And so there was wailing and gnashing of teeth on the rec list...
I've been watching for a while now how certain paid advocates have been hyping every element of the HCR debate. Watching worriedly. Slinkerwink currently has a diary in the Rec List, titled "The White House Lashes Out At Howard Dean". Even before I clicked through to it I had a premonition of what it would contain. There would be reference to an unnamed source in the administration who would be expressing disappointment with Howard Dean's now outright opposition to the Senate bill. I KNEW that there would be no 'lashing out' at all. And true enough, the diary's basis is pure bullshit. There's tittle-tattle from Morning Joe. And this from the Huff Po's reporting of Robert Gibbs (itself a beacon of level-headed clarity, with added tits!)
"I don't know what piece of legislation he is reading," said Gibbs.
"How better do you address those who don't have insurance... passing a bill that will cover 30 million uninsured or killing a bill?" he added. "I don't think any rational person would say killing a bill makes any sense at this point."
Asked if Dean was acting irrationally, Gibbs replied: "I can't tell what his motives are, to be honest with you."
The Huff Po reports this as "Robert Gibbs strongly hit back at former DNC Chairman Howard Dean for criticizing the Senate health care bill, suggesting, at one point, that Dean was being irrational and didn't understand the contents of the legislation." Hardly. At most it is a mild criticism that says that Governor Dean's expectations cannot have been met and that he should cool-headedly re-examine the existing bill as the best that we could get.
The real question that arises is why Slinkerwink is misrepresenting the facts and slinging handfuls of poison at the administration. I think the answer's pretty clear. She has for a long time been misrepresenting this debate, raising expectations massively as to what could be achieved and creating hate figures in Rahm Emanuel, and now Barack Obama, to blame for every misstep. Now that the inevitable has happened she can't admit to the clear fact that she has been twisting this debate for the financial gain of firedoglake (which is, I know, used to fund liberal causes) and that the reality, the reality, is that a robust public option or medicare buy-in could not have been achieved, that she has been building false expectations.
Why is that the reality? It's nothing to do with the administration, it's everything to do with the Senate. We were never going to get a single Republican vote, never. Therefore we needed each and every Dem Senator, which means that each and every one had a veto over health reform, which Joe Lieberman decided to exercise if the bill contained the PO or Medicare buy-in.
There you have it. The Senate killed this bill. Not the administration. "But the adinistration didn't hardball Lieberamn, they didn't dress him in a frock and parade him around the streets of Georgetown!" some people say. I'm sure people all the way from Reid to Obama tried to move Lieberman, but he just wouldn't budge. (BTW, I have been a negotiator for the UK Government, our first rule was that you NEVER conduct arm-twisting in public as that would immediately cause the effort to fail - no-one wants to look as if they've been forced into taking a position). Slinkerwink is covering her own ass and deflecting blame for her Huff Po, Fox News style hypemachining. She has not provided a single example of how you could have passed the (robust) PO through Congress with the Senators we have.
But that doesn't mean that the effort for the PO was for nought, quite the reverse. The Repubs and Conservadems fought the PO tooth and nail, and they won that battle. However, we still have the subsidies (which were the key to expanding coverage), the health insurance reform, the non-deniability of coverage in exchange for the mandate. All are wins.
Money buys influence, and the subsidies are one route (not very digestible I know) for getting public influence over healthcare. And if you think they aren't you should look at how the NHS came into being in the UK. During the Second World War the Government ended up shouldering more and more of the cost of the system. Once the war was over, the Goverment had the muscle (as it was providing most of the cash) to create a single payer system.
A dirty business.