The battle over the public option on health care has been little more than a distracting skirmish.
Liberals are fired up because the final Senate health bill will almost certainly not include a provision for a government-run, nonprofit insurance company.
Moderate Democrats and Republicans are cheering because the dread provision is staggering like a wino in a stiff breeze.
But so what?
The bill will include a new law that requires every American to buy government-approved health insurance with free or subsidized coverage for those who can’t afford it. Universal coverage with middle- and upper-income earners paying for the poor has been the liberal goal for generations. It shouldn’t make any difference what you call it.
But liberals such as Michael Moore and Sen. Jay Rockefeller don’t like the idea because insurance companies will make handsome profits in the process. They will also give up their autonomy from the government, but that’s not a bad trade-off for a chief executive officer anticipating fattened quarterly bonuses.
The public option matters to the conscientious Left because if you are a socialist, the idea of the government helping big business is anathema. It smacks of cartels and oligarchy and goes against the populist tradition in the Democratic Party that stretches back to William Jennings Bryan and Thomas Jefferson.
If you are a pragmatic liberal, though, Abraham Lincoln’s question about political adversaries holds true: “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them friends?”
And while President Obama has often misread the lessons of Lincoln, he has reached perfect clarity on that point.
The sputtering on the hard Left about the president’s cozy relationship with Wall Street, which includes powder-puff regulations and a weaker dollar, nicely capture the anger with which Obama’s financial foibles have been greeted.
As Moore rails against Obama’s dependency on Goldman Sachs for campaign cash and Salon’s Glenn Greenwald talks about “worthless, corporate-serving incumbents” who populate the Democratic Party, you get the sense of how deep the frustration on the Left is.
These folks knew that Obama was no populist, but supported him in 2008 because he was less sold out than Hillary Clinton or John McCain.
Community organizing, after all, isn’t about taking on the power structure. It’s about using grass-roots muscle to get a seat on the board. Obama is still disappointing the hard Left, though, because he has had to aim even lower because the shots from his first quiver of arrows so badly missed their marks.
Would Obama have been in a position to actually push Wall Street reforms if he hadn’t stumbled early on health care? Would clear leadership have prevented cap-and-trade legislation from turning into a lobbyists’ bacchanal? What if the president had thought through his Afghanistan policy in January instead of September? What if Rahm Emanuel were cutting dubious deals as a Chicago congressman rather than as White House chief of staff?
Those are the questions that are harshing the mellow of the most liberal 10 percent of the electorate and the reason for their anguish at seeing the public option snuffed out. To them, it’s just more evidence that the president won’t fight back against a corporate-controlled status quo.
But the laments of liberal intellectuals on influential Web sites and other outlets have spread the anxiety about the death of the public option across much of the Democratic Party.
While less doctrinaire liberals may not have developed the kind of frustration with Obama, the sense has sunk in that this is a bad sign and maybe something worth fighting for.
But for most Democrats, a cartel approach to socialized medicine wouldn’t be a problem. Doing business with insurance companies and drug makers is a real-world solution. And if the end result is government-controlled universal coverage and free health care for the poor, what’s the big deal if it means a new yacht for some insurance executives?
And in the final calculation, the most liberal members of Congress will come around. They might resent doing things the Chicago way, but they won’t refuse nationalized health care just to spite the insurance industry.
Plus, all of the anguish over the death of the public option has tricked Republicans into believing that they’re winning on the central issue. In fact, the chances for socialized medicine are better than ever.
While the GOP is busy congratulating itself on the death of public option, its members need to take a serious look at what life would be like under a subsidized mandate.
