This is the dynamic that makes me most confident Obama will end up pressing for what liberals want on health care reform. You have to think that Obama's top priority is to enact a health care reform that succeeds rather than fails, and it seems pretty clear that only the more liberal approaches will succeed - the more conservative, pro-industry it gets, that means it's less likely to contain costs, less likely to cover more people, less likely to help people deal with the costs, and less likely to make people happier with their health care coverage. So we don't have to depend on some inner liberal compass to guide Obama in the right direction, but really his own political viability, which will be greatly strengthened by successful health care reform, and severely weakened if the "legislatively pragmatic" plan winds up, in the next couple years, making people less happy with their health care, seen as a huge waste of money, unfair rationing, etc. In other words, we need Obama to be smart about his long-term self-interest, and he has definitely shown a tremendous knack for that.
This really is the great advantage to being liberal right now. That dynamic where liberalism is more successful hasn't always been the case, but in the current political alignment, where it's basically pragmatic national-interest progressivism vs. an ideological, what "sounds good", and what's in the short-term narrow interest of positional advantage, it's absolutely the case that we'll be successful and they won't be. Our approach works a lot better and makes people more satisfied, so even if it may be politically difficult to sell a lot of the time, ultimately politicians and parties and ideologies are judged on success, and that's why Bush conservatism could never remain politically popular, but liberal politicians can do the right thing and enhance their own long-term self-interest, especially when it comes to the economy, jobs, health care. We saw some of that with the stimulus package, but we need more of that thinking. I think that's really the right approach to convincing Democrats to do the right thing - not self-righteousness, but saying, "you need this to work for your own political survival, so you need to design a plan that works".
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