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Guest Post

Here is a guest post from former (and hopefully future) Great Falls resident, Travis Kavulla.  This is from National Review, which is subscription only:

Stuck There in the Middle

For better and for worse, Max Baucus is driving the health-care agenda

BY: TRAVIS KAVULLA

If Congress does not pass a health-care bill with a public option, the credit (from others, the blame) will fall on the shoulders of one of America’s most powerful backroom dealers: Sen. Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat.

A nondescript 67-year-old who has spent the majority of his life in Congress, Baucus is the Finance Committee chairman and the Senate gatekeeper for health-care and climate-change legislation, as well as pretty much any spending bill the Obama administration thrusts before Congress. Baucus categorically declared earlier this year that single-payer health care “is not going to work in this country.” Since then, he has changed his tone but not his bottom line; in appearances in Washington and at home, Baucus repeats like a mantra the assertion that single-payer “doesn’t have 60 votes in the Senate.”

That is an odd and infuriating claim to some Democrats, and the progressive blogs DailyKos and the Huffington Post have made Baucus their intra-party punching bag. They point out that 60 is the number of seats Democrats effectively hold in the Senate. So just how, they want to know, is Obama’s vision for health care a no-go?

Instead of single-payer, all of the health-care bills reported out of committees have a “public option,” a government-run insurance plan – like Medicare with universal eligibility. Sen. Chris Dodd (D., Conn.) the acting chairman of Ted Kennedy’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, strongly supports a public option and has suggested that Baucus might find himself out of his chairmanship if Democrats feel sold short by his negotiations.

At present, Baucus’s is the sole committee to have sent legislation to the floor. It also has conducted the only truly bipartisan process in either the House or the Senate. The six-member team Baucus has convened to negotiate the key issues is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. Progressives are furious: Here they win an election but still are hampered by the maneuverings of Senator Baucus and five others whose states together comprise 2.77 percent of the American population. Were it not for the Baucus negotiations, moreover, health-care reform might have been a fait accompli by the August recess. Now, with the sleeping giant of an angry public awakened, the debates seem just to have begun.

Left-wingers can hardly be surprised. This is stuff right out of the Baucus playbook. Carving out a space at the center, at the fulcrum of power, has long been the senator’s modus operandi. According to Montana political lore, when Baucus was a young lawyer eager to run for office, he approached the editors of his local paper, the Missoulian, and asked their advice on what was proving to be a tough question: Should he run for office as a Democrat or a Republican? The habit of preferring to remain on the fence has endured.

Indeed, Baucus’s centrism is sometimes literal. During George W. Bush’s early State of the Union speeches, Baucus made a point of taking a seat near the middle of the chamber and standing and applauding for items that drew mostly derision or indifference from his side of the aisle. Without Baucus, it is unlikely the Bush tax cuts or the Medicare prescription-drug benefit would have reached the president’s desk.

Republicans in his state are convinced that Baucus’s centrist image is a fiction. “He is a liberal who has convinced the press to call him a ‘moderate,’” says Rob Natelson, a law professor at the University of Montana and a leading conservative voice in the state. He points to Baucus’s lifetime American Conservative Union rating, which shows him on the conservative side only 14 percent of the time. To be sure, Baucus delivers procedural and filibuster votes to his party. On issues such as abortion, he has obeyed the party whip even when Harry Reid (who has a 19 percent ACU rating) has not.

In his last closely fought race, in 1996, Republicans tried to brand Baucus as a conservative vote only when Election Day neared – and, for the next five years, a reliable Democratic foot soldier. In one catchy ad from the campaign, titled “Max Baucus Does the Wishy-Washy” (set to the tune of “My Baby Does the Hanky-Panky”), a range of Montana’s charismatic fauna – here a bear, there a wolf – shake their heads “yes” one moment, “no” the next. There was something deeply true about the superficially silly advertisement. Baucus is nothing if not a political animal, and it is his instinct to assess his right flank warily. Like other Western Democrats, he tends to his NRA rating (an A+) with an almost paranoid devotion.

