Health Care Chess, Two or Three Moves Down the Road

What happens if the pukes "win" and the kill healthcare reform? Do they look like heroes? Do they look more powerful? Or is there a backlash? Obviously if we still have the same problems they're going to have problems since they will have no one to pass the buck to.

What happens if the pukes "lose" and we end up with a significant public option? Do the pukes look weak or can they then posture themselves in an "I told you so" position?

It seems to me their "best" outcome is to make the "reform" as weak and insignificant as possible and then do an "I told you so" against the Democrats. But even this, I don't think it works out for them in the long run.

I guess it may come down to how much of their pushback is PR, and how much of it is genuine?

The Dems will be blamed for any failure on this. And they will take the political hit.

Now I'm not so sure. At some point "conservatives" take ownership, and they are just so over the top. . .

It won't happen that way. The GOP will cheerfully blame Dems for any failure, and I fully expect the Dems to fail to get out in front of that framing. And so, it will work. The GOP will win by showing up. And also because the MSM will fail to do its nominal job of fact-checking GOP messaging. And also because the public has a short memory.

It will be the Republicans that kill it but it will be the Democrats that allow that to happen. Both will take a Hit. If Health Care goes down there will be a concerted effort to oust any Democrat that votes against it..If the Blue Dogs are howling now just wait until they cast a No vote....The American people want Health Care Reform and will not in any way reward Republicans that stop it from happening...Obama will also take a Hit if it fails to pass..Many Progressives/Liberals will just stop voting...

when push comes to shove can they cast a no vote? What if they send a watered down plan to the President and he vetoes it?

The Dems have a filibuster proof majority in the Senate, an overwhelming majority in the House and they hold the Presidency....and they still couldn't give the American people Health Care Reform.

Snowe and the other 2 give them cover for the Dems not being a monolithic party and charges of partisanship. Simply put, all we had to do was placate 3 GOP senators and 3 of our own could stray...and we can't even do that.

HCR failure will be a disaster for the Dems. Something will be passed and it will look more like what the Blue Dogs will accept than what the American people want. Something will be passed just to trumpet that something was done.

edit:typo fix

. . . the bottom line?

What "better" option does the GOP have to offer? There's still only one place to go if you want meaningful healthcare reform.

Medicare, when it was created, was a stall, a denial of the full national plan that was wanted then, the minimum they thought they could get away with. So were the HMOs, which were and are creatures of the government. And they intend to keep doing that. There is no other plan. You are correct that bullshit will only take you so far, but in politics in this country, that can be a long ways, and you may be sure they intend to go the distance.

As I said, 2 or 3 moves ahead.

The core issue is populism. If the people rule, run the country, make and break legislators, then the current power elites do not, so they HATE that idea. Yet the people, the voters, are the true ultimate source of power in this country, so if you want to institute real, profound change in how things are done, you HAVE to go to the people, use the bully pulpit, arouse "the masses", and get the public involved in politics. The townhall disruptors may be astroturf, but they STILL play lip-service to the notion that the public's opinion matters, the Corporations don't choose to speak for and defend themselves, they put their words in the mouths of tools pretending to be private citizens speaking for themselves. Yet we all know by experience that they generally do not give a crap what we think.

President Obama, willingly or unwillingly, is hamstrung by this conumdrum now. So was Jimmy Carter a couple of decades back. By far the easiest way to rule in this country is to make noise about irrelevancies and DO NOTHING.

The only real way to resolve this deadlock is for the voting public to arouse and organize itself, to incorporate itself and seek it's own profit. But that seems easier to think of than to carry out.

Edit: I want to add that this political contradiction has a lot to do with the profound dishonesty of political discourse here, the dirtiness of it, the visciousness, the habitual, even recreational lying. Destruction of honest discourse on topics of public interest is an end in itself.

A corporation does not speak. The people who run the corporations speak and they have control of the resources and can use those resources to run rings around WE, THE PEOPLE. But every so often they don't succeed.

because that is his only real play, and he really wants to make substantial changes. If he succeeds, we will get something, if not we will get dissembling and bullshit.

that isn't a fact in evidence.

Politically speaking what the GOP gets to do in 3 years, assuming a weak public option that the CBO says will enroll between 0 and 10 million people with 0 being more likely, is the GOP gets to say the Democrats have taken 2 cracks at it in 20 years and nothing meaningful has been achieved - trust us, we'll get it done.

A too large portion of voters don't care about the details. They care about seeing something done and then seeing results that reduce the problem. We'll get the "something done" part question is if it will give us any results that are meaningful. We can hold them off in 3 years with a "it needs time to work" but in the midterms 5 years out, no meaningful results will end up as a disaster for our side on the issue.

The GOP will then put forth a whole bunch of free market crap that will, in the short term, show results but in the long term make the whole problem worse as people realize that health insurance from an out of state insurer isn't all it is cracked up to be.

After that we get single payer. So another 15 years of waiting.

Meaningful HCR simply isn't part of their strategy because it does not appeal to their base.