Back to the Future

Word is seeping out that there is likely to be a compromise on the so-called “public option” component of the reform package. There a lot of ways to analyze why that is happening in the health care debate. But it really should be no real surprise that the winning side is more ready to compromise than are the losers.

Losing campaigns tend to radicalize (right or left) candidates and their key staff members. During the end game, often abandoned by fair weather friends and “the smart money,” they fall back on the true believers who sometimes turn out in huge numbers at rallies that seem to give the lie to polls showing almost certain losses ahead. After the results are in there is a kind of consolation in clinging to the belief that they stuck to their principles and that those who share those principles stayed the course.

For the winners, particularly for winners who have successfully contended for the electoral center, the experience is quite different. They have sought to convince a broad swath of the voting public that they should feel confident that after the election the newly elected leaders can be trusted to be sensitive to the views of centrists, and not just those of their base. Months of reassuring a wide and diverse electorate not only blunts the sharp edges of rhetoric, but also schools candidates in the lessons of how to secure the approval of the popular majorities and legislative support so important to success in office. Overall, the campaign may wind up having a significant moderating effect on the winner’s notion of how to govern.

The result is often a shock to the victor’s most ardent supporter who dreamed of an outcome that would reverse past trends, break new ground, and finally put over the top cherished policy dreams. This is clearly true in 2009, after eight years of George Bush, the Iraq war, the secret prisons, the illegal wiretaps, the economic meltdown, and the bruising language of the presidential campaigns combined to radicalized people on both sides of the political spectrum.

Progressives found new allies, conscientious objectors from the GOP side, while conservative hard liners came to believe that terrible necessity of saving the country at all costs justified even the most divisive policies.

In the midst of these struggles about core beliefs, calm and sure, Barrack Obama presented an option that for a majority seemed to rise above the noise and partisan strife.
Now the question is can he sustain the trust he earned for many different reasons; and, whether he can use it as political leverage to break the generation-old log jam on universal health care.

Already a dichotomy is emerging. Many Democrats and some in the middle feel that they are getting about what was advertised: a moderate liberal, committed to progress on matters that have been debated for decades. Red hots at both ends of the spectrum are having more trouble coming to terms with what is happening. Rather than breaking with the substantive past, this views Obama as pushing ahead on health care, financial regulation, multinationalism in ways that reflect a broad consensus among Democrats, wage earners, mainstream economists, and the foreign policy community.

Meanwhile, on the Right, there seems to be almost a need to make things up in order to pummel Obama (They can’t very well blast him for being a moderate). And, at the other end, some on the left are finding it hard to hold down all those hopes for sweeping change that motivated them during the campaign.

In health care specifically, the fact is that a compromise package was almost a certainty from the beginning. When the President signs the eventual reform bill, expect those at both ends of the spectrum to be unhappy. And, that’s probably good. It will keep the pot stewing as we go forward with new health care arrangements and, inevitably, we find all sorts of corrections are in order. In other words, moderates, liberals, and conservatives will find that the struggle over health care is not going away soon. No matter who won the last election or wins the next one, the American way of providing health care will need considerably more attention in the years to come.