Politico's Ben Smith yesterday suggested that one important aspect of Rahm Emanuel's health care strategy -- to ignore the demands of progressives on the ground that they would fall
into line at the end no matter what -- has been vindicated.  Smith
points to a new poll showing near-unanimous support for the bill among
liberals as well as the fact that not a single progressive member of
the House (not even Dennis Kucinich) will oppose this bill even though
the prime progressive objections were ignored.  Smith's argument
unsurprisingly provoked immediate objections from numerous progressives
-- Paul Krugman, Markos Moultisas, Chris Bowers
-- who argue that in the wake of Scott Brown's election, Emanuel
advocated a drastically scaled-back version of health care reform
because he believed the original, larger version couldn't pass.  If (as
looks highly likely) the current bill passes, then, they argue, Emanuel
will have been proven wrong -- not vindicated.

Assuming that Emanuel really advocated for a scaled-back version (that's from anonymous royal court intrigue reports, so who knows?), this objection
(as Smith acknowledges) is
true as far as it goes -- but it doesn't go very far at all, because it
doesn't really have anything to do with Smith's "vindication" argument.
 The "vindication" Smith sees has nothing to do with Emanuel's advocacy
for a "scaled-back" bill, but is about a different point
entirely:  namely, Emanuel's assumption that there was absolutely no
reason to accommodate progressive objections to the health care bill
because progressives (despite their threats) would automatically fall
into line and support whatever the White House wanted, even if their
demands were ignored.  Is there really any doubt that Emanuel was right
about this point?  Indeed, Markos himself essentially acknowledged these progressive failures last night on MSNBC.

For almost a full year, scores of progressive House members vowed -- publicly and unequivocally -- that they would never support a health care bill without a robust public option.  They collectively accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars based on this pledge.  Up until a few weeks ago, many progressive opinion
leaders -- such as Moulitsas, Howard Dean, Keith Olbermann and many
others -- were insisting that the Senate bill was worse than the status
quo and should be defeated.  But now?  All of those progressives House
members are doing exactly what they swore they would never do -- vote
for a health care bill with no public option -- and virtually every
progressive opinion leader is not only now supportive of the bill, but
vehemently so.  In other words, exactly what Rahm said would happen -- ignore the progressives, we don't need to give them anything because they'll get into line -- is exactly what happened.  How is that not vindication?

Just consider what Nate Silver wrote yesterday in trying to understand why progressives have suddenly united behind this bill, in a post he entitled "Why Liberals (Suddenly) Love the
Health Care Bill":

It has occurred in spite of the fact that the bill hasn't really gotten any more liberal. Whatever might come out of the reconciliation process will be marginally more liberal than what the Senate passed on its own, but
still lacks a public option or a Medicare buy-in, and suffers from most of the same flaws that some liberals were critiquing in the first place. It might have helped a little bit to get the Senate bill off the front pages -- but the differences between the "Obama"/reconciliation bill and the Senate's December bill are fairly cosmetic.

In other words, the bill which many progressives were swearing just a couple months ago they could not and would not support (the Senate
bill) is materially similar to the bill they're now vigorously
supporting (the Obama/reconciliation bill).  The differences are purely
"cosmetic," as Silver says (it's even worse than that, since one of the
few positive changes progressives could point to -- the Health
Insurance Rate Authority, which would prevent large premium increases
-- was just removed from the bill).
 Thus, from a purely strategic perspective, Emanuel was absolutely
right not to take progressives seriously because he knew they would do
exactly what they did:  support the bill even if their demands were
ignored.

I want to be clear here:   I'm not criticizing progressives who support this bill, nor am I criticizing those who insisted they would oppose it but changed their minds at the
end.  Unlike many progressives, I was never among those who advocated
for this bill's defeat because, as loathsome and even dangerous as I
find the bill's corporatist framework to be (mandating
that citizens buy the products of the private health insurance
industry), I've found it very difficult (as I said all along) to oppose
a bill that results in greater health care coverage for millions of
currently uninsured people.  Whether progressives are doing the right
thing in supporting this bill is debatable (there's a strong
progressive case for the bill -- any bill that restricts industry
abuses and vastly expands coverage is inherently progressive -- and a strong progressive case that it does more harm than good), but that's a completely separate question from the one raised by Smith.

