I don’t believe in getting people worked up when it’s not necessary. Energy is a finite resource, and when you don’t have a lot to work with anyway (especially relative to the opposition), the key to successful organizing is selectively applying carefully targeted effort to achieve maximum impact.
It’s like the difference between hitting your shoulder or your forearm and hitting your funnybone with an equivalent amount of pressure. The first two you might barely feel, but the third sends you through the roof.
When you send the DCCC into a month-long freak out with a few regional polls that anticipate the country’s mood on health care a week before the Coakley election, or 42 members of Congress insert language into the Congressional record at the behest lobbyists to counter a couple of blog posts, or Nobel prize winning NYT columnists are called into service to refute you, you know you’ve hit the sweet spot.
And it’s amazing what can be achieved when you stake out your ground early and just keep standing there.
Last June 23, we stated our position on health care reform (see the video above, from June 27). We said were going to ask members of Congress to commit to vote against any health care bill that didn’t have a public option. It wasn’t an original thought — we were simply echoing an effort that was already going on within the progressive caucus.
We said “okay, you gave up on single payer, so let’s agree to draw this line here. Because right now, everybody says the lobbyists shouldn’t be able to drag Congress over it. And when this is all over, we’ll see how well everyone’s words match up with their actions.”
I asked everyone who works for FDL for their opinion before we started. Everyone wholeheartedly supported the effort. And the only people who were upset within the larger FDL community were the single payer folks who didn’t think it went far enough. But it was never meant as a policy prescription, it was rather a firewall against something that was almost universally acknowledged at the time to mean that health care reform had failed and had turned into a bailout for the medical industrial complex. They thought that the line should be drawn much sooner. But it was the difference between kicking a field goal from the 70 yard line vs. the 50 yard line. One might be possible — the other simply wasn’t.
(As a side note, Ryan Grim recently asked me if I’d do anything differently if I had it all to do over again. I told him that I thought his story on the PhRMA deal memo was the single most important piece of reporting in the entire health care debate, and that its impact was profound. If I’d known what was going on from the start I would have run the campaign against the PhRMA deal, but in mid-August when it first appeared it looked like we were too far down the road on the public option to switch campaigns. Nobody knew the process would stretch out this long. If I could do it all again, I might have switched to breaking up the PhRMA deal.)
Anyway, when I was flying home last year from Netroots Nation, I sat with Kevin Drum. I’ve always had a good relationship with Kevin since I invited him to the first Kobepallooza in 2005. We talked about health care and I said said I didn’t think health care was worth passing if it included a mandate to buy private insurance, but not a public option. He thought it was. But we both knew then where we would wind up. Neither of us has changed our position since then.
Kevin continues to be a firm advocate for me changing mine:
In absolute terms, Jane may not represent a huge number of people or a vast amount of money, but she certainly seems like the linchpin of a disaffected left that could easily represent the difference between success and failure for a bill that’s likely to come down to one or two votes. Speaking for myself, I sure wish she could look past the disappointments — most of which were sadly inevitable — and instead focus all that energy on the big picture of what the Democratic healthcare bill means both for real people right now and for the likelihood of further reform in the future.
Our position has nothing to do with disappointment, disaffection or disillusionment. It was a clear policy position staked out in June of 2009 and reiterated for the past 9 months. Subsequently, on July 31, 60 members of Congress signed a letter agreeing to vote against any bill that didn’t have a public option, and the response was blogospheric-wide cheer that raised $430,000 in August in support of that commitment.
Many people who supported that effort at the time have now decided that we should change that position, because they have moved on. And they all too frequently mischaracterize our efforts in order to counter them, deriding them as “tantrum-throwing,” “anti-health care reform” or “marginal.”
Well, to the extent that we’ve had any impact at all, it’s due to the fact that there is widespread distrust of the Senate health care bill. There’s nothing “marginal” about a position reflected by 48% of the public who want Congress to “vote against a health care bill similar to President Obama’s” while only 43% want them to vote for it, per Gallup. Support drops further in the Rasmussen poll when the question doesn’t include the President’s name — 53% oppose the bill and 42% support it.
A small group of pundits appear to have misled themselves into believing that the opinions they hold, which echo those of a self-interested DC political class, are widely reflected by the public.
If that was true, Martha Coakley would be a Senator.
