Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
I would imagine we see and hear more of this from progressives in the event that Obama sells progressives out on healthcare reform.
Or at least she does a pretty good job of conceding what every dyed-in-the-wool single payer activist who is unable to get behind a campaign for the public health insurance option would want her to concede. Naturally, sarcasm explodes the single payer assumptions and what’s left is clear: the public option is our last, best option for reform that keeps government involved in providing care on a non-profit basis.
The simple fact is that at this point in time the energy of the single payer community could help ensure that Congress passes legislation that includes a public health insurance option. Is it a bitter pill for single payer advocates to swallow? Sure it is, but it’s one driven by political reality to the extent that this community can still take action to determine the outcome of healthcare reform in 2009.
It’s hard for me to imagine that the single payer community would sit out any legislative fight that isn’t for a single payer solution. Imagine if the anti-war community who filled the streets in 2002 and early 2003 had, after Bush sent troops to Iraq, stopped advocating in support of legislation that would put a strict timeline for troop withdrawals as a requirement for interim funding (the positions of Ned Lamont in 2006 and the Feingold-Dodd language of spring 2007 come to mind). It is simply would have been absurd to presume that anti-war activists would not support anything short of instantaneous withdrawal, but that is the situation we are in now as single payer advocates threaten to walk away from progressive efforts to pass a public option.
Politics must take place in the world we are in and not the world we wish we were in. That is not to say that you should be “realistic” in the sense that most Beltway pundits and Conventional Wisdom worshippers take it. It is possible to change how the political community thinks about discourse and policy norms (again, see Ned Lamont in 2006 as a perfect example). Change that can be achieved requires organizing, persuasion, and support; in fact, the work done by Jane Hamsher and Chris Bowers, among others, to hold the line on the public option is a definitive of example of how we can change the political reality to conform to the better world we wish to achieve. The extent to which single payer activists grasp this and choose to take part in the outcome of the public option will likely be determinative of the effort’s success.
Jean Edward Smith makes clear in a New York Times op-ed that President Obama is not governing anywhere near the mold of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and he could learn a great deal from FDR’s methods.
PRESIDENT OBAMA’S apparent readiness to backtrack on the public insurance option in his health care package is not just a concession to his political opponents — this fixation on securing bipartisan support for health care reform suggests that the Democratic Party has forgotten how to govern and the White House has forgotten how to lead.
This was not true of Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic Congresses that enacted the New Deal. With the exception of the Emergency Banking Act of 1933 (which gave the president authority to close the nation’s banks and which passed the House of Representatives unanimously), the principal legislative innovations of the 1930s were enacted over the vigorous opposition of a deeply entrenched minority. Majority rule, as Roosevelt saw it, did not require his opponents’ permission.
When Roosevelt asked Congress to establish the Tennessee Valley Authority to provide cheap electric power for the impoverished South, he did not consult with utility giants like Commonwealth and Southern. When he asked for the creation of a Securities and Exchange Commission to curb the excesses of Wall Street, he did not request the cooperation of those about to be regulated. When Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act divesting investment houses of their commercial banking functions, the Democrats did not need the approval of J. P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs or Lehman Brothers.
Smith goes on to point out that FDR went so far as to relish the hatred his actions and beliefs precipitated from his opponents. What a marked contrast from the current administration’s ethos. The quest for not even a patina but genuine bipartisanship on matters of the gravest importance is bizarre unto politically catastrophic.
Roosevelt understood that governing involved choice and that choice engendered dissent. He accepted opposition as part of the process. It is time for the Obama administration to step up to the plate and make some hard choices.
Health care reform enacted by a Democratic majority is still meaningful reform. Even if it is passed without Republican support, it would still be the law of the land.
Obama has not yet accepted opposition as part of the process of governance. As a result, every half-decent idea, regardless of pre-negotiation concessions made by him or other Democrats, will be watered down at best and outright opposed at worst by Republican legislators.
There comes a point where the only responsible thing for the President to do is to lead. Not from the imaginary center or a point of compromise, but from what he campaigned on in 2007 and 2008 and what we might reasonably presume he actually believes. He must surely have faith that the policies that carried him into office would, if enacted, actually work and their success would convince the public in their validity. The perpetual desire to compromise belies any conviction Obama may have that his policy prescriptions will be successful. Worst of all, it is the antithesis of leadership.
Since the reelection of George W. Bush in 2004, I have said that America would enter 2009 in dire need of a President who could lead with the strength and vision of FDR. There was too much damage done under Bush to not stop the rollback to social services and the erosion of the public safety net. We needed a President who could move the policy ball down the field far enough to potentially withstand 80 years of erosion, as many of FDR’s New Deal era policies have. But this need is predicated on the assumption that person sitting in the Oval Office has conviction in his beliefs and will act on that conviction, regardless of what Republicans, conservative Democrats, and America’s business lobbies say about him and his ideas. At least in the first nine months of the Obama administration, we have not gotten a new FDR or anything close to it. There is time for Obama to reverse himself, though. The healthcare fight is the perfect place for him to start, but if he elects to abdicate the onus of leadership it will be an ill omen for things to come.