Today, however, the Montana GOP is in ruins and, by habit, Baucus may be overestimating his opponents. Out of eight statewide elected officials, there is only one Republican. The resulting dearth of high-profile contenders has meant that some truly laughable opponents have faced Baucus. Last year, the GOP nominee was a former Green-party candidate who wanted to abolish the presidency and turn the United States into a parliamentary democracy. Before that, in 2002, it was a largely unknown conservative state senator who, in a past life, had apparently been a rather effeminate hair stylist. (He tearfully withdrew when the Baucus team distributed a video, ca. 1970s, showing him decked out in jewelry and wearing a billowing, half-open shirt.) Baucus won the races, respectively, with 73 and 63 percent of the vote.

The implosion of the Montana Republican party has shaken up Baucus’s position on the state’s political spectrum. Today, most of his colleagues in elected office are no longer to his right, but to his left.

Montana has always had a touch of the prairie socialism more often found in Minnesota or Saskatchewan, particularly on the issue of health care. The governor, Brian Schweitzer, first made his political reputation by ferrying seniors across the border to Alberta to fill their prescriptions. Jon Tester, Montana’s junior senator, expressed sympathy for single-payer health care on the campaign trail, though he has supported the Baucus negotiations, and Baucus has supported him back – hosting a fundraiser this month for Tester at his family ranch.

The difference between Montana’s two Democratic senators is stark. Baucus is dapper and trim; eyes roll when, speaking to a home audience, the senator starts sentences with, “As a hunter . . .” He is not credible. Tester, meanwhile, looks the part of a bona fide, aw-shucks Montanan: 300 pounds, a flat-top haircut, three fingers lost in a meat-grinder accident. Elected on a wave of outrage over the Abramoff scandal, Tester retains a common touch and exhibits a residual sense of outrage and bewilderment “at what goes on in Warshington.” He was the only Senate Democrat to vote against both the Wall Street and auto-industry bailouts.

Baucus, by contrast, helped shepherd the stimulus through the Senate. Firebrand idealism has never really been his thing, and uncharismatic would be a charitable description. He is, all agree, a terrible public speaker. After one particularly unimpressive address, replete with awkward pauses, umming and awwing, and nary a complete sentence, Baucus staffers were asked about their boss’s speaking style. “It’s always like this,” one aide sighed. “He’s better in committee mark-ups.”

Another Democrat, a state legislator, says he still wonders “how such a horrible speaker went so far.”

Will it matter that Baucus lacks the common touch? In the increasingly public debate over health care, it may. Americans are polarized, and the events of the August recess have hardened legislators. To introduce an unfamiliar middle option – the Baucus team’s idea is a system of not-for-profit insurance cooperatives – will require explanation and persuasive assurances that it is not merely a public option by another name.

Baucus probably isn’t the man to do this. Barack Obama staged a town hall in Montana, but the senator is holding none this summer. Instead, his days are a series of pre-planned events that are a bit of a snooze (one on “prevention and wellness strategies,” another on water rights) mixed with unannounced appearances, as if on a lark, at coffee shops across Montana. Moreover, both the Left and the Right will inevitably label Baucus’s plan “the insurance industry’s plan” – not an entirely inaccurate description. It is surely the legislation most favored by insurers and pharmaceutical makers, whose executives and PACs give more to Baucus than to any other senator.

All of this assumes Baucus’s negotiations will succeed in the first place. Negotiators may well return to the table unnerved by their experiences in August. Charles Grassley, the senior Republican member of the panel, already has speculated that the process may not produce a bill he could vote for.

Meanwhile, Obama seems to have opened to the Baucus scheme. In Montana, the president referred persistently to “Max and I” and “our plan” in his comments in Montana before describing a co-op system – a big difference from the out-and-out public option that has been the White House’s preference thus far.

If a few Republicans acquiesce to this plan, it is likely to become the foundation of the health-care reform. If not, liberal senators have made clear their intention of proceeding without Baucus. A floor vote on the public option would provide the real test of Baucus and other so-called moderates. Would they support it? Or would it be a return to 1994, when Democrats themselves were the undoing of their party’s first major legislative effort under a new and hopeful administration?

Mr. Kavulla is a former associate editor of National Review.

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