The eventual upside of unspeakable greed

Intentionally or not, yesterday the NY Times spotlighted the seemingly surreal politics of the Senate finance committee's public, as well as behind-the-scenes, machinations: "Ms. Snowe was a main author of the bill but she had never committed to voting for it."

I've got to give her credit. Unlike Chuck Grassley -- who perhaps bailed out a tad too early, although, on the other hand, Iowa's Republican primary politics are light-years removed from Maine's -- Snowe played this thing beautifully, and she now hangs like Damocles' sword over a merging Senate bill, and beyond.

What will, what would, what might Olympia do? -- Is she to be pro or con?: That is the question, evermore, if I may mix my bards.

Snowe didn't so much telegraph her ironic power, as she jackhammered it. "I would hope that we could maintain the integrity of the score of this package," she rather unsubtly suggested at one point yesterday, and otherwise her ultimatums were even more vivid: "My vote today is my vote today," she said. "It doesn’t forecast what my vote will be tomorrow."

Finally, just in case Harry Reid and Chris Dodd and Max Baucus were still fuzzy on this whole Who's in charge question, she noted "There are many, many miles to go in this legislative journey."

So how can one Republican senator become so powerful amidst an army of "filibuster-proof" Democrats? That's the question we keep hearing, but in the answer there's something akin to the testing of a sore neck: we already know the painful result. Yet we ask and ask, while pondering with a disagreeable certitude.

Dennis Kucinich cut through the b.s. of all this fraudulent marveling weeks ago, merely because he's one of the very few voices on Capitol Hill who can afford to do so, politically. In a conference call with the group "Democrats Abroad," Kucinich noted that it's his "opinion that the Blue Dogs are doing exactly what the White House wants them to do" -- without adding (perhaps because he reckoned this was already known by the politically mindful) that that's because the White House already knew where the Senate was inexorably heading.

At any rate, Kucinich then got to the meat of it: "The public option was a trial balloon. I cannot stress how cynical and brutal the politics are.... Anyone looking for the public option needs to look someplace else. It is not going to happen and anybody who says it is is in fantasy land."

True, Kucinich had repeated himself: political cynicism and political brutality are one in the same. Too many rank-and-file progressives make the mistake of believing that politics is the pursuit of public-policy virtue, just as many a layman makes the mistake of thinking that law is the pursuit of justice. If you want high-minded philosophy, go back to college; if you want Profiles in Courage, go to the library. Otherwise, focus on reality, and political reality is, and always has been -- from Washington to Lincoln to FDR to the present -- that politics is cynically brutal and brutally cynical.

With, however, a rather nice twist, which Kucinich then emphasized: "We have to take a long-term perspective on this. Eight, ten years down the road. This is a civil rights movement we have here. I think we are going to have single payer in the states one day." I think as he thinks, but there's always a downside: "Unfortunately there are going to be many people who get sick, go broke and die before we get there."

Whatever Snowe manages to successfully bless in the Senate bill, it unquestionably will not include a public option, as we've come to know it. The majority leader -- no, not Snowe, Harry Reid -- has, according to yesterday's Washington Post, already signaled his next play: He "has told colleagues he is reluctant to produce a measure that proves too divisive within his caucus." And we all know what that means, especially when only 30 Democratic senators have been willing to send him a pro-public option letter.

But, look at the upside, as Kucinich, in his own, unusually unquixotic way was attempting: If this cynical Congress can at least dispense with the insurance brutalities of preexisting-condition denials and annual caps and gender discrimination and the like, then the challenge of a public option (or single-payer) will stand alone in the contentious public sphere, uncomplicated by these other assorted issues.

The health-care debate, that is, will be a cleaner one. And, as premiums continue to climb, an easier one.

Remember, most Americans already have health insurance and a sizable majority of them say they like the insurance they have. Furthermore, in one recent poll 80 percent of even self-identifying liberals said they'd be content with a health-care bill that excluded a public option. So yes, quite naturally the accumulated politics of a public option have been brutally unfavorable.

But just allow those insurance companies a little more time to crank up their rates. As Kucinich observed, we haven't arrived at the endgame -- not yet. We have the insurance companies' unspeakable greed on our side.