Has Rahm's Assumption about Progressives been Vindicated?
by Glenn Greenwald
March 18, 2010
Politico's Ben Smith yesterday suggested that one important aspect of Rahm Emanuel's health care strategy -- to ignore the demands of progressives on the ground that they would fall into line at the end no matter what -- has been vindicated. Smith points to a new poll showing near-unanimous support for the bill among liberals as well as the fact that not a single progressive member of the House (not even Dennis Kucinich) will oppose this bill even though the prime progressive objections were ignored. Smith's argument unsurprisingly provoked immediate objections from numerous progressives -- Paul Krugman, Markos Moultisas, Chris Bowers -- who argue that in the wake of Scott Brown's election, Emanuel advocated a drastically scaled-back version of health care reform because he believed the original, larger version couldn't pass. If (as looks highly likely) the current bill passes, then, they argue, Emanuel will have been proven wrong -- not vindicated.
Assuming that Emanuel really advocated for a scaled-back version (that's from anonymous royal court intrigue reports, so who knows?), this objection (as Smith acknowledges) is true as far as it goes -- but it doesn't go very far at all, because it doesn't really have anything to do with Smith's "vindication" argument. The "vindication" Smith sees has nothing to do with Emanuel's advocacy for a "scaled-back" bill, but is about a different point entirely: namely, Emanuel's assumption that there was absolutely no reason to accommodate progressive objections to the health care bill because progressives (despite their threats) would automatically fall into line and support whatever the White House wanted, even if their demands were ignored. Is there really any doubt that Emanuel was right about this point? Indeed, Markos himself essentially acknowledged these progressive failures last night on MSNBC.
For almost a full year, scores of progressive House members vowed -- publicly and unequivocally -- that they would never support a health care bill without a robust public option. They collectively accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars based on this pledge. Up until a few weeks ago, many progressive opinion leaders -- such as Moulitsas, Howard Dean, Keith Olbermann and many others -- were insisting that the Senate bill was worse than the status quo and should be defeated. But now? All of those progressives House members are doing exactly what they swore they would never do -- vote for a health care bill with no public option -- and virtually every progressive opinion leader is not only now supportive of the bill, but vehemently so. In other words, exactly what Rahm said would happen -- ignore the progressives, we don't need to give them anything because they'll get into line -- is exactly what happened. How is that not vindication?
What's not debatable is that this process highlighted -- and worsened -- the virtually complete powerlessness of the Left and progressives generally in Washington. If you were in Washington negotiating a bill, would you take seriously the threats of progressive House members in the future that they will withhold support for a Party-endorsed bill if their demands for improvements are not met? Of course not. No rational person would.
The problem here is two-fold: (1) nobody (certainly not Emanuel) ever took the progressive threat seriously -- because nobody believed they would really oppose the bill even if they got nothing -- and it thus had no credibility and they were ignored; and worse: (2) nobody will ever, ever take progressive threats seriously again in the future, because they know that progressives will do what they did here: namely, get in line at the end and support what the Party wants even if none of their desired changes to a bill are made.
Amazingly, one now finds posts on the front page of Daily Kos (not by Markos) demanding that progressives repeat this behavior on every bill in the future: "whatever that final position is, it will then be the job of the progressive to evaluate it strictly on the merits of what it is, rather than what it could have been. And if what it is, is even incrementally better than what we have right now, then it should be supported." That sounds exactly like the rationale of capitulating Democratic officials of the last two decades, not what the blogosphere was ostensibly devoted to promoting. Why would anyone in Washington -- surrounded by powerful lobbyists and people whose threats are actually credible -- ever take seriously or listen to a person who thinks and behaves this way (I'll support anything you want even if you ignore me, as long as I get a single crumb), and even proudly announces it in advance? They never would listen to such a person -- and they don't -- because that's the sure path to self-imposed irrelevance.
Please read the full article at:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/03/18-9---------------------------------------------------------
Progressive Caucus to Decide Whether to Be a Power or a Punk: Weiner Makes it Plain
By: Casual Observer
September 9, 2009
"All of the protest letters in the world don’t add up to much if you don’t finally stand up and vote No on something the President and Nancy want,” Weiner said. “There is clearly a sense that progressives in Congress are easily rolled.”
“If the Congressional left can’t pass even something as modest as a watered down public option, then frankly I don’t think anyone is going to take the left very seriously later on in this Congress,” Weiner continued. “When Blue Dogs talk, there are fewer of them but they have more influence than when progressives talk.”
Said Weiner: “You can only shake the saber so often before someone expects you to use it.”
Can it be said any plainer that that? NY Representative Anthony Weiner knows that House progressives can decide their own destiny right now. They can stand up and hold their ground on the public option, or they can surrender to pressure and spend the rest of this congress doing…whatever it is that hapless losers do in congress (i’m guessing it involves getting kicked around by Blue Dogs, Republicans, their party leadership, and their president on every issue between now to the end of the session).
If House progressives don’t stand together now, how will they be able to say or do anything for the remainder of this congress without being met with gales of laughter? And the laughter won’t just be in Congress. It will echo everywhere from Rahm’s White House to their own districts back home. And, of course, their many friends in the D.C. media.
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/7977Glenn Greenwald noted in an update:
"Weiner, however, is one of those House members who is now voting for the final bill even after vowing unequivocally that he'd vote NO if it did not include a public option. Whether he's doing the right thing is a separate question; what's clear is that he's the author of his own powerlessness for exactly the reason he himself so eloquently described just five months ago."
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