When the final chapter on this recent attempt at health care reform is written, the inevitable question will be: Did President Barack Obama -- who famously vowed, "I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last" -- do everything he could to ensure that the best possible bill gets passed?
Adam Green of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee recently shared a list of options that Obama left on the table during this fight with Matt Yglesias, and it seems like the inevitable answer to the inevitable question is quite simply going to be: "No."
Since you asked, "What exactly should they be doing?" here is the list of what it would have looked like if Obama was willing to exert leverage and actually fight.
-- Threaten to veto any bill without public option.
-- Barnstorm Connecticut before Lieberman dug in his heels (Connecticut, where Obama campaigned for Lieberman in 2006, and where voters want the public option by 3 to 1).
-- Barnstorm across Maine (where voters want the public option 2 to 1, Independents 3 to 1, and where only 24% of voters like Snowe's trigger). Instead, Emanuel met behind-closed-doors with a senator out of touch with her own constituents and tried to cut a deal for a trigger nobody wants.
-- Publicly leak that Obama is furious that he went to bat for Lieberman's chairmanship, and Lieberman is threatening to filibuster reform.
-- Publicly leaking that reconciliation is on the table -- and will be used to push an even stronger public option if Senate Dems don't get in line.
Naturally, these are political tactics, not magic powers, and so no one should delude themselves into thinking that these tactics would have been sufficient to surmount the very real Congressional obstacles -- doubting centrists, health-care industry sluts, Joe Lieberman -- that are arrayed against reform. That's why, ultimately, the question of whether Obama did enough to ensure the passage of solid health care reform needs to be disambiguated from the larger and more complicated question of who killed health care reform.
Nevertheless, it's important to remember that as the Obama campaign became the Obama White House, the administration promised to deploy a unique and innovative style of policy-making and advocacy that were supposed to be unique and transformative features of their style of governance. The campaign arm that so effectively got out the vote in November was to be reconstituted as an effective machine for building support for White House initiatives. Obama's inner circle was to be composed of people who'd logged long hours in the legislature and thus were capable of busting through parliamentary logjams and artful dealmaking. And Obama was to have a pugnacious chief of staff who would do the dirty work of lowering booms and making the necessary threats behind the scenes.
Through those means, every single item on Green's list could have been accommodated. But they weren't for whatever reason, and that's why Obama shouldn't get away clean on the "Who is to blame?" question. As for the legislators who are playing a role in gutting reform, the White House's unwillingness to be unambiguous about what they want will lessen the price they have to pay for their obstruction.
Remember how, at the end of the 2004 campaign, the revelation that John Kerry had left $14 million unspent in his losing campaign for the presidency made more than a few people angry? Well, as they say, this thing is starting to look like that thing.
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