One Half Cheer For Max Baucus

The sad thing is that, on health care, while Baucus wasn’t good he was a little better than the generic conservative Democrat, and that little bit allowed the PPACA to pass:

Most people think of Baucus as the guy who cut all those awful deals with lobbyists for the health care industry—and who let negotiations in the Finance Committee bog down in the summer of 2009, exposing the effort to a political backlash that very nearly killed the entire enterprise. I think there’s a lot to those critiques, although neither one is as clear-cut as it might seem. At least some of those deals were necessary in order to get legislation through Congress. The pharmaceutical lobby could have killed health care reform all by itself, if it had chosen to do so. It didn’t.¹ As for the Finance Committee negotiations, Baucus was naïve to think he ever had a shot at winning over Republicans like Charles Grassley, the ranking minority member. But the painstaking effort to win over Republicans gave cover to more conservative Democrats who ended up supporting the bill.

But Baucus’ key contribution to health care reform was the one almost nobody remembers. In 2008, Baucus issued a lengthy white paper outlining a health reform plan similar to what other Democrats, including then-nominee Obama, had proposed. The details of the plan weren’t that important. The signal it sent was. In 1993 and 1994, the previous attempt at health care reform, the chairman of the Finance Committee was the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He had little interest in, or patience with, health care reform—and that ambivalence (some would say it was more like hostility) was a major obstacle to enactment. With that 2008 white paper, Baucus put down a clear marker: He was in. Whatever his reasons—a desire to serve the public, a determination to protect his turf—that decision made possible everything that happened afterwards.

For obvious reasons this pretty much exhausts anything good I have to say about Max Baucus, but it’s something.

I’m open to being persuaded that I’m missing something, but wasn’t Moynihan (in the context of his constituency) a pretty terrible senator? I’m guessing that his WAR might have been even lower than Feinstein’s.