It's Good to Be Wrong Sometimes

It's the jumpy season for health care reform, this end game with a thousand twists and turns. Rumors fly around, meetings happen where things said get misinterpreted. Senators get nervous, groups get nervous, and your friendly neighborhood blogger and consultant gets called sometimes.

All of this is natural to an intense legislative battle, and (some of the time) it's healthy too, because trial balloons get popped or false rumors get discredited. So here's my story: a worried Senator, and a couple of groups working on the health care battle, called me last night to tell me they were extremely nervous that the White House was on the verge cutting a deal with Olympia Snowe on her trigger-that's-not-a-trigger amendment. That rumor got combined with a story about the White House discouraging a floor fight over the public option, and suddenly a lot of folks were very upset, especially because things were moving fast in the Finance committee.

I wrote a story about what I was hearing this morning, and by the end of the day, it now looks like my sources and I jumped the gun. The White House has denied, on the record to Sam Stein at Huffington Post, they are pressuring anyone on the trigger proposal, and I have been privately been told by very senior White House staffers that my report was wrong.

I am glad to hear that, because this trigger amendment is awful, written on purpose to avoid ever being triggered. But having things like this happen is a very good thing, because it provides some clarity as to what is happening in this debate. I don't think my sources were wrong to be nervous, there is a whole lot of deal cutting going on, and I am glad that the White House responded so clearly and firmly that they are not interested in pressuring anyone to support this rotten trigger idea. We still have a long way to go in this fight, and we don't know what will happen in the end game.

But for the moment, I've never been so pleased to have gotten it wrong.

Comments

[lgillooly]

10:01 AM on 09/24/2009

Me too.... let's keep the pressure on becuase it is absolutely necessary to Reform our disastrous system. It works great for some, but no for the majority. It will also be too expensive for most of us in the next 10 yrs.

[kitkatborn]

09:56 AM on 09/24/2009

I, too, think it was good to push it out into the open so the White House had to make a statement. Good call.

[Moose49]

08:44 AM on 09/24/2009

Or maybe the denials only came out after the firestorm your report created. In which case, you did the right thing in (retrospectively) "getting it wrong."

Regardless, keep up the great work.

[Lynwood Walker]

07:50 AM on 09/24/2009

I think because of all the Clinton folk in the Obama administration, they are playing by the old playbook where progressives can be counted on to back down, blue dogs are the ones to negotiate with, and everything works by moving right. I think the fact that liberals finally feel its time for democrats to start delivering leftist policy, and that we are finally standing strong for our convictions, is a good thing. We expect transformative reform, we aren't invisible, and trial balloons will consistently show one thing; we are not prepared to concede the public option when we have already conceded medicare-for-all.

[Lynwood Walker]

07:50 AM on 09/24/2009

It is very clear that he does not at all believe that he got the story wrong. Because he has the unfortunate role of teetering on the fence between Washington insider and outsider, which invariably means what he says will be studied scrupulously by the grassroots and the White House to gauge "whose side he is on",, I feel he just picked through his words with tweezers to make sure he conveyed his general points without further offending anyone.

I think he casually but intentionally mentioned the trial balloons to allude to the role he and others are playing in this debate.

The whitehouse may have actually been seeking a deal with Snowe on triggers and all the evidence for the last few weeks show this to be more than plausible. I just think the reporting of he and others angered so many liberals who called, emailed, facebooked, and commented on this forum constantly that the whitehouse saw the impending backlash and decided to let the potato warm a bit before tossing it in the progressive's lap.

I am thankful to bloggers like Lux who can use their hybrid roles in the political establishment to keep the White House honest.

[BillZBubb]

11:07 PM on 09/23/2009

Did you really get it wrong? We'll see.