Labor’s Phantom Opposition to Health Care Mandates

It’s no surprise that I found Ron Brownstein’s article mostly lamenting the highly partisan and polarized nature of recent political campaigns to be full of things that struck me as false equivalence. After all, I’m a non-credible partisan hack so that’s how I would see things. On the other hand, I was surprised to read this criticism of Obama:

[Obama] has ruffled some feathers by emphasizing personal responsibility in the African American community, and in July he infuriated the liberal “netroots” by voting for a congressional deal that provided legal immunity to telecommunications companies that had cooperated with Bush’s program of warrantless wiretapping after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But little of his agenda departs from conventional Democratic preferences. Initially he declared that to stabilize Social Security, “everything should be on the table,” including benefit cuts, but he’d renounced that position by last September. He has similarly diluted his earlier support for merit pay for teachers. He pointedly refused to join Hillary Clinton and John Edwards in crossing organized labor to propose requiring individuals to buy health insurance—though such a requirement is probably the key to a deal with the health-insurance industry for universal coverage.

About a trillion pixels have been spilled within progressive circles about Barack Obama’s refusal to endorse an individual health insurance mandate, and this is the first time I’ve heard anyone suggest that the issue here is that John Edwards and Hillary Clinton were “crossing organized labor” whereas Obama was kowtowing to their demands. On the contrary, it’s mostly been the reverse with Edwards and Clinton in line with the labor liberal orthodoxy and Obama, for better or for worse, bucking it.