Chris Bowers over at Open Left is engaged in the laughable exercise of trying to justify the pathetic failure of progressive bargaining in the negotiations over health care:
Why do conservative Democrats hold more sway over the party's policy than progressives? That certain(ly) is a question that...has a wide range of possible, and largely unprovable, answers.
...I think it is fairly safe to venture that one reason for the relatively greater success of conservative Democrats in shaping Democratic legislative policy is that, generally speaking, a Democratic President has a lot more potential leverage over progressive members of Congress from blue states / districts than over conservative Democrats from red states / districts...
If you are just looking to pass a health reform bill at all costs, which it pretty much seems like the White House is, by far the easier move here is to apply more pressure--in the form of OFA, primary challenges, popular opinion, and more--against Representatives from districts where both the White House and health reform are popular...
To put it a bit more crudely, one reason Progressive members of Congress have relatively less influence over Democratic White Houses is because Democratic White Houses--and their legislative proposals--tend to be very popular in blue states and blue districts. That just makes it easier for Democratic White Houses to get concessions out of Progressives than out of Blue Dogs
In other words, It's not our fault, there's nothing we could have done differently, there's no way we could have wrung more progressive features out of a centrist WH desperate to get any kind of health care bill passed. Even when 70 percent of the public - including Republicans and independents - favored the progressive policy in question, a public option. There's nothing we can learn from how this debacle rolled out because it's just how things are.
His list of minor concessions won by progressives in the negotiations, compared to the number of failures, speaks for itself I think.
Since there are a wide range of possible, and largely unprovable, answers to the question of how progressives could have more impact over party policy in future, let me suggest another for consideration.
To win you need to be willing to dig in your heels with bloody-minded, unreasonable stubbornness on your chosen points of significant principle.
Have members of the progressive bloc ever NOT caved after declaring their readiness to die on a particular hill of principle?
When progressives (both elected and supporters) become willing to stick to a demand like the public option or Medicare For All the way Bart Stupak is sticking to his demand for further restricting abortion rights, even to the point of being willing to scuttle the whole health care deal, then they'll be taken seriously.
When people like Dennis Kucinich, who regularly holds to his principles despite party pressure, is joined by just as firm a bloc, then they'll be taken seriously.
When supporters of progressive policy aren't turned against and disparaged for their "purity" even by others who want the same policy but fear failure, but instead are accepted with solidarity as a useful part of the spectrum of Democratic activism, then they'll be taken seriously.
I keep thinking about what Joe Bageant's "masked consultant" had to say about progressives:
Progressives are fucking worthless -- they don't hate, they don't fight and then they wonder why no one is afraid of them.
Discuss.