Logic

by digby

Dan at Pruning Shears writes in with this:

Why is it that those who want to kill the public option use logic – the argument that it’s a small piece of the whole package so why make a big deal about getting rid of it – that more persuasively argues for their dropping the issue and letting the silly old liberals have their way?

That’s exactly the point Matt Yglesias has been making for weeks.

I continue to believe that it’s because they just can’t let the silly old liberals have their way on such a high profile issue. That particular “win” (such as it is) would indicate that liberals have the power to affect legislation and be serious players in the governance of our country. After all, on the substance, this public option really doesn’t mean all that much. They tell us that themselves over and over again. So it’s not about policy at all.

For some it’s about ideology to be sure. They don’t like liberalism and don’t want anyone thinking that liberals have any kind of constituency for it.
But I would guess that there are just as many in the Democratic Party who believe that allowing liberals to “win” something that has become so symbolically attached to the left will upset this allegedly center-right country and the Democrats will lose political power because of it. (They are already petrified that having a centrist African American president is a bridge too far for the Real Americans.)The Village CW would certainly indicate that’s the common cocktail party assumption.

As I have written many times before, the “public option” is a rather odd and complicated tool with which to show progressive muscle and it may end up forcing liberals to make a painful Solomonic choice that they wouldn’t have had to make if they had made their bottom line something that had a better grounding in principle. But that’s water under the bridge. The Public Option is what liberals decided was their requirement and lo and behold, the public liked the sound of it too. And now the forces for the status quo believe they must deny it to them lest they actually build up and then use this newfound muscle to do something really liberal.

I still have hope. The Public Option has been declared dead so many times already that I will not believe it has actually passed on until the conference reports out the final bill. But I see it primarily as a political matter at this point and one which I dearly hope the liberals can win. It will be hard work to build that muscle up again. (But that’s not saying it can’t be done…)

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