Politics Is About Doing Things

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

Matthew Yglesias has written an excellent analysis of the relationship between Republican obstructionism and the size and scope of the health care reform bill. He calls Mitch McConnell the "unsung hero of comprehensive reform":

We should also, however, spare a thought for the unsung hero of comprehensive reform, McConnell and his GOP colleagues, who pushed their “no c

ompromise” strategy to the breaking point and beyond. The theory was that non-cooperation would stress the Democratic coalition and cause the public to begin to question the enterprise. And it largely worked. But at crucial times when wavering Democrats were eager for a lifeline, the Republicans absolutely refused to throw one. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and other key players at various points wanted to scale aspirations down to a few regulatory tweaks and some expansion of health care for children. This idea had a lot of appeal to many in the party. But it always suffered from a fatal flaw—the Republicans’ attitude made it seem that a smaller bill was no more feasible than a big bill. Consequently, even though Scott Brown’s victory blew the Democrats off track, the basic logic of the situation pushed them back on course to universal health care.

This makes a lot of sense. If the Right signals uncompromising opposition, then the Left is not going to compromise. You can't clap with one hand, and you can't be bipartisan with one party. So while righteous, unyeilding opposition might make for good political theater -- and might whip your supporters behind you -- it has the depressing effect of necessarily removing your voice from the deliberation table, and of making the final result of reform (if it does manage to pass, as Health Care Reform did) unreflective of your thoughts or your imprimatur.

That's bad politics for the Right. Notice the time horizons of this strategy: while relentless obstructionism and mendacity helped Republicans boost their numbers for a few months during 2009-10, and it might help them win a midterm cycle in November, it also ensured that their ideas would have almost no impact on the question of how to we value health insurance as a country and how we should deliver it.

And guess what? That question -- the question of how we value things and how we deliver them, the question Republicans recused themselves from -- is what politics is all about. Politics is about delivering goods to people. It's about deliberating on the value of goods and then bringing them to the public -- goods like economic growth, domestic security, education opportunities, environmental health and so on. Health care is one of the goods that politics concerns itself with. And thus the question of whether the Health Care Reform will prove to be smart politics will be answered on the basis of if -- and only if -- it effectively delivers more and better health care to more people (at tolerable costs). I think that it will. Some people probably disagree. The purpose of the senate's slow deliberative process is so that these different views will clash together to shape a better bill -- one that delivers more goods to more Americans.

The absurdity of the Republican's position is that they chose to ignore this basic fact of what politics is about. They acted as if the deliberation on the bill was itself the politics of the bill. They acted as if politics were not about helping people's lives but, instead, about a kabuki warfare of lies and messaging in the realm of ideas and rightwing talk radio shows.

No, the politics of the Health Care Reform begins right now. If Health Care Reform helps the middle class get better health care, if it makes it easier for people to go out and start businesses, and makes sure they don't get denied coverage for pre-existing conditions; if it helps to lower the federal deficit and lower the number of deaths in this country from insufficient coverage, then the bill is good politics. If it achieves these things -- and I believe it will -- and Americans are aware that it's doing these things -- and that's a matter of messaging -- then the Democrats have won the political contest. And the Republicans have lost. And they've lost mostly because they didn't try. Politics is about doing things; they chose to just say "no."