Alex Massie, one of my favorite bloggers, suggests that I’m right to argue that Republicans should pivot from a stance of robust opposition to a willingness to cooperate on better legislation, e.g., bills modeled on the Capretta-Levin approach to incremental health reform. But I fear that Alex is being a bit more cynical than yours truly.

Messaging matters in politics, but so does timing. Suppose the Republican leadership had worked with the White House this past year to craft a health care bill that, though opposed by both the purer elements of both right and left, could pass the House and Senate; suppose too that this bill actually worked. Who gets the credit for that? Not the Republican party or Republican candidates across the country, that’s who. No, it would be the President’s triumph and his alone. (I’m assuming, for the sake of this argument that the bill would have covered 30m Americans, controlled or lowered costs etc.) It’s Obama who would have reaped the electoral rewards from this process. So what, rationally, does it profit the Republican party to help him achieve that aim? You might argue that this is a form of political nihilism or that it’s putting party before the national interest and you might well have a point. But the country is, much of the time, a secondary concern. Parties exist to win elections and then – and only then – take measures they believe are in the national interest. Helping the other mob win isn’t part of their brief.

Actually, I don’t think this is about who gets credit. Rather, I think that the approach taken by the White House and its congressional allies was wrongheaded, and that one potential benefit of the Brown victory is that it might chasten the Democrats in a constructive way. The hypothetical example — a reform model that actually works — was not a realistic option after Arlen Specter defected from the Democratic caucus in the Senate and Al Franken won his recount battle. At that moment, the incentives for cooperating with moderate Republican senators weakened tremendously. Granted, it would have been nice for the Democrats to have Olympia Snowe on-side, but as all close observers know, Maine has an unusual set of challenges with regards to the high cost of insurance premiums. Senate Democrats offered “compromises” like interstate compacts that bore little resemblance to robust interstate competition. There wasn’t a serious effort to woo Senator Bob Corker, who has explicitly said that he’d be interested in compromise legislation that placed a heavier emphasis on catastrophic coverage (an idea advanced by Michael Graetz and Jerry Mashaw in True Security, among many others), because there was no perceived need a serious effort.

So when Andrew Sullivan writes the following:

I do not believe that, given the fiscal and healthcare crisis we are in, that we should simply surrender to the basest impulses of partisanship. And I believe that was the core message of the Obama candidacy. And if this opportunity is simply thrown away, the bitterness will deepen, the polarization will widen, the public cynicism will explode and the country will truly pass the point of no return on its core and pressing problems. And when good folks like Reihan and Alex simply endorse all this, it’s enough to make one despair.

This isn’t my position, and I’m succumbing to the basest impulses of partisanship. Rather, it is about crafting workable solutions to difficult problems. I do not believe that a weak mandate, a sharp increase in implicit marginal tax rates, and a regulation-driven strategy to addressing adverse selection — as opposed to an incentive-driven strategy using state-based high-risk pools and, better still, well-designed public reinsurance — will work. In fact, I believe that it will turn out very badly and that it will prove impossible to reverse.

In this context, opposition is a very responsible position to take, even if Republican legislators are far from flawless or blameless. I have to assume that Andrew takes exception to many of the views, habits, and practices of his political allies in any particular dispute. My guess is that I’d be part of a very different coalition — that is, a coalition that includes more self-described progressives than self-described conservatives — on an issue like the reform of copyright or congestion pricing or any number of other issues. I’m very comfortable with that.

The fact that many people are powerfully invested in passing this reform, for political and financial reasons, doesn’t strike me as reason enough for me as a writer and thinker and citizen to acquiesce. And the fact that there are people with political and financial interests on the other side doesn’t mean that the basic problems with the Democratic reform model aren’t very real.