As the health care opera wends into its (hopefully) final act a fatalistic sentiment has been cropping up more and more. This feeling has been given new vigor by the possible Red upset in Massachusetts’ special Senate election on Tuesday. Should Scott Brown win and finish the rest of Ted Kennedy’s term the extremely watered down but nevertheless hugely beneficial health care bill will be thrown – yet again – into doubt. In the event he prevails Tuesday the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments will be deafening.
I obviously don’t know who is going to win on Tuesday. Nor do I know what’s going to happen in November. But I would like to point out that right now the most likely scenario is that sometime in the next year, possibly Tuesday possibly in November, the Blues are going to lose one or more Senate seats. (It remains a mystery why you see the number sixty so often next to the word “Democrats” when one of those is that notoriously amoral prima donna Joe Lieberman and a few more hail from Red states and are more conservative than liberal in their voting patterns.) Assuming that happens the Democrats will be faced with a rather stark choice: rewrite the Senate’s lunatic filibuster rules or watch any and all legislating grind to a halt.
What they chose to do, whether or not rewriting the rules is even a realistic possibility, is basically unknown. Even experienced Washington hands couldn’t give you good odds for the simple reason that we are in an unprecedented situation. Frustration is running very high and that can make for interesting times.
But I take comfort in something George Carlin once said: “Even in a fake democracy people oughta get what they want once in awhile”. That has long struck me as one of the most profound and insightful comments about our politics ever uttered. Our system of representative government, in all its various formulations going all the way back to when white people started getting off the boats four hundred years ago, has always favored the Haves over the Have Nots. But every once in a while something meaningful is accomplished, otherwise the system would’ve collapsed in on itself long ago.
And if Scott Brown wins on Tuesday and that dilapidated but important health care bill dies with his victory speech, so what? It won’t alter the two realities that have been colliding on the Democrats ever since Obama took office last year. The first is that they have a natural majority in terms of the voters (this is especially true as disenchantment with the Republican Party remains high). The second is that there are still enough Reds running around Washington to obstruct things. With each passing election the voters themselves get younger, darker and more liberal on social issues. There is no future in the current configuration of the Republican Party. All it means is more suffering in the meantime, and while that’s not a good thing it’s hardly the end of the world.
None of which is to say that the Reds are to be underestimated in any given election. They remain very potent and competitive. But the overall trends remain very much against them and there’s no evidence whatsoever that those are about to change. The people will get at least some of what they want, whether it happens sooner or later is the only real question.
