They blew it, so drop it

Democrats, dazed and confused, sat around at week’s end arguing about how to proceed, or not, on the fading signature of health care. Three schools of thought predominated.

The first was to press forward on the theory that Democrats were as right about the importance of the issue the day after the Massachusetts debacle as they had been the day before.

They could try to pass the Senate bill in the House. Or they could daringly try to use the budget reconciliation maneuver to get by with a simple majority vote in the Senate. Or they could simply proceed with their conference committee and let the Republicans obstruct.

If Democrats are going to get beaten up over the issue, or so this theory goes, then at least they should pass a bill to reap the benefits they believe it will provide, or, failing that, force the Republicans to stand in the way of those benefits.

That assumes tangible benefits will be evident by the next election or at least the one after. It is a tenuous assumption.

Health care reform won’t bear fruit quickly. It folds out over years. The second school of thought — the one, alas, that I’d choose — is to say the heck with it all.

Some call this punting. I call it turning the ball over on downs.

It’s for Democrats to say that, once again, they didn’t sell this initiative properly and that strong and solid majorities are clearly entrenched in resistance. It’s for Democrats to say it’s time to stop letting this issue suck all the air out of every room.

Only then could we turn our more productive national focus to the general economy and these weary foreign conflicts.

White House aides say the flaw in this school of thought is that Democrats would sustain all the pain of tackling health care without any of the gain. But I say again that there’s no gain in stubbornly adhering to something you’ve mismanaged and that is overwhelmingly resisted.

No one is passionately wedded to the substantive policy of these health care bills passed in the House and Senate. They’re too long, too technical, too compromised, too fine-tuned by intricate private negotiation and entirely too vague and intimidating to the American people.

Extending health insurance to more than 40 million uninsured Americans sounds like a moral imperative — and it is, really. A person shouldn’t be walking around this rich country with no insurance against illness.

But universal health insurance tends to sound like a moral imperative only until you start talking about paying for it with cuts in Medicare for seniors and with higher taxes on the more generous private health insurance plans.

All of that poses a public opinion challenge that cannot be met by Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Rahm Emanuel as they take a thousand-page bill into a private office, occasionally to bring in Ben Nelson of Nebraska to see what manner of extortion of the taxpayers he might require for his support.

The third school of thought is advocated by only one man, so far as I know. But that happens to be President Obama.

He wants Democrats and Republicans — yes, together — to identify the easiest and most agreeable elements of health care reform and pass those.

One problem all along is that Obama obviously wanted only a bill — some bill, any bill — so that he could say he had addressed health care.

That kind of detachment was one of the many basic tactical misplays.

Politics must be about people, not bills. The whole thing has been blown. I think you just admit that. Just shoot straight with the American people, you know? That’s the bigger lesson of Massachusetts.

John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of “High Wire,” a book about Bill Clinton’s first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@ arkansasnews.com.