What is this bipartisanship you speak of?
by digby
Oh lordy, Ron Fournier’s at it again:
On health care, we needed a market-driven plan that decreases the percentage of uninsured Americans without convoluting the U.S. health care system. Just such a plan sprang out of conservative think tanks and was tested by a GOP governor in Massachusetts, Mitt Romney.
Instead of a bipartisan agreement to bring that plan to scale, we got more partisan warfare. The GOP resisted, Obama surrendered his mantle of bipartisanship, and Democrats muscled through a one-sided law that has never been popular with a majority of the public.
Sigh …
I’ll let Matt Yglesias respond to that inane comment:
It is true that we did not get a bipartisan agreement. It is true that the GOP resisted. It is true that the law is unpopular. But Obama didn’t surrender his mantle of bipartisanship. The GOP took it away from him. They took it away from his as part of a deliberate strategy. They knew, as Fournier says right in this very column, that a big bipartisan health reform would be more popular than a big partisan health reform. So since Republicans didn’t want Obama to be popular, they had every incentive to refuse to reach a bipartisan agreement. And thus no agreement was reached.
But regardless of the process used to get there, Obama and congressional Democrats delivered exactly the kind of reform Fournier says America needed. Shouldn’t they be congratulated? After all, in substance, you still have a program that is very much on the Massachusetts model. That’s the whole reason Jon Gruber came to be a prominent proponent and exponent of the federal law.
But politically speaking, it’s a one-sided law that’s never been popular. And that’s not a coincidence. It’s also not something Obama bungled. It’s a consequence of mismatched incentives in Washington, DC. The president would like to be associated with bipartisan initiatives. The opposition party would like the president to not be associated with bipartisan initiatives. And the opposition party has it in their power to make sure that the president is not associated with bipartisan initiatives.
“I can almost guarantee you this thing won’t pass before August, and if we can hold it back until we go home for a month’s break in August,” members of Congress will hear from “outraged” constituents, South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint said on the call, which was organized by the group Conservatives for Patients Rights.
“Senators and Congressmen will come back in September afraid to vote against the American people,” DeMint predicted, adding that “this health care issue Is D-Day for freedom in America.”
“If we’re able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him,” he said.
That would be former Senator Jim DeMint, the current head of the Heritage Foundation — an advocacy group that once touted a plan with the element of Obamacare most loathed by the right wing.
What this proved was that even if the Democrats agreed to pass the Republican agenda, the Republicans would vote against it. This should be obvious even to beltway insiders by now.
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