On disasters, self-inflicted and unavoidable

Under the heading 'Analysis: July has been disaster for Obama, Hill Dems':

The Obama administration, which was flying high a month ago after pushing through a climate change bill in the House, has since been dealt a series of setbacks and is struggling to regain its footing.

After the climate bill passed 219-212 on the afternoon of June 26, there was a feeling that the White House could get much of its agenda through Congress in 2009.

A month later, there are doubts that President Obama will even achieve his number one priority of healthcare reform, much less cap-and-trade, immigration reform and a regulatory revamp of the financial sector.

Elsewhere, we get this:

After a week of major setbacks on health reform, White House officials and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did their best to sound upbeat Sunday, with new deadlines looming to move bills out of key committees before the August recess.

White House senior adviser David Axelrod insisted most of the work is already done, with just 20 percent left to go. Pelosi said again Sunday that she has the votes to get a bill passed on the House floor. “This will happen,” she said firmly.

But things look a lot different for some members and senators — some of whom said Sunday they don’t think a quick resolution in either chamber is guaranteed right now, no matter how much President Barack Obama wants it.

The most downbeat forecast came from Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), one of three Democrats and three Republicans negotiating the bill in the Senate Finance Committee. He couldn’t say for sure that the committee would vote on a bill before the Senate recess — despite assurances Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) has given to the White House.

The diverging assessments show what a tough sell Obama-style health reform is proving to be for some in Congress — particularly among moderates and fiscal conservatives in Obama’s own party. Last week, Obama was still pushing for both the full House and Senate to move bills before going on summer vacation. Now, reform advocates are down to hoping for committee action in each house, and even that isn’t certain.

Now, it is certainly true that this has been a tough month for the Democratic party, for a number of in and out-of-Washington reasons: there's been a spate of coverage on vulnerable Democratic senatorial and gubernatorial positions (Corzine, Dodd, the open Virginia seat, even Deval Patrick in Massachusetts), the economy isn't moving the way a governing party would like it to, and, just for good measure, the last few day's worth of media oxygen has been sucked up by this Gates nonsense - an essentially unwinnable situation, in my opinion, for Obama, and a huge detriment to his efforts to keep the spotlight on health care reform.

That said, I'm not really sure how the last month of politicking could have played out any differently. The White House set an August recess deadline, which they are now retroactively suggesting was just a gentle, non-binding suggestion, to get this thing passed, and that kind of deadline is a wondrous gift to slow-rolling Republicans. The deadline guaranteed that a) the media narrative will focus on the deadline, rather than the contents of the bill, as the relevant measure of success and b) Republicans just have to throw up enough legislative smoke-screens to slow an already laborious process to a standstill, and they win. The Republican party has zero interest (nor should they, from a strategic perspective) in cooperating with Obama, Pelosi, and Reid here, and they've managed to put some serious pressure on the Democrats by doing absolutely nothing. While I appreciate the argument coming out of the White House now that a deadline was necessary to just get things moving, putting one out there was at the very least an unavoidable self-inflicted error, the kind of line in the sand that is impossible to defend or maintain.

Beyond that, this is a very confusing chunk of legislation. I realize that isn't a very revelatory statement, but it is. I've spent my time reading about it and looking at Canadian health care stuff as a point of comparison, and I'm still stumped on a lot of it. Because it is so confusing, media coverage has concentrated more on the legislative back-and-forth surrounding the bill than its contents, only stopping to highlight a few easy-to-understand bits of information - the infamous $1 trillion CBO figure, for example - and how those things will help or hinder its movement. You can find criticism of this phenomenon on practically every blog, left or right, that political journalism is biased towards covering partisan fighting over legislative substance, but here's the thing: without a solid bill on the table, what is there to write about? Every single piece of the reform, from the public option to the IMAC board to the final cost, is still being debated, and until it passes through reconciliation we have no idea what it will look like. Again, while some have pointed out that this is a result of Obama's hands-off approach, in my opinion it's an inevitable, unavoidable cost of trying to pass comprehensive reform. In other words, media coverage was always going to veer towards the battle surrounding the bill, and I'd think Obama and his advisers are smart enough to have predicted this.

Add these two factors to the immense power of health-care lobbyists in Washington and the well-known sausage-making process that is part of every legislative push, and it seems, to me at least, that we aren't seeing anything at the moment we weren't going to see anyway. Huge reforms demand political capital, and they're also slow - there was never going to be a quick, easy, non-punitive way for Obama to fix the system. Just something to keep in mind as we sit through a long, grueling August of health care ads and par-for-the-course Republican hyperbole.