I’ve been pleased to see the predictable progressive turn in the health care debate as the administration gets the plaudits and hortatory reporting that always accrue to the winner of a big legislative fight.
That sort of adulation won’t last long. Next month the conventional wisdom will see some other faction as ascendant. But the legislative achievement will endure, even if the large legislative majority that made it possible does not, as will the ability of the president and the Democratic Party to take credit for realizing their rhetoric by finally making real change happen.
On the other hand, the Republican threats to repeal the law ring hollow. The legal challenges to it appear even more empty: Now that we all know that health care represents one-sixth of our economy, can anyone with a straight face deny that health insurance seriously impacts what the courts call “the stream of interstate commerce” and therefore can be regulated by Congress under the Commerce Clause?
And now the Republicans, trapped by their own extreme rhetoric about the reform bill, will have to explain why the sky isn’t falling as the bill takes effect. It will be particularly amusing to watch the clumsy Mitt Romney, mired in permanent presidential campaign mode, trying to explain why Obama’s health bill is an atrocity while the very similar one he enacted as governor of Massachusetts is good policy.
Progressives will also benefit from a number of remarkable images from last weekend’s debates that will become part of our common memory. The image of the Tea Party protesters screaming obscenities and racist abuse at Rep. John Lewis and others and anti-gay slurs at Rep. Barney Frank will be hard for many people to forget. The pictures of Pelosi, Lewis and others striding arm-in-arm (white and black, male and female) through the angry, hateful protesters to make reform happen are priceless; all the media buys in the world couldn’t purchase images that good for the Democrats.
The Tea Party people won’t go away. But they have succeeded in further marginalizing themselves.
Similarly, the sharp contrast between the president and the House Speaker rolling up their sleeves and calmly, diligently working for reform while Republican legislators were screaming things like “babykiller” and Minority Leader John Boehner was screaming about whether legislators had read the full text of the bills can only help progressive causes. (I wonder if Boehner thinks each member of Congress read the bill that created Social Security, Medicare, the Interstate Highway System, etc.) This time the Democrats looked like the responsible adults.
But perhaps the most enduring boost for progressive causes lies in the way the president managed in the final weeks of the debate to re-energize the Democratic activists and party base that had been oddly somnolent in Obama’s first year in office. As John Judis and others have noted, Obama’s strong stand for reform and sharper, more partisan rhetoric in recent weeks finally helped get key Democratic consitutencies fully engaged (see link below to Judis’ article).
Link to \”Democrats Discover Their Base\”
In a post some weeks ago (March 5), I noted that such protests had been conspicuously absent in the health care debate. That changed quite a bit in the last few weeks.
The impact of that change could go well beyond health care. For the last 30 years or so, the Democratic-liberal political base in this country has been relatively small and weak as the decline in the private sector labor movement and in the Civil Rights Movement eroded core activist constituencies. Meanwhile what we used to call the “New Right” built a huge and energetic base – albeit one that sometimes split between its Main St.-social conservative and Wall St.- economic conservative constituencies — that could easily be mobillized by political bosses like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove Republicans have benefitted enormously from that advantage.
One of the reasons the movement Obama’s campaign helped build seemed so promising was that it developed a grassroots organizing operation that mobilized millions of volunteers and donors and looked poised to provide a new base for progressive change. But a not very funny thing happened in the first year of the Obama administration: The energy and personnel of the Obama for America movement were largely sidelined as the organization was folded into the DNC. Tim Dickinson explained the process in a February piece for Rolling Stone that carried the cheesy title “No We Can’t”
So in year one of Obama’s presidency the Republican base, whipped into a frenzy by Fox News and the rest of the right-wing noise machine, displayed great fervor in opposing Obama’s agenda while the progressive base that should have been the bedrock of the groundswell for change was largely demobilized. It wasn’t a fair fight, and the change agenda suffered as the administration largely ceded populist outrage to the right.
Now it seems the Democratic activists are back in the game, and that’s especially important with mid-term elections just seven months away. Lower-turnout mid-term elections are largely about energizing and turning out the base, and the Democrats suffered their disastrous 1994 losses largely because an energized, angry Republican base showed up at the polls while many demoralized Democrats stayed home.
Now that Obama has given the party’s base and activists much more reason to rally to the cause, the November elections and the larger struggle for change should be a fairer fight.
