Democratic leaders - including President Obama - are telling progressives we must accept LieberCare or give up on healthcare reform for a generation.
They're wrong.
We ended up with LieberCare because Joe Lieberman is the 60th vote to end a 40-vote Republican filibuster.
If there were 39 Republicans, and Lieberman was the 61st vote, he'd be irrelevant.
So the real choice for progressives is whether to accept LieberCare or make Lieberman irrelevant.
So how do we make Lieberman the 61st "Democrat"? Simply by adding one more Democrat to the Senate in November 2010.
This is hardly impossible. We gained 5 seats in 2006. We gained 8 more seats in 2008, and Arlen Specter switched to join us.
So let's just add one more!
Five Republicans are retiring: Kit Bond (MO), Jim Bunning (KY), Judd Gregg (NH), Mel Martinez (FL), George Voinovich (OH). If we mobilized voters effectively, Democrats could win all of these states. That would make the rest of the Gang of Four - Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, and Mary Landrieu - irrelevant too!
(Better yet, we could replace Blanche Lincoln with a better Democrat like Lt. Gov. Bill Halter.)
Eight more Republicans would be beatable if we ran great candidates: Richard Burr (NC), Tom Coburn (OK), Jim DeMint (SC), Charles Grassley (IA), John McCain (AZ), Lisa Murkowsky (AK), John Thune (SD), David Vitter (LA). If we ran the table, we'd have 73 Democrats!
But even if we won just one seat and made Lieberman irrelevant, progressives could adopt a completely different strategy.
We could tell progressive Senators like Bernie Sanders, Tom Harkin, and Sherrod Brown to start over with the change we really want - Medicare for All. And we could tell them to adopt Joe Lieberman's strategy of refusing to compromise - ever.
So what's the rub?
We'd have to tell Congressional Democrats to let Lieberman kill healthcare reform for this Congress. They hate that idea because they believe it would alienate Democratic voters and cause a massive defeat like 1994.
But they're wrong. If all Congressional Democrats (except the Senate Gang of Four and the House BlueDogs) ran on a platform of Medicare For All, Democratic voters would be thrilled and would work their hearts out to send even more Democrats to Washington.
There is no law of politics (or physics) that says Democrats can never have more than 60 Senators. We had 61 seats after the 1976 election in the wake of Watergate. We had 76 seats after the 1936 election during the Great Depression. So let's aim for 73 in 2010!
Let's ask ourselves: Why settle for LieberCare when we could have Medicare for All?