I"m furious over what's happening to health care reform -- including at Obama's wan and lackluster effort at pushing for true reform. For months I've been wondering why he hasn't been using the power of the presidency to ram through reform. The degree to which the White House has the power to shape and define the public debate can hardly be overstated. He could be on television every night, ratcheting up the pressure. He could be putting insurance company victims on television three times a week. He could be making every person out there who has insurance think about whether, if they get really sick, their insurance might contain fine-print loopholes that leave them out in the cold (who among us has read every line of our policy?)
But we're just not seeing that. And this is just so central to how this administration will be judged -- in the short term and by history.
Glenn Greenwald lays out one possible answer: this is exactly what the White House wanted all along. Right or wrong on that theory, he nicely sums up how Obama could be doing so much more. Among his points:
- The White House has been vocally denigrating Howard Dean for attacking the Senate bill for being too weak -- but they've never actually gone out and denigrated Joe Lieberman, the one who is actually blocking decent reform. (Must be that Joe-mentum at work).
- The White House didn't hesitate to knock heads in Congress when opposition began to build to the supplemental war spending bill -- threatening members that they would be cut off and lose help with reelection from the DNC. But on health care reform? Nope.
- Obama defenders argue "that progressives should place their trust in the Obama White House to get this done the right way, that he's playing 11-dimensional chess when everyone else is playing checkers, that Obama is the Long Game Master who will always win. Then, when a bad bill is produced, the exact opposite claim is hauled out: it's not his fault because he's totally powerless."
It's far from clear that Obama's wet-noodle approach to health care reform is good politics either. Howard Dean is already being mentioned as a possible primary challenger to Obama in 2012 as he emerges as the voice of the progressive opposition to a weak "centrist" bill. If we don't get good health care reform and it's because Obama didn't try, sign me up. For me, health care reform is a core, nonnegotiable policy goal bigger than party loyalty or admiration for Obama or anything else. It is central to my vision and that of most progressives for what this country most needs that it does not now have: decent social policies to reduce the unnecessary human suffering brought about by our barbaric health care system, in which people are expected to buy insurance for their own bodies on the open market the way a merchant might shop for insurance for a warehouse full of appliances.
The best thing to do is to support and give money to MoveOn and other groups that are pushing for a decent bill -- that's how things work in Washington, through interest groups.
Update: Check out this piece by Eric Wattree calling on Obama to get some toughness. Sample:
The irony of Obama's presidency is that if he fails in his first term...it's not going to be because he wasn't cultured enough, or intellectual enough, but because he's not ghetto enough.
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