This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Feb. 23, 2010 - As progressive House Democrats quietly discuss health-care reform strategies, they should contemplate an unfortunate potential denouement, the renaissance of a multigenerational progressive propensity to combine rhetorical purity with feel-good suicide. They should recall that during the past four decades, the suicide option has been victorious to the extent that 16 years of Republican presidential rule can be traced directly to the willful recalcitrance of liberals.
In 1968, Hubert Humphrey ran a partly hold-your-nose-and-vote-for-me campaign after he had been a dutiful vice president during the Vietnam escalation. Humphrey was desperately wrong on Vietnam. But he was a civil rights pioneer and passionate liberal who saw the “moral test of government” in the faces of the young, the old, and “those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy, and the handicapped.”
The choice was Humphrey or Nixon, but it didn’t matter. Humphrey may have embodied the most liberal ideals of his party, but he was as flawed as the Senate health-care bill is today. So Eugene McCarthy, his anti-war primary campaign rival and long time progressive ally, refused to campaign for him in the general election.
Through the enormity of Vietnam, the visceral pressure on progressives was palpable. But facts are facts. The close contest was decided by millions of angry progressive non-voters who sat on their hands and effectively chose Nixon, the antithesis of everything McCarthy and the non-voters believed.
It happened again in 2000 when the faulty campaign of the wooden and intermittently progressive Al Gore was beset by Republican perfidy in Florida and robed malfeasance in Washington. But the real malfeasance was the gift of 97,000 mostly progressive Floridians who sold their souls to the fiction that there was little difference between the parties. They voted for Ralph Nader and elected George Bush.
Through their feel good dance with purity, these 97,000 became co-conspirators with Nader in the invasion of Iraq and a war against the environment, in Abu Ghraib and a go-it-alone foreign policy. Their rein-in-the-corporation zeal, the hallmark of Nader’s career, produced a Supreme Court that has ceded more political power to corporations than could have been imagined in the wildest Republican dream.
So here we are again. From the House to the voting booth, the progressive view is that the Senate health bill is as imperfect as Humphrey and Gore. It is gently solicitous of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. It contains no government option to compete with the private sector. It includes inadequate cost containment and says little about the fee-for-service model that is strangling our economic future by “incentivizing” expensive and unnecessary health care.
But the circle has been closed, and there are precisely two options. It’s Bush vs Gore and Nixon vs Humphrey redux. There is no middle ground and no other choice. When Gene McCarthy fought Humphrey for the Democratic nomination, it was consistent with progressive ideals to push hard for McCarthy.
But Humphrey has been nominated and the path has been bifurcated. Progressives can expand health care to 30 million uninsured, or they can be complicit spectators as millions more are denied coverage. Those are the options. They can remove “pre-existing conditions” from the lexicon of the insurance industry today, or they can long wistfully for perfection in two decades or three. They can have progressive advances in health care unimaginable just two years ago, or in pursuit of Valhalla and through petulance and pique, they can become agents of the status quo they so viscerally deride.
The unalterable fact is that the politics of health-care reform lead the two parties in opposite directions. No presidential forum will alter the central message of a year of vituperative stalemate: Ideology aside, Republicans will not support comprehensive health-care reform because it is not in their political interest to do so.
So House progressives have no option but to vote. They must vote for the Senate bill, precisely as the Senate defined it, exactly as it is now written. They can seek piecemeal improvements through reconciliation in the Senate. They can strategize about the timing of such action or the impact on their reelection campaigns. But if they believe what their moniker implies, they must pass the Senate bill.
Ken Schechtman is a freelance writer and a professor at the Washington University School of Medicine.