The Public Option's "Witness for the Prosecution" Moment

...From Mark Bowen

Trustee, Long Beach Community College District

The Public Option's "Witness for the Prosecution" Moment

 

September 29,  2009

 

The Baucus Committee has just voted down the first amendment to provide for the public option.  We stand at the moment of truth in which we who support it must put its opponents on the spot with the obvious question that we have thus far failed to confront them with.  We've been losing the debate because we don't have a Charles Laughton in our corner to make effective cross examinations of the right's talking points about the dangers of the public option.  That has to change.

 

Right now, the key talking point is the fear that an insurance plan that doesn't have to make obscene profits at the expense of the American public would have an "unfair advantage" over the private plans, which will be destroyed.   This cuts to the heart of one of the key distinctions between progressives and right-wingers, as identified by columnist Jonathan Chait.  "Liberal support for bigger government", he writes "is entirely rooted in what liberals believe to be its practical effects…. if liberals were to be convinced those programs failed to achieve their intended goals, they would withdraw support for them"

 

At the start of the debate, I remember making such a "practical effects" argument to many of the liberals whose instinct was to reject any plan that isn't Single Payer.  I argued, in effect, that the right-wing talking point about the "unfair advantage" is accurate, and that's exactly why Single Payer advocates should support it.  Once it becomes apparent how much better it is than the bloodsucking corporate insurers, everybody will eventually freely choose the public option, it will cover everybody, and…. Voila!!  We've got Single Payer.  But the difference between my prediction that this is what will happen, and the same prediction being made by its opponents lies in Chait's observation.  Suppose private insurers get their act together and show that they can deliver for-profit insurance to everybody more affordably than the public option.  Nobody would be more pleased than myself to be proved wrong. 

 

Compare this to the right-wingers' assertions, that they're always so sure of, that corporate bureaucracies are always more efficient than government ones, and that everything the government touches turns to crap.  Most will refuse to consider, even hypothetically, what happens if these assertions are proved wrong.  Remember, we're talking about people who are never wrong.  Regardless of what data shows, if they heard Rush Limbaugh say something, it has to be true. 

 

This is why its even more interesting how Chait contrasts the aforementioned liberal pragmatism with the dogma of a libertarian conservative like Andrew Sullivan:  "If faster growth were caused by a bigger government, a conservative would still back smaller government and individual freedom"  Notice he isn't acknowledging he might be wrong (we know that'll never happen), but his candor in the hypothetical situation in which he is is still impressive.  If I ever meet Chait, I'd love to hear how he got even this much out of him, and if sodium pentothal was involved.

 

We are thus at the "Witness For The Prosecution" moment, in which the right is caught in the web of their own lies.  For years they have asserted that government programs don't work, and now are fighting desperately for the survival of their beloved plutocracy by bemoaning the fact that such a program WILL work.  The limits of their deceitful rhetoric have them on the ropes, but progressives can't seem to deliver the knockout blow because they won't ask the obvious question that a master litigator would ask in his cross examination of a witness so clearly caught in her own lies.  I can hear Charles Laughton delivering the classic line:  "Were you lying then, are you lying now, or are you all just a bunch of habitual liars?"

 

The right must be forced to pick which lie they want to stick with.  If they want to stick with "government programs don't work", then they must explain why they fear the public option  Nobody will choose it, and its existence will be an irrelevancy.  If they prefer the "unfair advantage" argument, then they must acknowledge the extent of their extremism,  which has risen to the level of defending a privatized system that even they, in so many words, are admitting is inferior.  Either way, we win, and the case against the public option falls apart, at least for all those Americans who care more about results than ideology.  But it can only happen when we find our Charles Laughton to sit at our table in court.

 

 

 

Mark Bowen

 

Trustee, Long Beach Community College District