their mistake the fact that they ever believed in it?

We can’t say what would have happened, and we may spend years trying to explain why the President instead offered himself and his 70% approval ratings as hostages to Pelosi, Reid, and the forces to their left. The intermediate destination reached on the road that was taken is plainly visible in today’s widely noted Rasmussen “Passion Index” tracking poll:

In stock-trader terms, that’s a breakdown in OBAM, though cautious traders, even the ones who’ve been “short” for months, might want to wait for confirmation in the form of new highs on the red-line to go with the plunge to new lows on the green.

Yes, there’s a long way to go in Obama’s term, and reason to wonder whether an attempted pivot to the right could rescue him or would more likely finish him, but whichever way he goes, if Kristol’s suggestion or something like it comes to pass, then the real mandate of the November election, for a leftward correction in the wake of exhaustion and disarray on the right, would be realized and submitted to the test. There is every reason to suspect that “sensible incremental reforms with substantial bipartisan support” will be insufficient to address either health care problems or the larger fiscal problems of which they’re a major part. Such reforms might simply be another set of not-right-enough alternatives to be exhausted, but at least they’d be less likely to make matters irretrievably worse, and more likely to lay a groundwork for more difficult and ambitious decisions down the line.

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

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