Politics Without Politics

by digby

Gene Lyons sez:

[T]he odds of Obama’s signing what the New Republic’s Jonathan Chait correctly calls “one of the towering social reforms in American history” appear excellent. Ending the game of health insurance roulette that keeps workers unsure their coverage will actually exist when they need it, and fearful of losing their jobs lest illness or injury lead to bankruptcy, would be a significant moral achievement.Chait, however, also thinks progressives should shut up and accept a deeply flawed bill. He fails to grasp why some suspect Democrats could be slow-walking into political disaster. See, that’s where the self-interest side of the argument comes in. Because the widely publicized bill proposed by Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., not only won’t get Republican votes, it would also do little to restrain galloping cost increases. That’s why insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists love it.Instead, Baucus’ bill would force millions of working Americans currently without coverage to spend up to 13 percent of their annual income on private health insurance policies they can’t afford.Have these abstemious “centrists” on the Senate Finance Committee been hitting the medical marijuana stash? A surer way to stoke a right-wing populist rebellion can’t be imagined. Like Politics Daily’s David Corn, “I feel as if I’m watching a cheesy horror flick and some poor unsuspecting person is about to open the wrong door — and you want to scream, ‘Hey, don’t open that door!'”

The idea that these alleged Democrats would actually insist that uninsured people be forced by law to write huge checks to to the loathed insurance companies is mind-boggling. They seem intent upon taking what should be an historic progressive achievement and turning it into a hated, regressive tax on their own constituents, which is so politically obtuse I don’t know how to process it.

The only thing that explains it is that they don’t actually care about partisan political power at all. They won’t personally lose their jobs. Even if the whole progressive philosophy is discredited and millions of people turn to the alternative it has no bearing on them. They carry on no matter who is in the majority or in the White House. Many of them are in the leadership themselves, so there is no pressure to work for the greater good of the party as a whole. The problem seems to be that political considerations and consequences are irrelevant to the political system. What do we do about that?

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