I don’t believe in getting people worked up when it’s not necessary. Energy is a finite resource, and when you don’t have a lot to work with anyway (especially relative to the opposition), the key to successful organizing is selectively applying carefully targeted effort to achieve maximum impact.

It’s like the difference between hitting your shoulder or your forearm and hitting your funnybone with an equivalent amount of pressure. The first two you might barely feel, but the third sends you through the roof.

When you send the DCCC into a month-long freak out with a few regional polls that anticipate the country’s mood on health care a week before the Coakley election, or 42 members of Congress insert language into the Congressional record at the behest of lobbyists to counter a couple of blog posts, or Nobel prize winning NYT columnists are called into service to refute you, you know you’ve hit the sweet spot.

And it’s amazing what can be achieved when you stake out your ground early and just keep standing there.

Last June 23, we stated our position on health care reform. We said were going to ask members of Congress to commit to vote against any health care bill that didn’t have a public option. It wasn’t an original thought — we were simply echoing an effort that was already going on within the progressive caucus.

We said “okay, you gave up on single payer, so let’s agree to draw this line here. Because right now, everybody says the lobbyists shouldn’t be able to drag Congress over it. And when this is all over, we’ll see how well everyone’s words match up with their actions.”

I asked everyone who works for FDL for their opinion before we started. Everyone wholeheartedly supported the effort. And the only people who were upset within the larger FDL community were the single payer folks who didn’t think it went far enough. But it was never meant as a policy prescription, it was rather a firewall against something that was almost universally acknowledged at the time to mean that health care reform had failed and had turned into a bailout for the medical industrial complex. They thought that the line should be drawn much sooner. But it was the difference between kicking a field goal from the 70 yard line vs. the 50 yard line. One might be possible — the other simply wasn’t.

(As a side note, Ryan Grim recently asked me if I’d do anything differently if I had it all to do over again.  I told him that I thought his story on the PhRMA deal memo was the single most important piece of reporting in the entire health care debate, and that its impact was profound.  If I’d known what was going on from the start I would have run the campaign against the PhRMA deal, but in mid-August when it first appeared it looked like we were too far down the road on the public option to switch campaigns.  Nobody knew the process would stretch out this long.  If I could do it all again, I might have switched to breaking up the PhRMA deal.)

Anyway, when I was flying home last year from Netroots Nation, I sat with Kevin Drum. I’ve always had a good relationship with Kevin since I invited him to the first Kobepallooza in 2005. We talked about health care and I said said I didn’t think health care was worth passing if it included a mandate to buy private insurance, but not a public option. He thought it was. But we both knew then where we would wind up. Neither of us has changed our position since then.

Kevin continues to be a firm advocate for me changing mine:

In absolute terms, Jane may not represent a huge number of people or a vast amount of money, but she certainly seems like the linchpin of a disaffected left that could easily represent the difference between success and failure for a bill that’s likely to come down to one or two votes. Speaking for myself, I sure wish she could look past the disappointments — most of which were sadly inevitable — and instead focus all that energy on the big picture of what the Democratic healthcare bill means both for real people right now and for the likelihood of further reform in the future.

Our position has nothing to do with disappointment, disaffection or disillusionment. It was a clear policy position staked out in June of 2009 and reiterated for the past 9 months. Subsequently, on July 31, 60 members of Congress signed a letter agreeing to vote against any bill that didn’t have a public option, and the response was blogospheric-wide cheer that raised $430,000 in August in support of that commitment.

Many people who supported that effort at the time have now decided that we should change that position, because they have moved on. And they all too frequently mischaracterize our efforts in order to counter them, deriding them as “tantrum-throwing,” “anti-health care reform” or “marginal.”

Well, to the extent that we’ve had any impact at all, it’s due to the fact that there is widespread distrust of the Senate health care bill. There’s nothing “marginal” about a position reflected by 48% of the public who want Congress to “vote against a health care bill similar to President Obama’s” while only 43% want them to vote for it, per Gallup.  Support drops further in the Rasmussen poll when the question doesn’t include the President’s name — 53% oppose the bill and 42% support it.

A small group of pundits appear to have misled themselves into believing that the opinions they hold, which echo those of a self-interested DC political class,  are widely reflected by the public.

If that was true, Martha Coakley would be a Senator.

The fact of the matter is that you don’t run a large political blog with a core audience of people who follow the health care debate closely, and hold on to that audience even when you wind up at odds with a popular President and the Democratic establishment, unless you’re channeling very deep and powerful currents in the country at large.  Those who think that the Senate health care bill should pass because the Democrats need a political “victory” don’t seem to understand that they are the ones who actually represent the teeninest, tiniest proportion of the country imaginable.

