Tweet
It has often been said that politics is the art of the possible. The heart of this concept is the whip count.
You don’t allow votes to proceed if you know from the start that your whip count shows you will not prevail in some way, shape or fashion. Why? Because the worst thing in the business of legislative politics is to always be the symbolic loser. (Think of politicians like FDR, LBJ, and Teddy Kennedy — people who Got Things Done. They all knew this instinctively, without having to be told it.)
The whole thing about whip counts is why Jane Hamsher (you may have heard of her) decided to go with the public option rather than single payer when Obama and Congress started on the health care reform legislation, as there was no way in hell single payer would have come close to passing. We almost got the public option through, despite Obama and Rahm’s cutting the $150 million ad deal with industry stakeholders in May of last year; we couldn’t have come close with single payer and we knew that from the start, thanks to having ears on the ground. And even though we didn’t get the PO, the fight was close enough so that the organization Jane put together was able to pivot on a dime and successfully press for student loan reform, which turned out to be a nice consolation prize once the stake was buried in the public option’s heart. Now, that same organization has joined up with coalitions like LEAP (Law Enforcement Officers Against Prohibition) and Students for a Sensible Drug Policy, to push for marijuana legalization.
Here’s the thing about legalization: It’s not just a way to undo the hideous damage wrought on this country and its Constitution by the War on Some Drugs. It’s to us what gay-marriage referenda were to the Republicans in the last few election cycles — namely, a way to energize the base AND to attract independent voters. Once the voters are in the booths to vote on the referendum, they see the candidates from the party that back the referendum and vote for those candidates. Even if the referendum doesn’t pass, it’s already served its secondary purpose. Poll after poll shows that legalization of marijuana is perhaps the single most important issue for young people of voting age; this is also a group that tends to vote for progressives and Democrats, but also tends to get easily discouraged from voting — a factor that looks to cost the Democrats seats if nothing’s done to address this.
Will the Democrats realize what an opportunity they have to win back the 2008 voters they alienated in 2009 and 2010? The next few weeks will tell the tale.
36 Comments
thanks for the explanation
Democrats in California, unfortunately, were only able to wrestle a NEUTRAL vote out of their executive committee, despite Chairman John Burton’s recognition that turnout will be driven by pot this fall. Dianne Feinstein’s visceral objection that someone, somewhere, might be having FUN appears to have ruined the possibility that candidates atop the ballot Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer can look to the future — the future of law enforcement, the future of race relations, the future of our prison industry — as well as the future of the Democratic party.
California Democrats had the opportunity to cement the loyalty of young voters for life (remember, it takes three elections to do this) with the 2008 Obama excitement, the 2010 pot legalization, and the 2012 marriage equality vote (and Obama re-election).
They blew it. Who votes for neutral?
my unschooled brain says this “just the facts” approach to legalization may attract quite a few of the vaunted independent demographic as well
Oh, exactly.
Book Salon up with Eli Kintisch’s Hack the Planet: Science’s Best Hope – or Worst Nightmare – for Averting Climate Catastrophe hosted by Eric Pooley
They’re hedging their bets, which is almost but not quite understandable. They don’t realize how fast the voting landscape can change — as late as 1928, few people thought booze prohibition would go away. But it did, within five years, and the promise to end it helped propel FDR into the White House.
I could spend my entire online day surfing ‘mainstream’ sites … and wont find anything that concise – oooh excellent
Yet another epitaph for the duck and cover democrats, or as I call them democravens.
Here is the link I intended to insert.
I’m sure the Democrats realize what an opportunity they have to win back the 2008 voters they alienated in 2009 and 2010. Whether they’ll feel want to act on that realization is something else, and nothing has made them want to so far.
Thanks Woman. This is an excellent piece regarding Jane and the strategic thinking she employs. What little I have to give to any political cause goes to FDL and Just Say Now. And according to what I have read and to the best of my understanding I think you and Jane are on the same page with the following:
“Once the voters are in the booths to vote on the referendum, they see the candidates from the party that back the referendum and vote for those candidates”.
What candidates are we talking about? Not Obama or Jerry Brown. They oppose legalization. I am confused. Please help.
And yet you would Absolutely Never hear them say this out loud. They claimed it was a stand on principle, and they’re still standing on it, albeit not as loudly as in the past – Sharron Angle notwithstanding.
The only person I’ve spoken to who opposes Prop 19 (not normally very conservative – he voted for BO – but living in a very red zone) has this as one of his objections – that this is just a ploy by Dems to GOTV, not something they actually care about, and he’s not buying it. So, it may be counterproductive to publicly tout that as a purpose vs a byproduct.
