Didn't answer particularly well, in my opinion (for reasons that will be made clear later). Didn't answer clearly at times, but they answered. And there does seem to be a desire in this intra-Liberal split to keep things civil in some parts.
Nate put up a very good (but very long) posting at his website. Since I don't feel like crashing my site, I'll just link to it. And I can already see a response to Nate's responses coming in short order.
Still, I feel a need to put up some of Nate's highlights:
One of the fundamental rules of political forecasting is never say never -- miracles, or at least things that seem like miracles beforehand -- can happen occasionally. But it would probably take a miracle to get any sort of marginally robust public option into the bill. At least 2-4 senators have stipulated outright that they'd vote to filibuster such an effort, have been saying so for months, progressives have no obvious leverage over them. Blanche Lincoln will not be unhappy if liberals block the bill; she'll be thrilled that she doesn't have to make a no-win vote and can blame Bernie Sanders or Roland Burris or the SEIU for her troubles. I don't know how many times you can bang your head against the wall before this sinks in. It's not like liberals haven't tried everything in the playbook to get a public option into the bill; they've been both dogged and creative in their pursuit of one. It hasn't worked.
...
I don't like the insurance companies either; I'd gladly get rid of them and replace them with single payer. But the industry's profits are low: only about 3.3%.
And the evidence that the insurance industry would benefit from this bill on balance -- on either a marginal or an aggregate basis -- is almost completely lacking. Jon's point that "insurance stocks have gone up dramatically with each day of bad news for the public option" [emphasis mine] is absolutely correct -- I have observed this as well. But my question is how insurance company profits would respond to a public-option-less bill versus the status quo.
...
I don't know how people can still be arguing that the individual mandate isn't necessary. If you don't have a mandate but require insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions, you get extreme adverse selection and possibly even a death spiral.
Indeed, this why it's so hard to do incremental health care reform. If you want to cover people with pre-existing conditions, you need an individual mandate or everyone will be furious that their premiums have gone up. But if you have an individual mandate, you had better have subsidies to help poor people to afford the coverage.
...
The notion that only Blue Dog seats are endangered is flat wrong. There's almost no way that Democrats will end up with more votes for a public option at any point in the near future -- keep in mind that the House passed its bill, which had only a mediocre public option, by just about the bare minimum of votes.
...
There's also the idea, which Jon has advanced, of using the reconciliation process for some parts of the bill but not for others. It's a creative idea, but I don't see how it works, since it's not like you can keep this a secret from people. If you plan to pass certain provisions under reconciliation so as to circumvent Ben Nelson, it seems to me nearly certain that Ben Nelson would counter-circumvent you by filibustering the parts of the bill that you attempted to pass under regular order. So you'd still end up with half a loaf -- although maybe a different half than you might have otherwise.
Now, I certainly do think the Democrats would have some chance of passing portions of the bill under reconciliation in 2011; in that case you wouldn't have this transparent bait-and-switch with the moderates and could claim that you'd received a new mandate from the public.
...
For starters, you're going to lose any senator who is already looking for an excuse to vote against health care reform -- meaning Lincoln, Lieberman, Nelson, Landrieu. You're going to lose a couple of process hawks -- Byrd, probably Conrad, probably Bayh, maybe Feingold. There are far short of 50 enthusiastic votes for the public option -- there are closer to about 43, and that includes a couple of the process hawks. The odds of getting to 50 votes under reconciliation would seem to be about 60/40 at best.
...
The point is, at this point I don't think they've been directing their focus in ways that optimize the progressive-ness of the health care bill. But, as both Markos and Jon imply, that might not be the point. Rather, progressives are fighting a sort of proxy war over the public option -- as a way to exert their influence and authority. This is where I've always parted ways with the strategy -- I think health care is too important an issue to use as a demonstration of one's authority. What might be better? Financial reform would be one answer. But obviously, the cat is way out of the bag now on the public option and people have become vested in their positions.
Let me state for the record, even though I'm a Liberal, I can't stand Markos Moulitsas. I feel he lets his ego run amok at times. I think his positions are based in his belief in the superiority of his political wisdom, which of course I think he vastly overrates. I think he's a reason to fast foward through Countdown with Keith Olbermann.
That being said, you can't knock what he's accomplished, with DailyKos or anything else (he is a Veteran, after all). I feel much the same way about FiredogLake in general.
I've never read anything of Jon Walker's (at least I don't remember reading anything of Jon Walker's). That's not a swipe at him, it's on me. I certainly may have, but I don't personally recall his byline.
If you were to make a checklist of political positions, I'd probably agree with 98% of what these guys want and believe in (the one area of disagreement is probably Afghanistan).
Where we really diverge is in the area of is tactics, and the results they produce. I'm willing to sacrifice some of my agenda to get something done. They're not. Fine, a split on that area can actually be quite healthy.
But I also believe in fixing the damn problem at the end of the day (for those of you who remember the movie Disclosure). I believe that Liberal solutions are always preferable...but they're not an absolute. If a Conservative idea fix the damn problem, fine. I'm not so tied to ideology that I believe we're the only ones with good ideas in this Country. Despite what Kos and Walker think, not all of our ideas have worked in the past.
I also feel (as Nate suggested) that this is more about getting a pound of flesh fro the Republicans more than it is fixing said damn problem.
We just went through eight years of a rotten President, who thought that Government ended and began with the Executive Branch. Bush has become an epithet. A symbol of all that is wrong and evil in the country. In fact, you saw the President's Afghanistan speech being denigrated by calling it "Bushian".
But now, when cornered, my fellow Progressives want Obama to act like Bush.
Steamrolling was bad...when it was against us. Now that we need something, it's okay to steamroll Republicans.
I thought Obama was going to behave differently (he has). I thought we wanted him to behave differently.
So much for that.
