Ezra interviews GOP Senator Lindsey Graham:
EZRA KLEIN: The negotiations in the Senate are becoming more poisonous. One of the difficulties, though, has been that people are having trouble distinguishing between those who want to strike a deal on health-care reform and those who really want to kill the bill. How do you tell the difference between a senator looking for Obama's "waterloo" and people who want their ideas more developed in the legislation?No one does. And that's the problem. The White House, for a while now, has seemed awfully fixated on making Republicans like them, and making Democrats feel unneeded (well, that's not entirely true - I hear the White House does threaten liberal groups, telling them to toe the official line, lest they be defunded like Obama defunded the 527s during the campaign). It's a great recipe for building a GOP coalition - sucking up to the GOP and ticking off your own party - but it's not so great if you want to actually win battles, for the simple fact that the GOP is in the minority. And this, of course, ignore the rather crucial point that the GOP is also dead wrong on all of these issues, so any compromise that gets them on board is generally flawed from the start (think $300+ billion tax cuts in the stimulus package).
LINDSEY GRAHAM: I think that over time you'll tell them apart. You gotta flush them out. There's two ways to fix a hard problem in Washington. You make people afraid of opposing you or you get them rewarded for helping you. There's no fear for opposing Obama's public option, and the reward is for opposing it. Right now, Republicans feel no political exposure from opposing the president's health-care initiative.
