How Sixty Votes Killed Healthcare

The confidence Obama radiated when it came to managing a generational and massive change in health care puzzled me. It was more than confidence, really: somehow fixing health care was such a sure thing he could give Congress all the time it needed to work out the details, none of which seemed essential to him. Occasionally he would make impatient noises, but not loudly enough to bother anyone involved in the process, if you can call with a straight face the months-long debacle we witnessed a "process."

But what was clear from the beginning was that the process involved having sixty votes, the supermajority necessary for the senate to pass anything more significant than a tribute to motherhood. Any filibusters could be overcome with sixty votes. Obama knew this, and many very smart people believed it. He wasn't that concerned then with the details: he wanted a few Republican votes too to sanctify the new bi-partisan, or maybe it was post-partisan, era.

Why not give in on a few details, like the public option, when, in the end, he couldn't be filibustered and he had a majority of the Senate? He was certain that he would get enough of what he thought was needed that the rest could be corrected and improved over time.

The only problem with this don't worry, be happy, give a little here, give a little there approach was that he didn't actually have sixty votes. I haven't been able to sort out how many he brought to the table with any degree of precision, but I'm estimating conservatively he was at least five votes short of the magic number.

I blame Howard Dean, who, as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, had the brilliant idea of heading up a fifty-state campaign rather than just sticking to those seats which, traditionally, the Democrats had won or held in the past. Dean's strategy worked, in a way. The Democrats won seats in traditionally red states, which is what got them within claiming range of the sixty vote trump card. When push came to shove, though, the idea that these red-state Democrats would loyally vote with their party (for cloture) rather than for what would sit well in their states (against), just seemed like political suicide to them. I would have loved to have been in the Oval Office when Obama realized that there was an important aspect of his sixty votes he hadn't fully thought through: he didn't have them.

As a result of this profound miscalculation he was presented in the end with a Democratic Healthcare Plan written by Republicans, insurance companies and Big Pharma, which, at the same time, fractured the Democratic party and its supporters. Obama found himself negotiating for the sixtieth vote with people who had no intention of giving it to him unless nearly everything important to Democrats, Independents, and Progressives, as well as everything objectionable to the various corporate entities, was deleted or watered down first. Even the bill's democratic supporters saw an opportunity, by hesitating, to add a bit of last minute local pork.

Independents and progressives abandoned him and his party wholesale. Unions are furious. Why should anyone support and defend an insurance-company give-away bill in the 2010 elections whose major feature was that it has a big D on its cover? Especially, why stick around now that it has become clear that the first item on the Republican agenda in 2010 is to repeal it should it pass? (The Republicans are alarmed now by the possibility that the bill won't pass!)

Which brings me to the haunting thought: what would the last year had been like had Obama realized from day one that he didn't have sixty votes? What might have passed the Senate and how might it have been done? I'm still puzzling over that one.

At this moment, the Republicans are undergoing a gut-wrenching reorganization of their party, and there's no doubt in my mind that a similar reorganization is beginning with the Democrats. Both parties desperately need the hard days to come to whittle themselves down to size and back to basics. Democrats will be far better off if today they give up the delusion that in some universe they have the sixty votes needed to break filibusters. Maybe the Democrats will then finally turn a degree of appropriate attention to Joe Lieberman (who in college had been a hero of mine in civil rights). The Republicans might find a way of unifying a party dangerously close to flying apart in ideological warfare and attract a broader swath of voters, especially independents.

Once the Democrats realize that they beat themselves on health care with their own delusions and fully accept a loss as great as any suffered by Clinton in 1994, once Obama stops trying to force them to be some mythical post-partisan party no one wants to belong to, they might actually be able to accomplish important things before their time runs out. But they will accomplish nothing until Obama accepts the full enormity of his blunder. Over the next few weeks, we'll see if he can.