On top of that, the always-valuable chance to say “suck it” to Republicans and their death panel nonsense. It’s not anything real, but I’d be remiss in leaving it off the list.
Digby on why everybody’s still pissed:
It’s fairly obvious that the administration and the Democrats
always saw the public option as a negotiating chip and fully expected
to throw it in at the end. There’s a reason why Obama hedged on it for
the last six months. In fact,it seems likely to me that Reid put it
back on life support just so they could ritually sacrifice it. (He knew
he didn’t have 60 and needed something to “compromise” with.)So,
they knew going in that they were going to use the old “if liberals
hate it it must be good” marketing ploy, both to get the Senate princes
on board as well as sell it to Real American Independents (the new
“values voters.”)What they didn’t expect was that the wider public
would actuallylike the
damned thing, which made that play a lot more risky. And if public
opinion doesn’t come back up pretty quickly now, that’s a risk that may
not have paid off.
Emphasis mine, somewhat related to what I wrote about last night, which is that the political conversation is so profoundly fucked that we don’t expect the DFH’s to be right when they provide ample polling data that suggests OMG PSYCHO LIBERAL positions like “everyone should be able to get to the doctor without getting taken up the tradesman’s entrance by some jackass in‘accounts receivable’ every time” are actually popular. If you put single payer out there tomorrow you’d have a solid majority in favor and you’d have every pundit and halfbright mummy’s boy with an Ivy League degree opining that the 10 percent screaming with teabags are really the sensible ones in America.
A.