TW: Agree with most of what Klein says below and it segues well with my earlier posts on addressing the Blue Dogs and Republican opposition. The Republicans for not illogical POLITICAL reasons oppose almost any form of reform. When the other side wants failure, one does not have a negotiation (if the car salesman did not want to sell you that car you could offer 2X the sticker price and still not get the car), you have a campaign to force acquiescence from the recalcitrant Congressional folks.
From Ezra Klein at WaPo:
"...The...idea here is that someone can just go into a back room and torture Max Baucus and Kent Conrad. But how? Rahm Emanuel isn't a shrinking violet. Neither was Clinton or Carter or Nixon or Truman or FDR. But none of them managed to get health-care reform past the Congress. There's not really a record of presidents being able to bend committee chairmen and wavering centrists to their will. Even LBJ, the master of this stuff, decided to go for Medicare rather than full reform. He thought the latter too ambitious. The history of health-care reform is the history of health-care reform failing. If there was some workable presidential strategy, or foolproof negotiating lever, presumably someone would have used it by now, or at least mentioned it in public.
The problem, I think, is that there is a tendency to understand heath-care reform as an equal negotiation in which all sides want a deal, and you can game out various bargaining stratagems. But health-care reform is not a negotiation. It's a campaign. Reformers wants a deal, even as some differ on its precise shape. The opposition wants to kill the deal entirely. And that gives the opponents a lot more power to say "no." "No" isn't their fallback position. It's their position. The supporters -- if they're not sociopaths of some sort -- actually do want to extend health-care coverage to 40 million people and regulate the insurance industry and create out-of-pocket caps and make life better for millions and millions of people. That makes it hard to say "no." Being a decent person turns out to be a terrible weakness. And the pressure is even greater because the history of this stuff is that you don't get a deal at the end of the day. Failure isn't an unlikely outcome. It's the default.
The reason, crudely speaking, is that time runs out. With every week, and every month, that drags by, health-care reform becomes a bit less popular. At this point, disapproval of the president's plan -- if not of his plan's ideas -- outpolls approval. That's a function of the legislative process. Of stories about congressional infighting and of anti-change campaigns mounted by the opposition and of the risk aversion of members of Congress. Almost all major domestic legislation follows the same path of public approval giving way to public disapproval.
That makes it even easier for conservative Democrats and the mythical moderate Republicans to abandon the effort. And thus the effort gets abandoned. What usually happens next is that the opposition wins the following election and reformers spend the next 15 years lamenting all the deals they didn't take, and the country ends up with 10 million more uninsured, and 100,000 more needlessly dead, and so on.
That's not to say people shouldn't push on the public option. They should! But the strategy needs to be appropriate to the context. This is a campaign for the public option, not a negotiation. Winning it will require persuading the key votes to change their mind, either by offering them other inducements in the bill or applying direct and aggressive political pressure (identifying a lot of viable primary challengers and creating a credible promise of funds, for instance). Trying to say "no" for longer than they can will simply result in reformers losing everything they want, and opponents getting exactly what they demanded."
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