I'm a regular reader of Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight Web site, but this post really alarmed me ... and not just for what it says about the prospects of health care reform and the public option. Silver discusses at some length how "smart" Lie-berman (as I shall now continue to call him) was in refusing to accept last weekend's compromise proposal to substitute early buy-ins to Medicare for the public option.
I think this speaks volumes, sadly, about how we define the word "smart" as it applies to politics. Lie-berman's position is only "smart" as it relates to his short-term interest in slicing off the hands of the liberals who have fed his career, as well as earning the financial gratitude of his contributors in the health care industry (and just in time for his re-election campaign in 2012).
It's "smart" only in terms of his self-interest. The national interests, including those of the people of Connecticut, don't enter into his calculations at all. For that matter, neither do the interests of his caucus; if his views were really a matter of "conscience," he would not have waited to express them until the perfect moment for skewering the liberals he detests had arrived--at the end of the legislative process, and on the cusp of an election year. The case for throwing him out of the Democratic caucus has never been stronger.
As for the rest of us (and by that I mean Americans, not just Democrats), may God or something save us from that kind of "smartness." If history teaches us anything, it teaches us the folly of only focusing on the next fifteen minutes.
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