Rich, the phenomenon you describe in your column today should (not that it actually will) create some serious discomfort for those who have spent the last year lauding Obama as a thoughtful pragmatist. As you note, what’s striking about his health-care agenda is how hurried and ideologically focused it has been, with comparatively little concern for the practical details of how the massive new program is supposed to function, much less control costs. He has brought all hands on deck to ram through a government health-care system, any government health-care system, without showing a lick of real interest in bipartisan compromise or concessions to fiscal reality. If this were a Republican president, he would be rigid, inflexible, dogmatic, and all the rest. Instead, he’s simply devoted to his principles of reform in the service of social justice.
As I’ve argued before, the idea that pragmatism can operate independently of ideology has never been anything more than a political smokescreen:
It’s impossible to eschew ideology in order to “just do what works,” because any understanding of “what works” depends on the antecedent questions of what our policy goals should be and which instrumental policies are most likely to succeed in the world — both of which are heavily ideological questions.