It’s Time to Not Get Financial Reform Done

Nick Beaudrot on how to un-demoralize (re-moralize?) the base:

Banks. And Jobs.

While the absolute level of unemployment does have an impact on elections, the 1934 midterms show that change in unemployment is the more important number. If things are at least headed in the right direction, Dems will get some credit. Past that, it’s time to get financial reform done. Keep it off the calendar until all the budget bills pass, and then dare Republicans to tie up the Senate to stop it. Do they really want to go into the election as the defenders of Wall Street, the Credit Card industry, payday lenders, and sketchy mortgage originators? I doubt it will do them any good, and it will give Democratic candidates in swing districts something to run on that should be quite popular. At the moment, it looks like losses are coming, but there’s a big difference between losing 10 House seats and losing 35.

I’m agreed at the conceptual level, but I think the key insight here is to make financial reform the thing you’re willing to not get done. The whole problem with the health care issue, from the get go, has been that the reform push was “too big to fail” to the Joe Liebermans of the world can hold everything hostage, threatening disaster for the progressive project, unless they get their way. The genius of financial regulation is that while it’s important to fix this it’s actually not critical that it be done in 6 months as opposed to 18 or 24 months. This is an issue where if a block of 44 Senators want to filibuster you can draw a line in the sand, let them filibuster and run around the country complaining about it. That’s a campaign issue. That’s a time to show the base some gutty feisty fightiness. An opportunity, in other words, for people to see their president fighting hard. And also to see that a hard-fighting president isn’t enough—he needs a congress that’s willing to vote for progressive bills.

Saying you’re determined to get something done amounts to saying you’re determined to make whatever compromises are necessary to get a bill on your desk. What’s needed is determination to fight for what’s right, whether it can get sixty votes or not.