Shooting fire at Reason, Glenn Greenwald eviscerates libertarian double-speak on the Congressional Budget Office's accuracy (when the CBO reports were bad for Dems, they were the tablets handed to Moses on Sinai; when they were good for Dems, they became "highly speculative"). But in his coda, he hits unnamed liberal writers for moving the goalposts themselves when it comes to the now-dead public option:
Back in June -- when most people, according to [Ezra] Klein, believed the final bill would have a public option -- the progressive consensus was that the existence of the public option would single-handedly determine whether progressives won or lost (Klein himself wasn't necessarily adopting that view, only saying that "most of you" have done so). Yet now that the bill will have not merely a "neutered" public option, but no public option at all, the exact opposite decree is issued by the progressive establishment: this public-option-free health care bill is the single greatest achievement since LBJ or, perhaps, even FDR, rendering all progressive opposition to it immoral and insane. What accounts for that reversal?
I think this argument is an uncharacteristically weak one from Greenwald, given that it doesn't cite anyone who reversed their position afteronce insisting that the public option was the only possible measurementfor victory. I'm pretty sure all those people are now saying "kill thebill."
Throughout the fight over the public option, Matthew Yglesias argued the bill was still worth passing without it. Ezra Klein argued the bill was still worth passing without it. Dana Goldstein argued the bill was still worth passing without it. I argued the bill was still worth passing without it. Mark Schmitt, in a monster post detailing the history of the public option, wrote that it was "not necessarily essential to health reform." Jonathan Cohn wrote, "It's a refrain we've heard before, from the president and his advisers: There's more to reform than the public plan. But however familiar and unsurprising, the argument happens to be right."
Way before Joe Lieberman sacrificed the public option and then the Medicare buy-in on the altar of his own personal bitterness, many left-leaning writers had been arguing that ultimately, a bill that expands coverage to another 30 million Americans would still be worth passing, even if it lacked a public option. At the same time, it is likely true that without the left's passionate advocacy for keeping the public option, the bill would have turned out much worse.
The bill was always going to be held hostage, as Mark put it this morning, to the 59th and 60th most liberal Senators. If you still don't think the bill is worth it, despite all it does to guarantee coverage for those who don't have it, fine, that's your choice. But let's not pretend the public option was all the bill was ever about.
UPDATE: In an update Greenwald does have Jonathan Alter dead to rights on this. I'd also clarify that Greenwald was pointing out that it was Ezra who said liberals thought a bill without a public option wouldn't be a "win" but this was always bad framing. Any decent bill would have been a "win" for liberals in the sense of establishing the idea that the government has a responsibility to help make sure people have health care coverage. This bill does that. Today's conservatives are against that in principle--as I wrote months ago, they were trying to kill the bill, not the public option.
-- A. Serwer
