Myths about Toughness

I have vowed to stay away from the more hysterical of the progressive blogs today, and perhaps for several days.  On the one hand, I understand the rage and pain. With a freshly minted progressive Democratic President, apparently dominant majorities in both houses of Congress, an opposition party that had the debating vocabulary of a 2-year old, you’d hope the Democrats could at least bring their own legislation to a vote. On the other hand, wasn’t this the entirely predictable outcome of the process?

“Hope is a dangerous thing,” Red told Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption. “Hope can drive a man insane.”

This is, after all, the Democratic party we’re talking about. As one sane lefty writer – I think it was Matthew Yglesias – pointed out, in another country, what is today’s Democratic Party in Congress would be three or four parties. (Unsaid: today’s GOP would be two parties: the reactionary purists who dominate, and 2-3 old-school Rockefeller Republicans.)

Anyway, folks on the left got their hopes up, because several versions of health care reform were fairly robust, mostly because they included a public option to compete with private insurance companies (the best – so-called “Medicare +5% – didn’t even make it out of the House).

Barack Obama has come in for his fair share of criticism (and then some), the latest meme being he didn’t fight hard enough for the Public Option, or the late entry, the Medicare buy-in. Or that he didn’t push strongly the threat of reconciliation. (For why reconciliation was not an ideal alternative, go here.) One could argue – and many have – that not starting with a single payer bill made the Public Option the element to be negotiated away, instead of the compromise that sealed the deal.  And much as I think single payer should have been on the table – because in a sane world, you look at ALL the options- I am convinced that the Lieberman/Conrad/Nelson caucus would have held out until the Senate bill got to pretty much where it is today.

But back to Obama “doing more” and “fighting harder”. I’m curious as to what that looks like. Does anyone seriously believe that Barack Obama has ANY leverage over an embittered Joe Lieberman, especially when Lieberman is the magical 60th vote in the Senate? Or Ben Nelson, whose state, remember, Obama lost to McCain by over 15%? It seems people just wanted Obama to be more strident.

Last fall, I wrote about Obama’s zen-like approach to politics. He didn’t get ruffled, didn’t respond to every feint, but kept on his course. Just curious – how’d that work out for him?

In that piece, I quoted Dave Lowry, a writer and martial artist, on toughness. Toughness, he noted, wasn’t the ability to mete out punishment – it was the ability to absorb it:

It was Clyde Kimura, from Kauai, who spoke with a final authority. The toughest individuals he’d ever encountered, he said, were kendoka. “The old ones,” he said. “A kendo man who’s in his mid-sixties, been training about 50 years,” Kimura said firmly, “he can take an incredible amount of abuse.”

I have often reflected on Kimura-san’s words. Interesting, isn’t it, that his concept of toughness was not in how much one could dish out, but in how much one can take?

Well, by that standard, Obama is one tough dude, because he’s getting pummeled from all sides.

I think the fairest criticism of Obama is this: his apparent unwillingness to take on Wall Street burned enough of his progressive credibility that he is unable, now, to convince the left that what is left of health care reform is still worth doing. (That is Matt Yglesias’s take, and he suggests that, were he alive, that is what Ted Kennedy would be doing right now.)

But – and this is a big but – what has been revealed over the last months is that Joe Lieberman is a petty prima donna who would have preened and held out until he got to exactly this place: the place where the left that had the audacity to challenge him three years ago is angry and divided. No amount of toughness, or “fighting” by Barack Obama, would have changed that dynamic.

As a side note, does anyone remember that it was Obama, seemingly alone among Democrats on the national stage this past August, going from town to town in support of health care reform?  That he was the sane voice in opposition to the tea party crazies and the death panel nonsense? And that his veto threat was not related to the Public Option, but to deficit neutrality?

As I pointed out a few days ago, the dynamic of this process wasn’t a negotiation between two parties that want to make a deal.  You had one group who wanted a deal badly, and another group that wanted, at all costs, no deal at all (the GOP), or, at best, didn’t really care whether a bill made it or not (Joe Lieberman). So tell me, those of you in the “Obama didn’t fight hard enough” camp – what levers did he have to pull? What kind of “fighting” would have generated a better result?

Ironically, what people on the left seem to want is the pseudo-toughness of George Bush – the George Bush who inherited a country much feared, militarily, because the threat of our military action was so grave. Bush, by overplaying that card (in Iraq) and doing so incompetently, made that threat less, well, threatening. Obama had NO cards to play against Lieberman, and while it would have been psychically satisfying for him to call out Holy Joe for his preening hypocrisy, that course would have left us with a summer and fall of inflamed passions and nothing else.

Belligerence crowds out reason, and while it appears tough to be intransigent, it is tougher still to put small defeats aside in the service of larger victories. I laid out my four reasons to move forward, even without the public option, or Medicare buy-in, here. They are, in sum:

1. It won’t get easier next time, and next time could be a very long way off. Plus, if history is a guide, what you get the next time will be worse than where we are now.
2. Passing what is left of health care gets regulatory reform on the books that can’t be had through reconciliation.
3. The bill, de facto, establishes health care as a right. That is HUGE.
4. If the left kills the bill they’re shooting themselves in the foot.

We’re not where we are today on health care because Barack Obama isn’t tough. We’re where we are because he’s a grown-up, lots of other folks in the sandbox aren’t, and he’s willing to take a lot of hits to push this humongous boulder uphill.

If you’re wondering what toughness looks like, look no further.