Matt is right to remind folks that Max Baucus is arguably the very last Democrat liberals would want to put in charge of health reform. His blog post has some good reasons why, and so too does his article from a few years back, and Ari Berman's article on "K Street's Favorite Democrat." This is a guy, as I say in my piece yesterday, who folded so easily and eagerly to Bush on Medicare Part D and the tax cuts that The New Republic editorialized in favor of stripping him of his chairmanship. The New Republic! That said, I've also talked with Senators and Hill staffers who are longtime Baucus skeptics -- including the most liberal members of the body -- and they uniformly pronounce themselves surprised and impressed with how he's handled health reform thus far. That's not to say they're relaxed. One Senator fretted that Baucus is the type of Democrat who could give health reform a try, back down to a couple piece of incremental legislation, and still sleep easy at night. But the fact that he's cleared Finance's schedule, that he's holding preliminary hearings, that he's publicly and repeatedly committing himself to reform, that he's weighting witnesses towards reform, that he's staffing up on health care, that he's often the last Senator in the room at reform hearings -- those are meaningful signs, and for now, they've left observers cautiously optimistic. This is where organizing matters. The argument of my article was that the Senate Finance Committee (and, for that matter, the Senate) is the key body for health reform. Absolutely enormous amounts of energy -- including by me -- have been expended pushing the presidential Democrats towards better positions in campaign proposals that won't be implemented. That was useful insofar as it effectively conveyed the importance of health reform to the Democratic base. But that message has been conveyed, and the organizing energy now needs to shift to the Senate. As I wrote in the piece, "By publicly asserting jurisdiction on health reform, the Finance Committee is also taking responsibility for it. If the effort fails, it will be on their heads. And none will receive more blame then Baucus." The question is whether he, and his colleagues on the Committee, will fear failure and the consequences of blame, or whether they'll figure a couple irritated editorials will be better for their careers then sticking their neck out on this issue. At the end of the day, for better or worse, Baucus is the key figure here. Progressives can't have him as an enemy, or there simply won't be health reform. But nor should they assume him an ally. They need to watch, organize, and agitate. They need to make it easy and rewarding for him to do the right thing, and hard and dangerous to fold before industry. If comprehensive health reform ends up being the right political play for Baucus, he'll happily make it. He's not ideologically opposed to the issue. But nor is he likely to lead in the absence of such an environment.
