Obama’s ideals wrestle reality

The Senate has passed the so-called Baucus bill, which, as all but the least sophisticated newspaper reader knows, wasn’t a bill at all, but a ticket to the finals. The real healthcare bill is being written in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) office, and no one knows how much of what the Senate has already passed will survive.

The odds are, however, that Reid, Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who is representing the president in these meetings, will redirect things further to the left both to satisfy the far more liberal House leadership and because that’s where they want to go anyway. The real question, and what must be worrying them, is how the electorate will respond to what they force down the throats of their colleagues.

The rumor is that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) feels it might be worthwhile in the long run to throw the recalcitrant Blue Dogs under the bus to get the most comprehensively liberal bill possible through Congress. If some moderate or conservative Democrats lose their elections as a result in the more conservative districts they represent, it would strengthen her more left-wing allies within her caucus without really risking a majority, the thinking goes. After all, a smaller but more ideologically cohesive majority might actually make her job easier.

If the Democratic leadership and the White House buy this reasoning, they will be free to go with their true believers, who are growing more restive by the day, ignore the moderates within their party and jam their dream bill down the throats of congressmen and senators alike. Although it isn’t clear at this point that they have the votes to do this, the odds are that once they decide to do it, the votes will be there. It will mean acting without any Republican votes at all, but it’s not all that clear that one or two Maine senators provide all that much cover anyway.

One suspects that this is what the Speaker, Reid and the president himself would like to see happen from a substantive standpoint if they think they can get away with it. The Speaker makes no bones about the fact that she’d love to go for the whole thing and move us as close to a single-payer system as possible; the Senate majority leader is a bit cagier but shares the same view, as do Dodd and Emanuel. That leaves Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) to argue that for political reasons they can’t afford to proceed so openly with a high-risk left-wing agenda.

Baucus might argue that others who share his concerns ought to be allowed into the deliberations, but Reid told a Washington Post reporter recently that there is no need to bring anyone else in because the crew with which he meets knows how its colleagues feel and talks to them regularly. That’s no doubt true, but one wonders whether any of them are good listeners.

Reality has a way of sneaking into these sorts of meetings, however, and has to be on the minds of Sens. Dodd and Reid. Both are running for reelection and both are in deep trouble. Reid said last week that his poll numbers are fine, but no public poll in the last six months (and there have been about a dozen of them) has him running anywhere close to any of his possible opponents, and Republican strategists are convinced that Dodd is in even worse trouble. Emanuel, while as liberal as the others, is a tough pragmatist who helped recruit and elect many of the so-called Blue Dogs who are causing Pelosi so many problems. He knows that many of them could lose if asked to vote against to the wishes of voters in their districts, many of whom voted for McCain in 2008 and Bush in 2004.

As a realist, Rahm has to know that unless the wave of opposition to his boss’s policies is contained, Democrats could face a wave of opposition in 2010 that could result in the defeat not just of congressmen whom Pelosi would like to get rid of, but of Democratic elected officials throughout the country whom the president will need to maintain a working majority for the next few years.

The president once vowed that meetings like those in Reid’s office should be open and even televised. That was the sort of promise that might have brought Joe Wilson to his feet, but it’s too bad they aren’t, because it’s always fun to watch ideologues wrestle with reality and self-interest.

Keene is chairman of the American Conservative Union and a managing associate with the Carmen Group, a Washington-based governmental
consulting firm.