Who Needs Republicans?

by digby

Either Barack Obama is not very good at leading his own party or he really doesn’t want a health reform bill that’s worth a damn:

President Obama promised last week, in his address to Congress, that he wouldn’t sign any health care reform bill that added “one dime to the deficit, now or in the future.”[emphasis added]

That pledge could get him in trouble as the Senate Finance Committee considers asking the Congressional Budget Office to change the way it calculates an impact on the deficit.

Instead of measuring the impact of health care reform over ten years, the CBO will use a 20-year window, Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) told reporters Tuesday. “You have to do that if you’re going to know whether you’re bending the cost curve,” he said.

If you had any remaining thoughts that Kent Conrad had any good intentions whatsoever, I think you can put them safely out of your mind.

It’s impossible to know for sure what’s going on, but if this is what it appears to be it looks like Obama either doesn’t want a decent bill or he foolishly walked into a trap. The endless kowtowing on the deficit (in the middle of a recession!) is bad enough, but throwing in the promise that he wouldn’t ever add to the deficit in the future opened him to this nonsense.

Kent Conrad does not want a health care bill that does anything but shrink government spending. It’s all he cares about. If he could end the medicare program too, he would — he’s been fighting “entitlements” for years. So he is an enemy of any process which provides universal coverage for all Americans — because in lean times the government will run deficits to keep it going.

Ever since the Republicans showed their “Waterloo” hand in the stimulus debate we’ve known that the real obstacle to reform is the overlapping corporate lackey/deficit hawk wings of the Democratic Party, of which Obama is at least a nominal member himself, if not a full fledged devotee. Coming so late to the public negotiations and then making absurd promises not to raise the deficit (on top of the sweetheart deals with the industry) leads one to naturally conclude that he is part of that camp. If he isn’t, his people are going to have to be hell on wheels behind the scenes from here on in, because the lackeys and the hawks are closing ranks and he’s not going to have any room to maneuver.

I have to say that with all the chatter about how they studied the Clinton years, it seems unlikely that they didn’t read the chapter on the egomaniacal, pampered Democratic princes of the Senate deciding that they owned the agenda and crossed the president at every turn. It was one of the more instructive parts of the legislative history. One has to wonder if they did read it and decided that this time they threw in with them rather than fought them.

I have heard that the 20 year fortune telling …. er projections, could actually come out looking favorable to reform. I wouldn’t count on it. But I guess that’s something to cling to. Otherwise, this is yet another nick in the death by a thousand cuts — many of them by the CBO, by the way. Conrad knows what he’s doing.

Not that anyone else does:

Democratic aides were alarmed Tuesday to learn of the CBO’s plans, which were first reported by CQ. One Senate Finance Committee aide, however, said that the 20-year estimate would not be an official “score” but rather a broad estimate.

Other longtime aides noted that any estimate after five years is just a guess because of the variables at work and they were hard-pressed to think of any prior occasion in which a 20-year window of time had been used. Monkeying around with the window, however, is one of the older tricks in the budgetary bag.

Some aides speculated that Conrad wouldn’t want to do anything to harm the finance committee bill, which he is invested in. But others noted that while it would harm that bill, it would likely be more damaging to the more generous health committee and House bills. The more parsimonious finance committee package would be relatively less impacted, elevating its stature.

What a win, win for Conrad if that’s so. Now that Obama’s promised not to ever raise the deficit, Conrad can make even Baucus’ hideous bill look bad, much less the others. If he holds the President to his promise, maybe he can succeed in getting rid of medicare and social security too — and then everything will be perfect. After all, only Nixon could go to China …

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