Bob Shrum: The Price to be Paid (Selling Healthcare Reform)

[flpoljunkie]

Excerpts from The Price to be Paid by Robert Shrum writing in the New York Times Forum 'Selling Healthcare Reform to Voters'

President Obama will stay the course — he demonstrated during the campaign that he isn’t driven from strategy to strategy by the winds of passing events. The real test here is whether Democrats in the Senate and House will have the nerve to move ahead.

Unlike Congressional Republicans, who unite around their president’s signature initiatives instead of picking them apart, Democrats haven’t been an effective governing party since the mid-1960s. On the Clinton health plan, they had many preferences, often narrow, usually at odds, and they never found the path to a floor vote, let alone final passage. The generally accepted assumption is that it can — or will — happen again. But I don’t think it will.

The real political price would be paid not in 2012, but in the 2010 midterm election, when the casualty count could be highest among the so-called “Blue Dog” Democrats if they abandon their party on health care. That’s exactly what happened in 1994. It was the Blue Dogs of that era — for example, Congressman David McCurdy in Oklahoma and Congressman Jim Cooper in Tennessee, both running as heavy favorites for the Senate — who were mowed down on election day.

Bipartisanship only goes so far. Senate Republicans participating in health care negotiations are being pressured by their colleagues to delay and delay — and then go into opposition. If the president and Democratic leaders have to, they can push a bill through the Senate without a single Republican vote, and even without support from a few Democratic Senators.

That option is the budget reconciliation process; victory requires only 50 votes plus a Biden tie-breaker. This may not be the ideal route, but it can work. (The strategy was routinely used to pass major Reagan and Bush initiatives.)

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/selling-health-care-reform-to-voters/#robert

[PretzelWarrior]

1. who still listens to that hack?

he and Terry McAuliff need to start a reality show called "The Biggest Political Loser".

[flpoljunkie]

3. I do. You obviously did not have time to read his opinion on this before you dumped on him.

[FrenchieCat]

2. Everyone wants him to "Spend" political capital,

and so when he does, everyone who was yelling for to happen from the sideline shits on him....
What else is new?

[Still Sensible]

4. IMO Shrum is actually quite right on this point. n/t