When we started the public option campaign, when we asked people to donate money, we made a pact with our community to see it through to the end.  If we have to whip health care, if we have to run a campaign to enforce the pledge made by members of Congress to vote against a bill without a public option, we will.  It may not succeed and I wouldn’t kid anyone about its chances of holding 65 votes, but we’ve already got the page set up — it’s a thing of beauty, replete with primary filing deadlines and each signature that appeared on the July 31 letter.

If it looks like they’ve got the votes to pass the Senate bill, we’re ready, with an arsenal we’ve been assembling for the past 9 months.  We’ll reactivate the One Voice for Choice campaign, too — because there’s nothing “progressive” about a health care bill that auctions off women’s reproductive rights.  Both Democratic leadership and the pro-choice members of the House who promised that Stupak would be “fixed” in the final bill should be reminded of that fact.

And no, Nelson isn’t a fix, just ask Stephen Schneck, director of the Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies at Catholic University of America.  Yesterday he said “I actually think the Senate bill will more effectively prohibit federal funds from going to abortion…that legislation will actually reduce the demand for abortion in the United States.”  There were any number of ways Democratic leadership could’ve gotten around Stupak if they’d addressed his letter in June of 2009.  “Sorry, ladies, too late now” is not a reasonable excuse.

Reproductive rights are part of the Democratic Party platform, no matter how many boy pundits shake their fists and say otherwise.

We would do it because that’s what we said we’d do, and it’s what our community wants.  Over 20,000 people ultimately took our survey on health care, and the numbers didn’t change significantly from where they were when we reported the results at 14,000 — 91.7% think it’s “important” or “very important” that a health care bill include a public option, and 76.3% think members of Congress who break their pledge to vote “no” should face primary challenges.  A full 79.7% think it’s “important” or “very important” that the health care bill contain no restrictions on abortion coverage, and 82.3% think that any member who casts a vote to restrict abortion coverage should face a primary.

As I noted when we reported the results in January, it was widely rumored that House progressives insisted on pushing the vote past most of the primary filing deadlines before they’d agree to vote for the Senate bill.  They’re well aware of what awaits them in their own communities if they cast this vote.

But I see no real evidence that it’s going to be necessary at this point.  House leadership is whipping hard, in spite of Jim Clyburn’s assurances to the contrary, and all the momentum is in the other direction.  Both Mike Arcuri and Jerry McNerney were “yes” votes, and both have said they’ll vote “no.”  Stupak has five votes he didn’t have when he wrote his June 19 letter, including Brad Ellsworth who was whipping against Stupak for his own “compromise” (basically Capps with stronger rhetoric) before the first House vote.  Stupak is only picking up support as members of Congress scramble for shade in the wake of a truly “career-ending” vote that spells electoral armageddon for the fall.

Does anyone seriously think Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t call for a vote immediately if, as she says, she actually had them?

But like I said at the beginning of this post, I don’t believe in asking people to do something when it’s not necessary. And I don’t see any evidence that whipping this bill is.  In the mean time, I support efforts to get members of Congress to try and fix the bill, and hope they do what they’re supposed to do at this point in the process — play hardball for their votes and insist on making the bill better as a criteria for committing them.

It’s something that Bart Stupak certainly understands.

In the mean time, we’ll be working on urging Congress to pass student loan reform, something they need to do before they pass the next budget in April and the reconciliation instructions expire.  And if they try to pass health care through reconciliation without student loan reform — which means they deny colleges across the country and millions of students the help they need for another year — everyone affected by that decision will no doubt be pulled into the fray too.

Fighting for student loan reform is a positive use of energy.  It’s a clear “win” for the Democrats, the White House and the students and colleges who desperately need it.  It’s an even bigger win for President Obama, who had the courage to sketch it out as a primary goal of his administration and has never wavered in his support for it.

And as for health care? I don’t buy the “now or never, this or nothing” arguments that are being used to scare people into supporting the bill.  The only reason they’re addressing health care now is because the system is broken, and WalMart (and other corporations) need Congress to do something to fix it. That’s not going to change, whether or not they pass a face-saving bill that makes health care unaffordable and doesn’t take effect until 2014. And they will hopefully understand at that point that lying to progressives and triangulating against your own campaign promises (and the people who believed them) is not a recipe for success.

The only thing the Democrats will succeed in doing  by passing this bill is decimating their majority and shooting themselves in the foot, because turning over control of the House to Republicans in 2010 actually will stop meaningful health care reform from passing.

As for FDL, we’ll continue to maintain the position we’ve held since June 23 and insist that a health care bill must actually achieve its goal of helping people, rather than the the unregulated monopolies who exploit them.  That’s not being a “purist.”  It’s just being pragmatic.

Ultimately, I think the current bill will collapse under the weight of its own inadequacies no matter what we do.  And until I see signs that it has any realistic chance of passing in its present form, we’ll continue to devote our energies in places where we feel we can make a difference.