Hullabaloo

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

 
Principles

by digby

Yesterday, Democratic Representative Mike Capuano, who is running for Ted Kennedy's seat seemed to have forgotten that he is running in a Democratic primary when he reacted this way to his rival Martha Coakley's statement that she would vote against any health care bill that contains the Stupak Amendment:

Capuano, giddy over a discernible difference with the presumptive front-runner, called Coakley’s comment “manna from heaven.”

“I find it interesting and amazing and she would have stood alone among all the pro-choice members of Congress, all the members of the Massachusetts delegation,” Capuano said in an interview. “She claims she wants to honor Ted Kennedy’s legacy on health care. It’s pretty clear that a major portion of this was his bill.”

“If she’s not going to vote for any bill that’s not perfect, she wouldn’t vote for any bill in history,” Capuano added. “She would have voted against Medicare, the civil rights bill. Every advancement this country has made has been based on bills that had flaws in them ... Realism is something you have to deal with in Washington.”

I wondered how that was going to go down among Democrats in Massachusetts and it seems they weren't too impressed:

US Representative Michael E. Capuano, in a significant departure from his forceful arguments a day earlier, said today that he would vote against a final health care bill if it includes a provision restricting federal funding for abortion.

It seems that everyone in the media is knocking Coakley for failing to be "pragmatic" and making the perfect the enemy of the good for saying she would vote against the bill on principle. As Capuano indicated yesterday before he was brought back to reality The Globe editorial board also seems to think that even anything but a solemn promise to vote for any bill the congress finally throws out there is a betrayal of everything Ted Kennedy stood for. Except Kennedy had a very recent history of recanting his support for even his own health care bills, and for reasons less principled than civil rights:

When the Senate voted last summer to provide Medicare patients with prescription drug coverage, a fiery Senator Edward M. Kennedy hailed the bill as "the greatest action in a generation to mend the broken promise of Medicare."

Now, it is Kennedy complaining about broken promises, after Republican leaders took the bill Kennedy painstakingly negotiated and morphed it into an industry-friendly "Medicare reform" package that opens the 38-year-old entitlement program to competition with private insurers. The senator, who had spent months cajoling Democrats to back his version of the legislation, was back on the floor this week with equal passion, pleading with his colleagues to stop the measure he charged had been "hijacked" by Republicans.

Seems even Teddy let the perfect be the enemy of the good at times. After all, it may have ended up hugely benefiting PHarma and costing the taxpayers many billions, but nobody can say that seniors didn't get at least some help with their prescriptions, no matter what a boondoggle it ended up being. Under the current logic, it sounds almost quaint that he even quibbled with such a silly complaint.

It's very telling that with all this talk about how pro-choice women can't be stubborn about their little needs, there is nobody out there complaining that Stupak and his crowd are making the perfect the enemy of the good. He and the other "pro-life" Democrats are commonly and without criticism portrayed as voting for their principles, as if they have no choice in the matter. (Indeed, the whole argument over funding is defined by the fact that "pro-life" advocates apparently cannot be forced to pay taxes for something that goes against their principles.

Apparently some principles are just more important than others.

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digby 11/11/2009 11:00:00 AM |