Recognize that the weakness is in the geographical distribution of referenda, period. So there are some very close races in which this cannot get people out to vote — unless a candidate puts the issue to the voters, which is not likely in a close election.
Until a major candidate or the national Dems push it, it will be a local factor, at this point restricted to California. Where strategically you need to go with it is downticket to get the California legislature unlocked from its gridlock. But that depends on candidates in marginal districts stepping up to the plate.
Duck tape and cover.
I was in the sixth or seventh grade when the Soviets orbited Sputnik. I remember the adults were upset and a teacher told our class that it would be up us kids to study hard and counter Soviet aggression. I didn’t know much but I knew if it was up to us kids, we were in big trouble.
I wouldn’t be critical of your approach, or even of your disappointments, or of Jane Hamsher’s approach as Phoenix Woman has outlined it, but I think the Just Say Now campaign is too gentle. If you won’t demand an end to the insane and vile prohibition, if you don’t demand an end, you won’t have it. Good people got arrested in this country for breaking laws as their means to end apartheid in South Africa. Hint hint.
wow. I love fdl, but this is one of the lamest, internally contradictory self-justifications I’ve read in a long time.
“You don’t allow votes to proceed if you know from the start that your whip count shows you will not prevail in some way, shape or fashion. Why? Because the worst thing in the business of legislative politics is to always be the symbolic loser.”
So no push for single payer, don’t want to be the symbolic loser.
Except, of course, that we LOST the PO too and became, guess what?
The symbolic losers.
the really self deluding aspect is this:
“We almost got the public option through, despite Obama and Rahm’s cutting the $150 million ad deal with industry stakeholders in May of last year”
“Almost?” Evidence please?
-the PO, as a meaningful piece of health care policy, was dead the minute the House committees reported. What they reported was far too small and weak to have any real impact on the health care economy. Compare the House committee versions to Hacker’s original concept and they fail all the tests of usefulness, size, rate setting power, you name it.
-So the House version became a SYMBOLIC measure, an even further attenuated version of which then failed in the Senate Finance Committee. And we got how many votes for the PO on the floor of the Senate?
-That’s right, zero. Nada, zip, zilch. Not an vote. Unless I missed something, we didn’t even get an up or down vote on it on the Senate floor. How is that “almost passing?” We supposedly “had the votes” for passage in reconciliation, but the WH and Reid brushed us off like flies. No vote, no nothing, not even a credible excuse. And nobody expended a single drop of sweat over the decision. Unless I missed something, not a single member of either Chamber voted no on final passage because there was no public option. Not one. Famously, not even Kucinich. We almost passed the public option like John Edwards almost became President of the United States.
This isn’t to say that the shift to financial reform and legalization weren’t accomplished with great elan. Or that those campaigns aren’t exciting, worthy progressive endeavors. Folks are working really hard, and we’re kind of winning, and that’s a wonderful thing. But please, in addition to winning immediate fights, we’re supposed to be building a movement over the long haul, so let’s try not to bullshit ourselves about ourselves.
An honest assessment would go back, look at the campaign, and revisit the decision to push for the PO instead of single payer, because our whipcounts completely sucked and we did, in fact, wind up the symbolic losers anyway, without the benefit of anyone in Washington having made the case for single payer. The hard political reality is that the PO failure has raised the bar for progressive success in DC another couple of notches. Everything about the fight has convinced Obama, Rahm, et al, that they can utterly ignore us. So if we were going to lose anyway, why not spend time pushing to have a real discussion of single payer? Who knows what tactics we might have come up with if that had been the focus?
I’m not arguing here fundamentally that the strategy, in the end, was wrong and that we shouldn’t have ignored single payer in favor of the PO. But if you want to look back, then have an honest discussion. Don’t start with a bunch of tough talk about the need to count votes, and then try to fudge the fact that the campaign utterly failed to reach those hard-eyed whipcount benchmarks. Or if there’s real feedback from the financial reform fight from actual members of Congress that the way the PO fight was fought made members more likely to support financial reform, then lay it out so we can evaluate it.
My personal view is that our intelligence was horrible. The fix was in with the White House and Senate leadership in May, and the outcome was pretty much inevitable from there.
We got our asses handed to us, lived to fight another day on other issues and we’re fighting those well. Leave it at that.
“My personal view is that our intelligence was horrible.”
The allied canvassers, especially Jane Hamsher, offered and tested good-faith approaches. What more can one do? Run for office?
I believe I first saw that little civil defense clip in Trinity and Beyond – The Atomic Bomb Movie (1995), a rather ghastly in its realism film narrated by William Shatner. I wasn’t born during the Cuban Missile Crisis but the Reagan years were frightening enough to make the film scary to watch.
