By Ditching the Public Option, Obama Gave His Enemies a Path to the Supreme Court

[JoePhilly]

89. I have Lieberman on the phone ... tell me what to say to him.

Lieberman campaigned AGANST Obama in 2008, you do realize that, right?

But you believe Lieberman when he says, "Obama never pressed me" ... really??!!??

Try this ... do you recall the "Cornhusker kickback?" ... do you know what that was with the HCR debate?

That was Obama trying to get Ben Nelson to come along.

What public pressure do you think Obama had at his disposal to use to press Lieberman?

I'm all ears.

I'm going to say this again ... the reason you can't come up with anything specific is because there was ZERO leverage with Lieberman. None. He was never, under any circumstances vote for it.

Yet you demand that Obama should have used some unknown leverage with him. Some leverage that you can't describe.

I'm going to help you some on this. I've asked this same question maybe 100 times here on DU and I have received about 3 interesting responses ... I will share them with you.

1) Use the DOJ to black mail him. YUP, this was a serious position. Use the DOJ illegally to black mail him. Its a bad idea, but at least this person was thinking.

2) Threaten to cut funding to Israel, or to DOD contracts in Lieberman's home state. Once again, this is a bad idea, but it shows an effort to come up with something Lieberman cares enough about to get hinm to play ball. Most serious people would recognize that you don't play games with national security, and so this approach also fails ... but again, this person was thinking about it.

3) Get Harry Reid to threaten to remove Lieberman from all committees that he's on. This is the best of the responses to date. Lieberman benefits personally from being on those committees because the lobbyists want to come see him ... and so if you take that away, maybe you can get a yes vote out of him. The problem with this approach is that if Lieberman doesn't backdown, and you carry out this threat, (a) Lieberman goes public (which might actually be a good or bad thing), but (b) Lieberman decides to caucus with the GOP, and he votes against every other Dem bill that comes along ... after all, Lieberman is in this for Lieberman, and he's a vindictive jerk ... so this was the only potential path forward, and it was not assured either.

So again ... if you actually have to get votes ... you have to have leverage ... what you suggest i.e., "pressure him" is meaningless unless you describe specifically where the leverage might come from.

most of the folks railing against Obama on this never get that far.