Is It The Process, Stupid?

Tom Schaller at 538 has a good post, Is It The Process, Stupid?.

"Because it was Super Bowl week--and I happened to be watching a rebroadcast of the New York Giants' amazing Super Bowl victory over the New England Patriots, in which his son Zack made the tackle on the final kickoff of the game--I checked in with Steve DeOssie, an acquaintance of mine who also won a Super Bowl ring for the New York Giants, back in 1991. Steve is very politically active and astute, and although we don’t see eye-to-eye on many issues, I respect him a lot and his opinions."

DeOssie said: "Much of the media seems to be missing the point or the cause of the election. On the right they want to believe it was anti-Obama or anti-healthcare. On the left they try to spin the idea that it was just about the poor performance of Coakley. Having been to at least 20 of Scott's campaign events I can tell you it was none of those reasons. The most consistent attitude was that people wanted to slow down the process. There was a natural reaction even in the most liberal of states to not want anything forced on them the way the healthcare seemed to be. People up here were not anti anything except the healthcare process. They saw it as sneaky and underhanded. Even in Massachusetts, people did not want something that unknown forced on the country. Either way I am glad the process will slow down some but I will not put even a good friend like Scott on that political pedestal like some people are trying to do."

Schaller talks about the closed meetings, deal-making and speed of the process and then says:
"Meanwhile, Obama is now participating in a bi-partisan commission and publicly debated House Republicans live on television in their backyard--and without any notes written on his palm. These actions are unlike anything that was done by the Bush Administration, which had to be shamed by 9/11 victims into agreeing to even have a commission to investigate the pre-attack intelligence failures of our government, nor did Bush visit a caucus of House Democrats to defend the claims of Al Qaeda-Iraq connections or how exactly that yellowcake or mobile weapons labs on the back of 18-wheelers managed to get into Saddam's hands. So we will have greater transparency, and that’s a good thing as an end in itself. But does anyone want to bet that a highly-transparent policy process, and certainly one that departs dramatically from the politics of the past decade, will be sufficient to end conservative complaints?"