Never mind that presidents don’t actually craft legislation (see: Hillary Clinton, 1993). What it all illustrates, for Marshall,
is that the Democrats now in the majority don’t have the moral purpose for this fight. They’re not Republicans, who actually are willing to go down fighting, no matter how wrong they are on any given issue.
See, going down fighting is always preferable to, y’know, winning a partial victory. There is only flawless victory; anything less is a defeat. Not content with absolutism, Marshall reaches backward to her outrage from Spring 2008:
Would this be happening with Hillary? Her unflinching passion and purpose for health care reform, seen through her first failure, would have given us a leader who’d put political capital down to get it done. No, she wouldn’t have written the bill, learning from her mistake, but she would have laid out markers of what was expected and she would have fought tooth and nail to get it done right. She certainly wouldn’t have accepted a bill that put more burden on the American middle class, while not coming close to covering enough people to make it matter, with costs not contained. And she wouldn’t have stood by silently while the bill was crafted as a gift to bolster the insurance monopoly across this country.
First of all, the idea that Hillary Clinton would have experienced more success in Congress, or less interference from Joe Lieberman, is just laughable. Her plan was literally identical to Obama’s, with the sole exception of a mandate (which is now in the bill). As for the notion that Clinton is less beholden to the insurance lobby…well, that’s just not a reality-based statement. To wit:
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The health-care industry, once a fierce critic of then-first lady Hillary Clinton’s reform plans for the sector, is now lavishing campaign contributions on the U.S. senator ahead of her expected presidential bid.According to Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan group that tracks campaign finance filings, Clinton has received $781,112 in contributions from the health-care sector during the current election cycle, which makes her the No. 2 recipient of funds from that sector, behind only Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., who received $977,354.
The real reason progressives like Marshall are upset is the perceived loss of a major progressive win, i.e. the public option and/or Medicare expansion, to Joe Lieberman. The anger at Obama smells like mothballs to me.
