An Upside to Opposing the Bill?

By Dave

While I feel strongly that killing the health care bill would be a tragic loss for the American people, not to mention a blow to this administration and the Democratic party, there may have been one upside to the recent outburst by the left: It may have given Ben Nelson less leverage to negotiate his position. Here's Nate Silver:

While the very nature of last-minute negotiations makes it hard to draw straight lines from point A to point B, it seems likely that if the kill-billers had not pushed back so hard against Lieberman, the bill would have been worse -- maybe much worse. It's sometimes said that a good compromise serves to make everyone equally unhappy. I'm not quite sure if that's the case here, but it does seem that Lieberman pushed things very close to the brink, to the extent that Nelson didn't have much leverage. Allow states to opt-out of their Medicaid obligations, for instance, as Nelson was said to have desired, and the unions might have gone from neutral to outright hostile to the bill, the opposition in the progressive blogosphere would have become nearly universal, and even the "wonk bloc" -- people like Ezra Klein and Jonathan Cohn and Paul Krguman and myself -- might have said this was a bridge too far. Nelson certainly could have voted to kill the bill outright, but he wasn't going to succeed in making it substantially more conservative.

To the extent that the backlash by the left was a signal to conservative Dems that a pound of flesh had been exacted and no more would be tolerated, I say more power to 'em. However, to the extent that progressives really want to kill the bill because it lacks a public option, I still say that's downright crazy.