The completely cynical position that the politicians of both sides of the shutdown are purely self-interested and equally to blame is one of the most intellectually lazy positions out there. It should stand to reason that just because both sides are flawed doesn't necessarily mean that both sides are equally flawed. The government shutdown is in many ways and in so many words the Republicans' fault. Nevertheless, conservatives have been working hard to spin the situation so it looks like Obama and the Democrats are the ones who won't compromise. Below you'll find the short history of Democratic compromise that the apparently amnesiac Right seems not to remember; in case you, too, have temporarily misplaced your mind.
Let's start with Obamacare, which was at least ostensibly the wedge issue that drove petulant conservatives to sabotage the US government.
Here's an indisputable fact: Obamacare's core features--making it illegal for insurers to deny coverage based on 'preexisting conditions'; the mandate to be insured, required so that healthy people don't opt out of the insurance exchanges; and government subsidies for low-income people--are also the core features of the 1989 health reform plan that was created at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. The core features of Obamacare, in other words, are not liberal policy; they're conservative policy.
In fact, that individual mandate that conservatives tried to render unconstitutional? That idea was introduced twice by Republicans in Congress in 1993.
Here's another indisputable fact: these same core features of the Heritage Foundation plan would later appear in Mitt Romney's implementation of that plan while governor of Massachusetts. Mitt Romney is a Republican, remember?
In fact, Mitt Romney is THE Republican who ran against Barack Obama in the last presidential election (if you recall). Then, conservatives were vocally concerned about Romney being their candidate, in large part because the smarter ones among them understood that it would look kind of strange and not very good for Romney to campaign against a health reform plan that he himself implemented. It's not that Romney was schizophrenic or something; he was just campaigning against Obama, the man who borrowed the core ideas from Romney's health reform plan, and from the conservative Heritage Foundation plan, and made it what we call, today, Obamacare.
Let's turn now to the broader history of compromise on health reform the led up to the recent government shutdown, now that we've established that Obamacare is unmistakably a conservative policy idea.
I know it's so long ago, but remember when Barack Obama was campaigning for President of the United States the first time? If you don't, here's another indisputable fact: Barack Obama ran on health reform as part of his platform. And he won. And the insane thing is, the second time he ran for president, he ran again on health reform, which still hadn't come into effect yet. And I'll be damned, he won again! Remember?!?!
In fact, when Obama started out with this health reform talk, what liberals really wanted was a single-payer system. That's where the negotiation started: with single-payer, which would be a truly nationalized means of healthcare insurance (though not a nationalized form of delivery of care; doctors would still be privatized). So when Obama and the Democrats floated the single-payer idea, conservatives went apoplectic. The Democrats calculated, probably correctly, that they wouldn't be able to pass a bill that enacted single-payer healthcare.
So they went back to the drawing board, and they came up with something called the public option. Remember the public option? The idea was that everyone would have the choice of private insurance, but on top of that we'd offer everyone the option to buy into a government-run insurance plan. It wouldn't be 'nationalized health care' unless you opted into the government plan. So Obama and the Democrats in Congress floated that idea, and negotiated it with Congressional Republicans, and realized that even that relatively liberal idea, a compromise on single-payer, mortified Republicans.
Yet again Democrats calculated that it would be in their best interest to compromise another liberal idea, and took one more rather significant step to the right. That was the point at which they arrived at what became Obamacare.
Just to reiterate, in case your memory is failing you since you read the first half of this article: Obamacare is Romneycare is Heritagecare, a center-right health policy idea.
So to be clear, amid the process of winning two presidential elections, Obama moved all the way to the right, adopting a conservative idea, for the signature legislation of his presidency. If you don't call that a compromise, I don't know what the word could possibly mean to you.
But it didn't stop there. Obamacare was written and rewritten, debated and redebated, disputed and redisputed, dragged through endless bipartisan committees. In fact, it went through the same kind of rigorous process that so many laws go through WHEN THEY BECOME LAWS. Which is to say, Congress, with Democratic majorities (because this is how elections work) passed the bill into law. Republicans immediately started spinning about how Obamacare was 'rammed down our throats,' except for the brief history I've just recounted above.
In the end, then, all the bitter disputation leading up to the government shutdown--all the whining about lack of compromise by Democrats--turns out to be little more in context than the last gasps of conservatives who lost both the elections and the policy battle.
If you want to win on the policy front, here's my suggestion: win the elections.
