For health's sake, ditch bipartisanship

 Progressives aren't making it up when they say Republicans keep moving the goalposts rightward.  Every time Democrats try to meet them half way on an issue, they end up going the whole way, as the policy at hand, and the country as a whole, shift further down a conservative path.  Yet, somehow, the issue remains unresolved.  Hmmm, see a pattern here? Ezra Klein does on health care policy over the past 60 years:

The original idea, of course, was a national health service run by the government. Harry Truman proposed it and fell short. Lyndon Johnson got it for seniors and some groups of the very poor. But Republicans said that was too much government, and it was unacceptable for the whole country. They proposed, through President Richard Nixon, an employer-based, pay-or-play system in which the government would set rules and private insurers would compete for business.

That didn't go anywhere, because Democrats, led by Sen. Ted Kennedy, weren't ready to give up on a national health service. By the 1990s, they were. President Bill Clinton proposed an employer-based, pay-or-play system in which the government would set rules and private insurers would compete for business. Republicans killed it. Government shouldn't be telling businesses what to do, they said, and it shouldn't be restructuring the whole health-care market. Better to center policy around personal responsibility and use an individual mandate combined with subsidies and rules making sure insurers couldn't turn people away...

I think we know how that turned out.  Obama and the Democrats did, in fact, propose that last plan, and pass it, but, true to form, Republicans still wouldn't go along with it.  In the process, they managed to turn Mitt's Romney's mild little plan into StalinCare. 

It stumps me how a Harvard guy like Obama doesn't detect a trend here, or, if he does, refuses to change his tactics in response.   I always hated his bipartisan spiel and hoped it was just that, a political song and dance  he would abandon as mere campaign blather. He did that with so many of the progressive issues I care about, but the bipartisanship? That he clings to.

All the talk about Axelrod's "We have to deal with the world as we find it" quote has missed the point:  Obama was elected to change "the world as we find it," not learn to live with it.  That, more than anything else, shows how little Obama & Co. believed the "change" message they evangelized in 2008. You pick Rahm to deal with the world as you find it.  You pick Larry Summers to deal with the world as you find it.  You pick Tim Geithner and court Wall Street and dine lobbyists to deal with the world as you find it.  But you don't change it. Unfortunately, the world as we find it may be this: Obama is a conventional politician surrounded by conventional people with conventional ideas.  How you escape a near-depression that way escapes me.

In a letter delivered to Pelosi on Tuesday, Boehner identified the tactic Pelosi might use. "Using the suspension process - which requires a two-third vote in the House to pass legislation instead of a simple majority vote - as the vehicle for a vote on legislation that would stop President Obama's tax hike on all tax-paying Americans would be an obvious attempt to circumvent the will of the House by denying Republican and many Democratic members their right to offer an alternative proposal," Boehner wrote.

In a letter delivered to Pelosi on Tuesday, Boehner identified the tactic Pelosi might use. "Using the suspension process - which requires a two-third vote in the House to pass legislation instead of a simple majority vote - as the vehicle for a vote on legislation that would stop President Obama's tax hike on all tax-paying Americans would be an obvious attempt to circumvent the will of the House by denying Republican and many Democratic members their right to offer an alternative proposal," Boehner wrote.