This is, of course, complete nonsense. We've seen Democrats rip the guts out of reform and the Republicans still won't budge. This isn't about compromise, it's about killing reform. The insurance industry has a lot to lose if health care reform is adopted, and they are dedicated to stopping reform. Lots of politicians - Max Baucus, blue-dog Democrats in the House, as well as Republicans - are putting their efforts behind the industry's goal and are undermining progress toward real reform. But this recent effort to suggest Republicans would go along if Kennedy were at the table is especially upsetting.
Nina Totenberg on NPR offered a key observation: "If politics is the art of compromise, it is also, on some occasions, the willingness to fight in the face of overwhelming odds." And, as Totenberg points out, no one understood this better than Ted Kennedy. The example she brings forth, as others have, is Kennedy's effective demolishing of Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court. To understand that moment in history - Reagan's immense popularity, the skittishness of Democrats at the time, who were abandoning their commitment to the least privileged to become a more centrist party, and the general rightward drift of the nation - is to understand how exceptional Kennedy's forceful, and at first lonely, opposition to Bork was. But for Kennedy it was clear: ''Bork's rigid ideology" would have tipped "the scales of justice against the kind of country America is and ought to be.'' Kennedy did more than just make a strong statement in opposition to Bork. From the Totenberg report:
"Tactically, the speech was intended to, in essence, freeze the debate, to alert people in the country that this was going to be a matter of huge controversy, and to give senators a reason to think twice before saying something favorable to Judge Bork," says Jeff Blattner, a former member of Kennedy's Judiciary Committee staff. In the weeks that followed, Kennedy would use that pause he created to mobilize grass-roots activists, Democratic contributors and everyone from African-American ministers to labor leaders.
That, it seems to me, is what the Democrats who want reform need to do right now. They need to Bork their Republican opponents (instead of being Borked, which is what the industry lobbyists and Republicans have been succeeding at with their townhall shennanigans). Democrats need to stand up and forcefully speak the truth: in the anti-reformists' America children will die if they don't have health insurance. There are forms of treatment that working Americans without health insurance - and many with poor insurance - can't afford. In America, with our immense wealth and our supposed compassion, should anyone be forced to abandon life-sustaining treatment - for themselves but especially for their children - simply because they can't afford it? Kennedy forcefully said "that kind of choice for any parent in this country is unacceptable."A lot of ink has been wasted on the Republican efforts to position the fear of Obama's "death panels" in the public mind. Republicans are employing other tricks to shape the debate, and these go largely unchallenged - like deflating the estimated number of uninsured Americans (set at 45.7 million by the Congressional Budget Office), by stripping out people we could conceivably leave to die, like illegal immigrants. Democrats need to stand up and challenge all of this, not by a point-by-point refutation, but by asking the bigger question: do Americans have a right to affordable health care. In the anti-reformers' America they do not. Make the debate about that question, as Ted Kennedy always did. And if the answer to that question for most Americans is yes - as it assuredly is - then don't be afraid of the implication: there is a role for government in guaranteeing this outcome. Ted Kennedy wouldn't have been afraid of this truth, why should the rest of the Democratic Party be?
By the way, the picture at the top of this post is a shout out to my friend Andrea, inexplicably a Red Sox fan. For the moment let me say: any team Ted Kennedy could get behind is OK with me. At least until the post-season.
Update 8/31: Interesting follow-up here to a claim related to my recent posting. Some have been arguing that Kennedy would take a compromise now on health reform, because he regretted not doing so way back when Richard Nixon was President. This posting makes a valid point: if there is evidence of this deep regret, produce it. Otherwise, shut-up and assume, as the available record seems to argue, that Kennedy would want the millions of uninsured covered.
