Krugman today calls out Dana Milbank (who I can't stand). Still in doing so, Krugman does a bit of rewriting history.
I don’t usually bother looking at the Washington Post. But I’m inside the Beltway right now, so I spared a peek — and for my sins ended up reading
Dana Milbank, who praises Obama for punching the hippies.
So far, so usual. But then I read this:
This is a hopeful sign that Obama has learned the lessons of the health-care debate, when he acceded too easily to the wishes of Hill Democrats, allowing them to slow the legislation and engage in a protracted debate on the public option. Months of delay gave Republicans time to make their case against “socialism” and prevented action on more pressing issues, such as job creation. Democrats paid for that with 63 seats.
Um, that’s not what happened — and I followed the health care process closely. The debate over the public option wasn’t what slowed the legislation. What did it was the many months Obama waited while Max Baucus tried to get bipartisan support, only to see the Republicans keep moving the goalposts; only when the White House finally concluded that Republican “moderates” weren’t negotiating in good faith did the thing finally get moving.
So look at how the Village constructs its mythology. The real story, of
pretend moderates stalling action by pretending to be persuadable, has been rewritten as a story of how those DF hippies got in the way, until the centrists saved the day.
Pretend moderates? By Krugman's own admission, centrist Democrats held up the bill.
KrumganHealth care reform hangs in the balance. Its fate rests with a handful of “centrist” senators — senators who claim to be mainly worried about whether the proposed legislation is fiscally responsible.
<...>
But in the closing rounds of the health care fight, the G.O.P. has focused more and more on an effort to demonize cost-control efforts. The Senate bill would impose “draconian cuts” on Medicare, says Senator John McCain, who proposed much deeper cuts just last year as part of his presidential campaign. “If you’re a senior and you’re on Medicare, you better be afraid of this bill,” says Senator Tom Coburn.
If these tactics work, and health reform fails, think of the message this would convey: It would signal that any effort to deal with the biggest budget problem we face will be successfully played by political opponents as an attack on older Americans. It would be a long time before anyone was willing to take on the challenge again; remember that after the failure of the Clinton effort, it was 16 years before the next try at health reform.
That’s why anyone who is truly concerned about fiscal policy should be anxious to see health reform succeed. If it fails, the demagogues will have won, and we probably won’t deal with our biggest fiscal problem until we’re forced into action by a nasty debt crisis.
So to the centrists still sitting on the fence over health reform: If you care about fiscal responsibility, you better be afraid of what will happen if reform fails.
KrugmanI still believe that Obama could have gotten a bigger stimulus. Yes, he needed some Senate “centrists”, but my read is that they were determined to take a slice off whatever he proposed — so he could have proposed more and gotten more. It was very different from health care, where it was really about policy rather than essentially arbitrary numbers.
Obama could definitely have taken a harder line with banks.
Obama could also have done a lot more to change the discourse — less hope and change and let’s end the partisan bickering, more conservatives have the wrong ideas and we need to undo the damage.
But on health care, I don’t see how he could have gotten much more. How could he have made Joe Lieberman less, um, Liebermanish? And I have to say that much as I disagree with Ben Nelson about many things, he has seemed refreshingly honest, at least in the final stages, about what he will and won’t accept. Meanwhile the fact is that Republicans have formed a solid bloc of opposition to Obama’s ability to do, well, anything.
KrugmanSo, will health care reform fail because a lazy candidate didn’t bother campaigning and didn’t know her Red Sox? (Yes, there were national factors at work, but Nate Silver makes it clear that a better candidate would have won easily). It’s up to the House, which can and should just pass the Senate bill.
Unfortunately, quite a few representatives seem to be in panic mode. And that’s just dumb.
First of all, the strategy of playing Republican-lite, and hoping that you’ll be left alone, has been tried — and failed disastrously. Remember 2002?
Second, David Axelrod is right: the campaign against HCR has been based on lies, and the only way to refute those lies (and stop them from being rolled out again and again) is to pass the thing, and let people see it in action. It’s too bad startup is delayed under the Senate bill — but even so, that’s what you have to do.
Finally, Democrats have to realize that politics isn’t just about where you stand on issues, it’s about perceptions of a party’s character. The rap on Dems has always been that they’re wimps — and giving in on such a central part of the party’s agenda, emerging from two years in power with nothing major to show for it, will play right into that perception.
KrugmanWell, this certainly sounds like it’s a go. That’s the style, Mr. President!
If this works out — I’d think the odds now are that it will, though it’s by no means a done deal — there will be endless debate about whether Anthem Blue Cross was wot did it. My sense is that a final push was always available, as long as the White House was willing to take a stand; Anthem may just have helped provide an occasion.
Extra dividend: Jonathan Chait is right, conservatives will freak out. They’ve already been celebrating the defeat of HCR, failing to notice that Democrats have actually passed a bill in both houses, and still have a huge majority. And there will be cries of foul play — how dare Democrats actually follow the Constitution!
KrugmanYes, I know, someone is going to tell me that this isn’t fundamental — but the truth is that the bill the Senate is about to pass looks a lot like the Obama campaign plan, so something real has happened. Give credit to Obama, or Harry Reid, or whoever; the fact is that four months ago the usual suspects were gleefully writing the obituary for reform, and have been sorely disappointed.
It's easy to smack down Milbank's divisive bullshit without claiming that moderate Democrats weren't part of the problem.
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