In a way, we liberals are at a severe disadvantage in the health care debate

We want health insurance to be a right, we want it to be expanded and we want it to be fairer. Furthermore,most of us think that 20 some countries with single payer offer a common sense solution to this problem that only the USA is trying to come up with a new way to solve.

Our opponents among Blue Dems and Republicans know exactly what we all want and they are trying to find any weakness. They will attempt to strip or change parts of the bill to change it enough to cause liberals to vote the whole thing down. I don't know how bad we let the bill get before it's worth voting it down. Perhaps, it will depend on what we have a requisite number of votes to pass (and what we have enough votes to prevent changes to).

The reason our opponents have the advantage over us is that if everyone isn't covered, our oppoents aren't losing any sleep over it. In fact, many think it's a good outcome. Oh, the Blue Dogs may take false comfort in thinking they have Sistah Souljahed health care reform to their political advantage --but this is all about what they think, not what's valid.

So they take shots at a concept that they hate, dislike or are ambivalent about and if they have enough vote to weaken it, then liberals will do the rest and vote it down. The end result is that nothing passes, but the pressure if off Blue Dogs, if not Democrats in general, but Blue Dogs don't really consider their success related to Democratic Party success anyway. (although they should ask Republicans like Chris Shays or Sue Kelly what a wave election feels like to a moderate)

I really don't know what this means for our strategy, but it may mean that they've got us. It may mean we are going to have to pass an imperfect bill to advance health care to scores of people that don't have it or not advance that cause at all.

I'm writing this because I think it's important to see things as they look through that lens.

On the bright side, however, Blue Dogs don't like noise, they don't like commotion and racket upsetting their apple carts and what liberals did to them over the late summer and fall regarding this issue got their attention. They didn't like it. So, thanks to that activism, they aren't seeing 100% upside to killing health reform or killing certain parts of it. No doubt, they would probably love it if the issue died and activists like us blamed our own liberal members for the bill's death.

The point is that it's clear that we have leverage and we know that, we just don't know how much.

But my view is that one way or another we have got to come out of this covering a lot more people, a lot more effectively and fairly than right now. I am not willing to come to the end of this and say, "we'll try again next year, our bill will be 20% better." Why not? Because I don't trust all the circumstances and congressional leadership and congress and presidential approval to get us this close again for a while. I know it took three years to create Social Security but frankly, i don't trust voters in this country to wait three years for anything --heck the average voter will honk at you if you stop for a pedestrian in the crosswalk!

I think that's why you had people like Raul Grijalva and Barbara Lee voting the way they did last night. Balancing advancing the cause or not, they aren't going to be the ones that stop it, because nobody else cares as much as we do (and the representatives we trust).

Proper sentence structure, capitalization, and grammar goes a long way.

give me 5.

And voters don't wait for anything anymore.

In a week they can start a Death Panel II and convince idiots that the bill will require them to eat lima beans five times per week. The Blue Dogs won't fall for that, but they will yank out something like early childhood care to prove that they take the lima bean concern seriously.

I f$#$%# hate this stuff anymore.

:grr:

I don't know what you're expectng. It would never be perfect because someone would take issue with something somewhere. On DU you have people who are for a logical move out of Afghanistan, people who just want to get out, and those who think we should stay and see if we can get something done...<---Three separate groups, do you really think anything would be satisfactory for them or perfect?

On DU we have a faction who are just single payer or bust, those who will accept HCR but want it to fail on so many levels so they can scream "I told you so", others who really just want to see Obama fail, and others who are willing to compromise on a few things to start cleaning up the system as much as we can now. <----Nothing will be perfect. The whole point of having different views on ANY table is because we need to make compromises----but what your post lacks and what most people don't seem to want to accept here, is that we need to compromise at times. I won't like it, you won't like it and even the other side won't like it, but there are things we can do now, live with, and be substantial.

So far we've got this and there's a chance to get things done. We have someone on our side, Kucinich, who I thought would vote with us and not scream "wait until next time" but his vote "nay" says otherwise. I agree we need to work together and there is a lot more to get done a lot more good we can do before everything is clear. We need to be sure to presure the conservadems and focus our ENTIRE energy on them first, so we can change the rhetoric and dialogue that they're using against significant and watered down change.

Most on DU focused on the Repubs, they were never our problem because they would NEVER vote for this, the Conservadems are the real threat and we need to take control. Obama is doing his part, we need to do ours.