What's not debatable is that this process highlighted -- and worsened -- the virtually complete powerlessness of the Left and progressives generally in Washington.  If you were in Washington negotiating a bill,
would you take seriously the threats of progressive House members in
the future that they will withhold support for a Party-endorsed bill if
their demands for improvements are not met?  Of course not.  No
rational person would.

Moreover, everyone who has ever been involved in negotiations knows that those who did what most progressive DC pundits did here from the start -- namely, announce:  we have certain things we'd like you to change in this bill, but we'll go along with this even if you give us nothing --
are making themselves completely irrelevant in the negotiating
progress.  People who signal in advance that they will accept a deal
even if all of their demands are rejected will always be completely
impotent, for reasons too obvious to explain.  The loyal,
Obama-revering pundits who acted as the bill's mindless cheerleaders
from the start (this is the greatest achievement since FDR walked the Earth) were always going to be ignored; why would anyone listen to the demands of those doing nothing but waving pom-poms?

By contrast, progressives who originally threatened to oppose the bill unless their demands were met (such as Moulitsas, Howard Dean,
Jane Hamsher, the Progressive House Caucus) absolutely did the right
thing:  that's the only way to wield power and to have one's demands be
heard.  And there's nothing necessarily wrong as a negotiating strategy
with ultimately backing down from one's threats:  it's normal and often
effective in negotiations to insist that one won't accept a deal
without X, Y and Z only, at the end, to accept a deal lacking some or
even all of those elements on the ground that the deal on the table is
the best one will ever get, and it's preferable to having no deal.  The
problem here is two-fold:  (1) nobody (certainly not
Emanuel) ever took the progressive threat seriously -- because nobody
believed they would really oppose the bill even if they got nothing --
and it thus had no credibility and they were ignored; and worse: (2) nobody
will ever, ever take progressive threats seriously again in the future,
because they know that progressives will do what they did here: 
namely, get in line at the end and support what the Party wants even if
none of their desired changes to a bill are made.

Talk Left's Armando, who is a long-time litigator and thus deals with these negotiation dynamics every day, has been making this point for months,
and made a very insightful comment yesterday about all of this.  He quoted Nate Silver pointing out that "at least five different parties effectively have veto power over the process, including the White House, the Blue Dogs (who cast the decisive votes in both chambers of Congress), and both the Floor and Committee Leadership," and then explained:

And there you have the progressive failure in political bargaining in a nutshell - no one EVER believed that progressive had veto power, or
more accurately, no one ever believed progressives would ever EXERCISE
veto power. That the progressives would be rolled was a given.
Obviously that was an accurate view of the reality. . . .

Silver can not imagine a progressive bargaining position that threatened the passage of the health bills. No one could imagine it, even
progressives. Until they can not only imagine it, but in fact
project it in a political negotiation, progressives will remain
irrelevant outside of Democratic primaries, when they will receive a
plethora of campaign promises sure to be abandoned by pols. Cuz that is what pols do.

I think there is actually a counter example that anyone interested in bargaining can look to for a better result - the unions and the excise
tax. The unions were willing to "kill the bill" unless they received
major concessions on the excise tax issue.  The White House wanted an
excuse tax and serious and tough negotiations ensued, with the unions
gaining major concessions.

The only reason why the unions were able to garner those concessions was because they were willing to, and were perceived as willing to, "kill the bill."
They knew Obama wanted this health bill more than they did and that
Obama would find a way to accommodate the unions' concerns on the
excise tax.

The unions took the risk of killing the bill and were rewarded with major concessions on their key issue. That is how bargaining works.