I agree with you, if there was “no way in hell single payer would come close to passing” then there was no way in hell the public option would pass either. The missing ingredient was a push by Obama for either, and aiming low didn’t make either come true if Obama wasn’t behind it.
Around 1997 my stepson’s 9th grade science teacher told his class that Saddam Hussein had small pox and anthrax weapons.
With respect: L’esprit de l’escalier.
The Reagan sabers had been unsheathed in Carter’s administration. It was paramount to prevent the Soviet Union from gaining access to a warm water port, such as the Persian Gulf via the Caspian Sea with Iran’s co-operation or submission. The USSR had more natural resources than any other economy, especially steel, oil, coal, copper, and a lot of grain; but it couldn’t deliver any of it. Now it looks like Russia will get a quid-pro-quo with Iran, and have that warm-water access. Unless there’s an incident on Monday. Or Tuesday. Or the Arctic Ocean melts fast.
Very much agree about Carter, and actually you can go back to Nixon when the US pushed the Shah to build a nuclear power plant they didn’t need, which is the same one now being activated. Carter’s support for the Shah removed any claim to morality in international relations the democrats could claim. BTW let’s see how the Russians react when their technicians are killed in an Israeli airstrike.
Well OK. Lets see if I can answer my own question. I’m a twenty year old independent voter in California. I would have stayed home but I was motivated to vote yes on prop 19. While I am in the booth I notice Democrats on the ballot who opposed prop 19. So as long as I am there anyway I vote for them also.
Wait…………………
I think the theory is that it will turn out high information but low motivation voters who tend democratic. Maybe the guy would vote straight democrat if he can be bothered to turn out, and the pot initiative will push him over the top. One contradiction I note already is that people who smoke a lot of pot do not tend to be go-getters, they in fact seem the least likely to get off their butts and do anything.
I am totally down with this and have been trying to sell it to OFA for a few months now.
smoke out
turn out
vote out
the pot ban.
and while you’re at it
vote democratic.
also this:
let the bush tax cuts expire, as they were intended to.
Create the Obama Tax Cuts, in a bill and put it to a vote before the election.
It cuts taxes beginning Jan 1 for those making less than 150k and couples at less than 250k. Everyone in that “poor cohort” gets the 20% dividend and long-term cap gains cuts, along with marginal rates that match the current rates.
the rich, who arent doing their job by spending, get to pay what they were paying in 1999.
If the goopers want to vote against tax cuts for the middle class, the so-called little people (thank you very much sen. simpson) then let them do it and pay the price.
and let’s stop calling the new tax plan anything to do with Bush.
no wait, peterboy and phoenix woman.
I and all my friends can be gotten excited if you tell me????
vote for barbara boxer.
and
vote against meg whitman.
sure. that’ll work.
what a sterotypical piece of crap analysis that is–about pot smokers.
they are pretty much just like you and me. or they are you and me.
I had the same reaction to OP, saying things like, “there was no way in hell single payer would have come close to passing. We almost got the public option through”, just sounds… sad. Miss by an inch, miss by a mile.
We got played and it wasn’t by the Republicans, it was by the President. He and Max Baucus knew from the start the bill they wanted, they just figured they’d get political cover by winning over several GOP senators. They could then explain that they had to compromise to get a bipartisan bill. Obama and Baucus hadn’t anticipated that the Republicans would sit back and leave the Democrats to carry it alone. Of course the Dems didn’t have to compromise; what had doomed the Clinton HCR effort was President Clinton took using a filibuster-proof reconciliation bill off the table because Robert Byrd objected to using reconciliation to reform healthcare.
Last year, Byrd had a change of heart and was on board to using reconciliation, which would have meant a public option bill (Pete Stark’s “public option on steroids” Americare bill was the road not taken) would have been passed before last year’s August recess. But the President never wanted the public option, to mix Robert Frost poems, he had promises to keep and not the ones he made to the voters.
thank you.
Experience is a good teacher.
Thanks reddflagg. It makes sense that way at least. Personally, I don’t care if the Dems win elections. But ending prohibition is important.
A few states legalizing pot will not stop the federal war on drugs. There is too much money being made on both sides of the war.
Voting for the dems and expecting change is a real pipe dream.
jcc2455 I agree strongly with the first part of your reply, but this:
I can’t agree with. Jane’s judgment in not supporting Medicare for All, and supporting the PO instead was plainly wrong, as was the decision of all the “veal pen” progressives (and I don’t attach Jane’s own label to herself and FDL, since in spite of her support of the Po, she’s certainly no denizen of the “veal pen”) to support the PO. To see this all one has to do is to review the dynamics of the hcr fight over many months, see the continuous retreat of the progressives from anything meaningful, and the final acceptance by all the DC progressives but Jane and the FDL team of a bill that clearly is worse than no bill at all.
