You Can Support Jim Cooper. You Can Support a Good Health Care Bill. You Can’t Do Both.

What’s most striking to me about Joe Klein’s leaked JournoList messages are the mash notes to Jim Cooper, the right-wing nominal Democrat who played a major role in destroying health care reform in 1993 and is doing what he can to make any bill that passes in 2009 be as expensive and ineffectual as possible. To Klein — as with, one suspects, all too many Democratic Villagers — it’s more important that something that can be called “health care reform” passes Congress than that the bill actually be any good.