Matt Taibbi, writing at True Slant, lays out the healthcare conundrum in pretty clear terms.
I’ve been getting phone calls from some folks in DC with some ugly stories about how the Democrats have systematically sandbagged the progressive opposition, with the White House pulling strings and levering the funding for various nonprofit groups in order to prevent them from airing ads attacking the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. I suspect in the end this is going to be the main story of the health care reform effort, how the Democrats (and some progressive groups) sold out their constituents in exchange for financial contributions from the relevant industries.
We’re reaching a head on what will happen on healthcare. Either the White House and leadership will put pressure on the Senate conserva-Dems who oppose a public health insurance option and get them to accept it, or the White House and leadership will put pressure on House progressives who have pledged to not vote for any bill that does not include a public option. If the pressure falls on the House, then Taibbi’s take on Dems will at least in part be correct. Adjudicating the extent to which he is right would depend on an assessment of whether, as he says, these Democrats are politically craven or if they just don’t believe the same things as their base…or the 2008 Obama campaign.
There’s been a lot of posts in the last week or so about Megan McArdle of The Atlantic’s insane post in which she poo-pooed the idea that teabaggers openly carrying guns to presidential town halls were in fact dangerous or likely to increase the risk of violence perpetrated as a political act. McArdle has repeatedly demonstrated herself as one of the most willfully ignorant members of the Baby Journalist set (though her pal Russ Douthat gives her a run for her money). But this post really helps redefine one’s perceptions of her idiocy.
Thomas Levenson of The Inverse Square Blog has what will surely go down as the definitive Fisking of McArdle’s puddle of drool in favor of bringing guns to political protests. After dissecting the numerous logical fallacies and intellectual shortcomings put forward by McArdle, he packages the overall rebuttal not with the specifics he’s just put forth, but the common force of history:
But the point I’d finish with here, to counter McArdle’s attempt at a conclusion, is to remind everyone of the intellectual and emotional poverty of McArdle, along with that of those on the right who like her are trying to turn our politics into a game of high-school debate, unanchored in lived experience. She asserts, in effect, and almost in so many words, that the fear of political violence is a mere abstraction — her “symbolic belief.”
She is, of course, totally, utterly, and almost painfully wrong — as everyone knows who can remember back just a few years, read a book, perhaps, …or even managed to recall the fate of a couple of people who shared a last name with someone else famous who died on Tuesday.
Specifically: I was born in 1958. Since then, there have been ten presidents who have served before the current incumbent: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II. Of them, one was killed by a rifle. Another had guns drawn on him twice in two weeks. A third was shot outside a Washington DC hotel by a deranged celebrity hound. Three out of ten.
More: Over the history of the presidency, ten out of the first 43 presidents were subject to attempted or successful assassinations. Political violence is a fact of American history.
I think this is a point that most pundits simply refuse to acknowledge: “Political violence is a fact of American history.” It is even more pronounced, as Levenson notes, when it comes to African-American leaders. Yet to McArdle, it is an act so rare that it does not even merit concern at a time when teabaggers are openly carrying military-type rifles in close quarter to the President of the United States. Levenson’s right: she is “totally, utterly, and almost painfully wrong.”
“Political violence is a fact of American history.” We can only hope that it is not a fact whose empirical repertoire is enhanced during this administration or any other. But it is impossible to be aware of the role violence has played as a means of furthering political arguments in American history and not be deeply afraid for what might come next in our country. As Atrios is wont to say, “I wonder just what it is about Obama that inspires such lunacy…” But we all know the answer to that question and as such, we must be reminded that a distinct subset of political violence in America is violence perpetrated by white racists against African-Americans. Levenson makes a similar observation regarding the historical danger and the need to take the threats against Obama even more seriously.
I hope with all sincerity that none of these nut jobs who bring guns to political rallies and Obama town halls, carrying signs that refer to watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants, decide to act on their image and use the guns they carry. But it is fundamentally naive and dangerous to assume that the addition of firearms to political protests does not increase the risk of violence, as McArdle does. We should all hope she’s right, but if she is, it won’t be because she’s made a persuasive argument and only that people aren’t as crazy as they seem and/or the Secret Service is phenomenally good at what they do. At this point in time, though, I would not bet against the Obama administration being free from political violence perpetrated by right wingers, though I hope I am wrong.
(Via The Poor Man Institute)
Hold Fast 