Now one might say that things would have been even worse if a tough Medicare for All strategy had been followed by progressives, but that’s just a counter-factual and can’t be proven. And there are other counter-factual conjectures that seem just as plausible.
For example, the decision to pursue the PO split hcr forces, and the split grew more and more serious as progressives backed off further and further from Hacker’s original proposal and approached the final compromise on the hcr bill. This split weakened the movement for health care reform because Medicare for All groups did nothing to support the legislation.
Further, we know that Rahm and Obama wanted a victory on hcr. What if they had been faced with a united and solid progressive front saying “we won’t vote for anything except HR 676 or S 703, Mr. President, take your choice,” and they had let Obama and the leadership know this back in April of 2009, then what?
Either Obama would have gone that way, or he wouldn’t have touched health care at all. If he had wanted to go with Medicare for All, there would have been no way to get it without getting rid of the filibuster. So, he would have had to get that done.
If he didn’t want to pursue the Medicare for All course then he wouldn’t have brought up health care at all, because whip counts would have shown that it wouldn’t pass. So, the progressives wouldn’t have been symbolic losers at all, and he most probably would have been pushed toward more vigorous action on financial reform, and on jobs. So, the likelihood is that those things would have been done better than they have been. Whatever way he wished to go when confronted with that kind of progressive resistance, I think we’d all be better off today.
Whether or not my counterfactual conjectures are true or not, however, is really beside the point. The really important point is that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The PO strategy produced bad results, and if we’re going to get better results next time, we have to be honest in our evaluation of what happened. Jane herself, has written against this bill. She recognizes it was a bad outcome, so the PO strategy didn’t work. End of story.
From where I sit, there’s no way to say that a strategy that’s led to a bad outcome was the right strategy. And the unwillingness to recognize, even now, after the failure of that PO strategy, that a Medicare for All strategy might possibly have worked better is not objectivity or sophistication. It is just stubbornness, and an unwillingness to admit that one was wrong and to learn. People in American politics today are afflicted with this inability. Another very good example is Richard Kirsch who ran HCAN’s campaign. Even today he’s doing happy dances pointing to the wonderful job he did.
Finally, no Democratic President has tried a single-payer health insurance strategy since Truman failed to get it through. Carter wouldn’t attempt it. Clinton thought he was too smart to try it, and Obama, apparently doesn’t really believe in it. Next time, we get a chance, we need to try it. The messaging would be a lot simpler and better for it, and the compromise positions coming out of it are a lot more attractive than those we saw coming out of the PO.
I don’t think most people here are looking at the Health Care Debate and Legislative Process through the dimension of history — and what this reform does to change the ground rules for many future debates and probably voting behavior with respect to the issue.
First of all — all major system change legislation, (which this is) have unintended and unforecast consequences. Over time, this requires further changes. We have no way of knowing what these will be — some will be the result of legislative flaws, others will be the consequence of rapidly changing medical technology, and how it is applied. If the intent of this year’s effort was to bend the medical cost curve (and I suspect that was the highest value), over time better and alternative ways to accomplish this will come to the fore, and become legislative issues. The playing field will change in any new effort to further bend the cost curve.
Second, like it or not, this Act puts about 30-40 million more people into the system, and thus makes them interested parties in the administration, cost, access and elaboration of the reformed system. Never underestimate the ground level change of making the universe of stakeholders much much larger. They may change their taste in the kinds of candidates they elect.
Third, much of what will initially be created as a Health System, will be a function of what State Governments do with both the Federal Legislation, the rules that are adopted, and the way Insurance and health provider standards are regulated on a state by state basis. State Governments have a huge job in the next few years — and the typical state legislature is going to be most challenged by the job at hand. For instance, I live in a state that requires providers (clinics) and hospitals to operate on a not for profit basis. Has been that way since the Mayo Brothers advocated it in the first decade of the 20th century. Result — we have a relatively low cost, very high quality outcomes ranking. Nine other states have similar laws about not for profit requirements. In order to meet cost/outcomes measures, (and the act contains sanctions for not meeting it, and benefits for a high ranking), many other states will probably be forced to examine the “for profit” instutional model, modify it, or junk it. This will profoundly change the terms of the debate…but much of that debate will be at the state level.
My own guess is we will reach something like a public option at the state level in fairly short order, once the states examine their options, and once the politics of this get inserted into the state political contests. What has been accomplished is huge — it moved the boulder from the doorway of even legislating, and will profoundly change the grounds for debate, and the terms of debate.