The Daily Background

Couldn’t agree more with Mike Lux over at Open Left:

When we lost on health care in 1994, and then lost Congress in the elections because our base was so discouraged that they didn’t turn out, it made Clinton and Democrats in general hyper-cautious about trying to do anything big or bold the rest of his Presidency. If we had won on health care, we would have kept Congress, and we would have emboldened Democrats to try other big things. It is one of the most basic laws in politics: victory makes you stronger, and defeat makes you weaker. You can fault Obama for some of his specific policy proposals, and for being too ready to compromise on some things, but one thing he has been willing to do is try to do big things, and if health care goes down, the attempt to do big things will probably will stop- climate change probably is given up on as too hard, financial reform gets weaker, efforts to create more jobs probably is given up on, immigration reform very likely gets shelved. If a health care bill is passed, as Bob argues, it will create the possibility of doing other big things.
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Social Security: […] when it was first passed, it was far weaker than today, and had many flaws progressives of today would have been rightfully upset about, but that it was a platform future progressives could build on. I think that’s how we have to view this health care bill, the climate change bill, and at least some other legislation coming down the pike.

Also, I’ll add that if we step back and look at it from a broader perspective, the health care bill passed in the House and the bill about to go under debate in the Senate really aren’t as bad as they quite easily could have been.

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