Ezra Klein has a good post describing how a victory with health care reform or climate change could work. The underlying strategy gets to a Mark Schmitt piece back in November titled the audacity of patience.
Here's a fact: We will not save health care this year… We might pass legislation improving the health-care system, expanding coverage to tens of millions of people, and instituting some needed delivery-side reforms. We might pass a bill that begins to clamp down on the carbon we emit. But, as Tim Fernholz argues, it doesn't end here. After eight years of stasis on these issues, it begins here…
Mark doesn't mention this explicitly, but another force for revisiting legislation is that, sometimes, things work. And then we make them bigger. Medicaid, for instance, has grown over the years. So too has Social Security. And S-CHIP. And, for that matter, the FDIC. Passing legislation doesn't settle the argument over its worth. But seeing it in action can often go a ways towards answering the question. And if the answer is that this approach appears to ease the problem at an acceptable cost, we often build on it.
Decisive moments do happen and there are costs to missing them. Also, maintaining pressure from the left is key to keeping the President working at the long game rather than settling into a new status quo. However, I think in human nature strongly inclines us to see decisive moments as a way around the frustrations of complexity and waiting. I think the same holds for Iran. It does appear the protests are diminishing for now as a natural consequence of the government showing unity and a willingness to deploy force.
The Islamic Republic has been delegitimized to an important extent, that said the Myanmar regime has managed to hold on quite some time after losing an election. I don’t think Iran’s leadership has the unity of Burma or the potential to establish performance legitimacy as the PRC has after Tiananmen. Iran also has a notable and destabilizing youth bulge. These factors make me think there will be other opportunities. Winning will ultimately require some combination of friends in high places or splintering/outgunning the Basij and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
What’s the U.S. role in this? Tricky, but we can’t make it about us. Ultimately I’m still open to talking to the government because I’m open to talking to anyone. That said, this greatly reinforces the importance of directly engaging the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and not the farce of a President. (Someone on the Post Op-ed page was arguing for that, but I can’t remember who so I can’t cite. I think it might have been Jim Hoagland, who was correct to chide the administration for a specific comment that Mousavi would likely mean a similar foreign policy, but on the whole I think that the misstep was an exception in an otherwise tuned policy.)
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