—FORMER SEIU PRESIDENT
ANDY STERN
Congress. Pundits across town
thought the whole enterprise was
dead. It was the outside game
that revived it.
The only possibility was to use
a process known as reconciliation,
a controversial legislative maneuver which requires only a majority
vote. Pingree and Polis urged Reid
to use reconciliation and put the
public option on the floor.
But instead of lobbying Reid
alone, the freshmen partnered
with outside progressive groups
who ran national petitions and
lobbied other members to sign.
Hundreds of thousands of people
signed the petition, along with
scores of Democratic members of
Congress. Each time a new senator
signed on, momentum grew. Eventually, more than 50 senators were
HUFFINGTON 09.09.12
“WE WERE
WATCHING THE
ADMINISTRATION
LOSE, AND
THAT’S WHEN
I THINK PEOPLE
BEGAN TO
APPROPRIATELY
ASK: ‘WHAT IN
THE WORLD ARE
WE DOING HERE?’ ”
THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION
what the best deal he could get
would be for those issues,” said
Steve Hildebrand, who served as
deputy national campaign director
for Obama’s 2008 campaign but
has been critical of the president
on legislative matters. “And he
sort of moved beyond some of the
aspects that he just didn’t think
would ever be able to pass. I think
there is some sense that having
served with these relatively crazy
people in Congress that he had a
pretty good understanding of what
was going to be acceptable and
what wouldn’t fly.”
But that only raises the question of what Obama might have
gotten had he done more to drum
up support for his proposals outside Washington.
Long after Obama and Democratic leaders on the Hill had
given up on the public option,
progressive groups, working with
two freshmen on the House side
— Maine’s Chellie Pingree and
Colorado’s Jared Polis — brought
it back to life.
Democrats lost their 60-vote
majority in the Senate in January
2010 when Scott Brown won a
special election in Massachusetts
to fill the late Ted Kennedy’s seat.
Emanuel urged the president to
whittle down the bill into small
pieces that could pass through