Back to the Middle…and Around, Again

My good friend John Neffinger has an interesting post up at The Hufffington Post re: progressives and health care messaging. Here’s the crux of John’s argument:

The center does not hold without the left. If the left is not visible, then the center appears to be the left, and that makes moderate voters wary. Progressives could have gone out and created the political conditions to make elected Democrats reform our health insurance system – they could have advocated the Medicare-for-all approach they really wanted instead of throwing their lot in with the pragmatic center. If that had happened, we could be talking about bargaining away Medicare-for-all to end up with a robust public option, instead of bargaining away an already-gutted public option to end up with a bill that will force millions of Americans to buy from private insurance companies with nothing to control the premiums they are charged.

John makes the point that we can still turn this ship around, and perhaps more importantly, learn a lesson moving into the next big fight:

Later today immigration reform advocates will begin the long process of moving reform legislation through Congress. Realistically, they may hope to achieve an “earned path to citizenship” to bring illegal immigrants who have lived here for years out of the shadows, but requiring them to pay fines and back taxes and to meet an English fluency requirement. To reach that legislative goal, their equivalent of the public option, then someone needs to be visibly advocating something further left, the equivalent of single-payer: maybe something like unlimited amnesty with visitation for family members. (That is not impossible to argue for: we are a welcoming, pro-family country, built on immigration, and if we do a better job enforcing our employment laws then illegal immigrants won’t find work here and will deport themselves, etc.) The key point is that without some further leftward position to balance the debate, conservative Democrats will not be able to support the moderate approach that progressive reformers want them to, because it will literally be the most liberal position in the debate. We know how that works because that’s exactly what just happened on healthcare: conservative Democrats insisted on maintaining some daylight between their position and what is seen as the left’s position.