Primaries and Pressure

By Dave Anderson:

Matthew Yglesias makes the very simple point about healthcare reform in a non-reconcilable fashion --- it really comes down to a handful of centrist Democrats on whether or not they want to actually follow through on a multi-generation promise of the Democratic Party, or whether they want to do other things including fight for better parking spaces for themselves:

the most important known unknown in health reform is nothing to do with the Obama administration�s tactics and everything to do with the actual subjective premises of the handful of moderate Democrats who control the balance of power in the Senate. If Max Baucus, Kent Conrad, Mary Landrieu, etc. want to see a universal health care plan enacted there�s nothing stopping them. But if they don�t want to see a universal health care plan enacted, neither the left nor the White House has any particularly impressive leverage to use against them.

Right now, about the only leverage liberals have on conservative Democrats is the credible threat of a primary challenge. That threat becomes much more credible if a small gang of five or six are identified as the highly visible killers of healthcare reform.

The Political Wire passes along a report that one of the Democratic hold-outs, Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas may be facing a serious primary challenger.  This may change her political calculation to respond only to conservative pressure as there is not a strong Republican bench in the state that could challenge her, but a primary challenge has the potential to knock her out if there are enough pissed off Democrats who actually believed her and the party that it was serious and contrastingly better about healthcare issues for the past three generations.

The same dynamic may be happening in the House as well. Down with Tyranny is leaking a rumor that Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN-5) may be getting a primary challenger in the near future. The primary challenger�s main issue will be active support for healthcare reform. Recent polling shows Cooper�s actions as one of the Blue Dog Dems is not playing to his district (which voted 3 points more Obama than the nation as a whole ) and it is not translating into popularity, either absolutely or relatively. He is in a solid Democratic district and is actively working to make himself exceedingly vulnerable to a primary challenger.   I�ll kick in a few bucks for if the primary challenger meets minimal competency standards.

Pressure and push back should work to convince people that it is no longer 1994 and that political arbitage should be most advantageous for the party that is in the minority and not the majority.