Does Bad+1=Good?

As a Democrat, you get used to hearing people argue that X proposal or Y candidate is good because it or he is better than the Republican plan or the Republican candidate.

And I'm sure that's true. Even with all the mayhem Obama is causing, he's doing more good than John McCain would do in office. But is a marginal improvement enough? Is it acceptable to millions of gay Americans, for example, that Obama appears to be breaking his promises on DOMA and DADT, that they can't get married and can't serve in the military, but at least they can put their spouse's name on their passport?

Matt Yglesias argues that the Baucus health care bill is better than our current system. Matt is a smart guy, and if he says that's the case, I'm prone to believe him. Matt says than were we to adopt Baucus' plan we'd have a better health care system than what we have now - since we're currently the worst in the world - but even with the Baucus plan we'd be worse than every other country in the world except Switzerland. Does that make the plan, thus, "good"?

I've been wrestling with this concept of "better than Bush" and "Better than Reagan" for years. And perhaps I've found the chink in the rhetorical armor: Better is only good when it's the best you can do. Or as the adage goes, don't let the best be the enemy of the good. But what that adage means is: If good is all you can get, then take it. It does not mean: If you can have the best, settle for less.

It's clear that President Obama could have led the charge on health care reform eight months ago - or at least after the stimulus package was passed - and he chose not to. Had Obama taken the lead on his signature issue back in February, he'd have been at 62% in the polls, the Republicans would still be a dispirited mess, Democrats would still be motivated from the election, and Obama could have had any health care reform package he wanted.

But things didn't turn out that way.

Obama squandered his opportunity for real reform, he broke his own campaign promises (as he's done repeatedly on other issues), and now, we're told, there's no chance for a better bill than the Baucus bill. Well, I'm sorry, but if that's true - and it's not clear it is - it's only true because our president refused to lead on his signature issue.

With all due respect to the president, since Joe and I did support him in the primaries and raised nearly $50,000 for the man, a strategy of "I'll always settle for one step better than total crap" is not the kind of presidential thinking we should reward. If we agree that the Baucus plan is good because there's no chance for anything better (because Congress and the President chose not to do their jobs), then we reinforce the notion that it is acceptable for the administration, and Congress, to take a four year siesta on legislating - on leading the nation. We agree to four more years of Republican-lite.

I'm sorry, but I am not as pessimistic on America as our president and his top advisers seem to be. I do not believe that the American people are so stupid that you can't explain to them why our current system sucks and why your campaign promises are better. But the thing is, you'll never win unless you try.

So, no, the Baucus plan is not "better" than what we have now, because "what we have now" should have been legislation passed by the Congress and signed by the president reforming our entire health care system in accordance with his campaign promises.

If we enable the president's aversion to lead, then all we will get for the next four years, if not eight, is the same kind of crap we're being handed today. At some point, friends in trouble need an intervention, not more enabling. And if the White House doesn't turn this disaster around soon, Barack Obama's intervention by his friends on the left of the left will have only just begun.