A believable threat

Ezra chimes in on John Edwards, health care, and the politics of aggressive populism:

Why wouldn't the Democratic leadership want to use this legislation to hammer away at Republicans? To force them to go on the record about the importance of their own health care? The idea behind this bill is that it will ratchet up political pressure for change, creating a situation in which Congressmen come to the table because they fear losing their seats if they don't. It's a strategy based on the application of political pressure, not legislative finesse. And while not a surefire winner, it's certainly a plausible theory of reform.

Meanwhile, I find the liberal outrage and bewilderment over this bit of populist symbolism to be very unsettling. At base, Edwards is doing something very simple: Dramatizing the inequities in our health care system. Most liberals would have you believe that dramatizing, and fixing, the inequities in our health care system is their primary political goal. But not like this, I guess.

I've gotta say, I'm with Ezra in theory. I think that Edwards' underlying idea here is the correct one. Call the left on their bullshit, call the right on their bullshit, and call industry on the fact that there influence exists only inasmuch as politicians allow it to. But I worry that his specific plan will never be enacted.

Republicans, you'll recall, were perfectly happy not to over-ride the SCHIP veto, which was itself based on a claim that the expansion represented a crawl towards socialized medicine. How happy will they be to oppose a plan that they will just have spent months characterizing as not just an encroachment towards socialized medicine, but as the big bad monster itself? Very happy, I imagine.

And if all they have to do to kill it is filibuster one or two bills, they'll go right ahead and do that. There's some small chance, I suppose, that, between the handful of moderates in the GOP caucus and the electoral losses they'll sustain in 2008, I could be wrong. But I don't think so.

I do however, think this almost the right way to go--that Edwards shouldn't be promising six months, but, say, a year or a year and change, by insisting he'd veto FY 2010 appropriations that don't explicitly reject COLA and health care for congressmen and senior executive officials, unless a universal care package is passed beforehand. Something like that.

It's still hardball, but there's just a much lower risk that Edwards will suffer a catastrophic, political capital draining defeat six months into his presidency.

Update: Ezra and I do agree that this Richard Cohen column suffers from a critical amount of godawfulness.