This has been going on forever, far beyond the health care process.  After all, aside from contempt for the establishment media, the single greatest fuel for the rise of the liberal blogosphere was contempt for
the Democratic Party's corporatism -- i.e., the fact that progressives had no influence within the Party, and Party leaders, TNR-style,
spent far more energy scorning the Left than the Republicans.  That's
what is somewhat ironic about the blogosphere's almost-unanimous
support for this health care bill (as well as their increasingly rabid,
TNR-style demonization campaign against the handful of people on the Left who actually stuck to their guns
and who are thus now viewed as worse than Pol Pot):  namely, even if
supporting the bill is the right thing to do, this conduct has
reinforced and strengthened the powerlessness of progressives, i.e.,
the very problem the blogosphere was devoted to subverting.  There's a
reason why so many progressive Beltway bloggers now turn to the
war-supporting, Lieberman-loving, Left-bashing Jonathan Chait as the
guide for what All Good Progressives do and think; that's the model
that's being strengthened here.

Amazingly, one now finds posts on the front page of Daily Kos (not by Markos) demanding that progressives repeat this behavior on every bill in the future:  "whatever that final position is, it will
then be the job of the progressive to evaluate it strictly on the
merits of what it is, rather than what it could have been. And if what it is, is even incrementally better than what we have right now, then it should be supported." 
That sounds exactly like the rationale of capitulating Democratic
officials of the last two decades, not what the blogosphere was
ostensibly devoted to promoting.  Why would anyone in Washington --
surrounded by powerful lobbyists and people whose threats are actually
credible -- ever take seriously or listen to a person who thinks and
behaves this way (I'll support anything you want even if you ignore me, as long as I get a single crumb),
and even proudly announces it in advance?  They never would listen to
such a person -- and they don't -- because that's the sure path to
self-imposed irrelevance.

Again, whether progressives are doing the right thing by changing their minds and supporting the health care bill is a separate question from the one I'm
discussing here.  I never argued for this bill's defeat, so that's not
my issue; I think that's a reasonable debate to have.  As I also said,
it's also perfectly reasonable to oppose something all along and then
-- once the process is over -- decide you're accepting what you
previously said you wouldn't.  But what's not reasonable is to pretend
that Emanuel wasn't right in his core assumption about progressive
behavior.  Nobody likes to acknowledge their own powerlessness, but no
good can come from shutting one's eyes and pretending it's not true. 
It's a genuine problem that the threats and demands of progressives
(for lack of a better term) aren't taken seriously at all, and will be
taken even less seriously now.  Facing that problem is a prerequisite
to finding a way to solve it.

UPDATE:  As I've noted many times, the column of mine which has produced the most hate mail over the last year was when I argued back in August that the White House affirmatively wanted there to be no public option in the final health care bill (contrary to the President's
claims) because that was their way of minimizing opposition by the
health care industry (opposition both to the bill itself and the
Democratic Party generally).  I repeated that argument many times,
including recently when explaining
why Democrats would not enact a public option even though they now only
needed 50 votes (because the White House did not want one).

Last night on MSNBC, NYT reporter David Kirkpatrick confirmed the existence of that arrangement -- where the WH negotiated secret "quid pro quo" deals with the hospital industry based on the premise that there'd be no public option
in the final bill.

UPDATE II:  Last September, Rep. Anthony Weiner said:

All of the protest letters in the world don’t add up to much if you don’t finally stand up and vote No on something the President and Nancy
want.  There is clearly a sense that progressives in Congress are
easily rolled. . . .

If the Congressional left can't pass even something as modest as a watered down public option, then frankly I don’t think anyone is going to take the left very
seriously later on in this Congress.  When Blue Dogs talk, there are fewer of them but they have more influence than when progressives talk . . . You can only shake the saber so often before someone expects you to use it.

Weiner, however, is one of those House members who is now voting for the final bill even after vowing unequivocally that he'd vote NO if it did not
include a public option.  Whether he's doing the right thing is a
separate question; what's clear is that he's the author of his own
powerlessness for exactly the reason he himself so eloquently described
just five months ago.