This is well, and right, and just as it should be.
Obama is turning out to be a disastrous president, wholly unsuited for the times and our national and global challenges, and his job approval ratings reflect this.
In Obama, we get all the corporate toadying of the last Democratic president, along with an even greater unwillingness than Clinton -- and who would've thought that was possible -- to name names, call out enemies, and throw a freakin' punch every other year or so. (We're also getting a continuation of the civil rights and civil liberties policies of Dick Cheney, as an extra added bonus, but that's another story.) What makes it even more astonishing this time around, however, is that we've seen this movie before, and we know how it ends. There is apparently absolutely no bottom -- as the events of recent weeks have reconfirmed -- to the pit of vicious lies, brutal tactics, and democracy-demolishing antics of which regresses will avail themselves in their practice of contemporary American politics. In addition to not being prepared for that, Barack Obama is still seemingly unable to raise his voice a decibel or two against the very people who are helping him to destroy his own presidency. Indeed, he is negotiating "bipartisan' (read: total capitulation) deals with them, even as they relentlessly trash him before a national audience.
Sorry. Did I say "his health-care bill"? Problem number one here is that there's no such thing. As in just about everything else of consequence this administration has been involved in, he seems quite content to simply defer to Congress and allow the sausage-making process on the Hill to generate precisely the policy abomination one might expect, with all the political liabilities we've come to know and love from such a dispiriting collection of 535 (minus two or three) moral midgets.
Sorry. Did I say "defer to Congress"? Looks like I goofed again. What this really means -- and this is problem number two -- is deferring to a select group of members of Congress. In particular, conservative Democrats and supposedly moderate Republicans (you know, like fuel-efficient Hummers). Right now, for example, probably the two most important actors in America on the healthcare question are Max Baucus and Chuck Grassley. Both have received massive campaign contributions from the industries which have most at stake in this legislation. No doubt, however, that's entirely a coincidence. What they are doing right now, and what Obama is allowing them to do, is nothing less than neutering any serious aspects of healthcare reform. In the end, having succeeded at doing that, and being the tail that wags the entire dog of this 300 million person country, Grassley won't even vote for the bill, nor will any Republican. As in the stimulus bill, Obama continues to allow legislation to be murdered by a thousand cuts. All in the name of some bipartisanship god he has taken to worshiping, even though none of the knife-wielders will be around to go anywhere near the stinking corpse they've created when it's eventually tossed up on the congressional slab for a vote. Seems pretty nutty to me, but I guess when you stop and think about it, Obama's definition of bipartisan participation in the legislative process really does make sense after all: Republicans murder the bill, then Democrats vote for it. Everybody gets to play a part. Everybody contributes.
From what can be gathered so far, the legislation will accomplish very little in terms of real reform, will diminish existing health-care programs, will nevertheless still exacerbate the explosion of national debt, and will not even begin to kick in until 2013. Hey, for all the good this will do Americans, why not just complete the job and have all the benefits go to people living in Kuala Lumpur?
Will healthcare be universal in America, bringing this country into line with the standards of what every other industrialized democracy has practiced for the better part of a century? No. Will we massively increase the amount of actual health care we provide while eliminating the incredible bloat in costs of our predatory, special-interest oriented system by adopting the obvious no-brainer choice of the single-payer model? Fat chance. Will a real public option even be created, which might instantly show up the incredible profiteering and waste in the insurance industry, while simultaneously giving lie to the endless rhetoric about private sector efficiency and government bungling? No, there won't (but President Obama wants you to know he appreciates your asking). The Capitulation Administration signaled this week that it is giving up on that as well. Because of Republican opposition, of course. You remember those guys don't you? The folks who have such small minorities in Congress that they can't even muster forty percent of Senate votes to block consideration of legislation by filibuster?
That's who Obama is caving to. That's who's in charge. It seems that we regular folks are in the process of getting a fresh education about the way American politics really works. Evidently, there's a new algorithm I wasn't aware of. It goes like this: When Republicans control Congress and the White House, they rule. When Democrats control Congress and the White House... Republicans still rule. Okay. Well at least we know how it works. And it's not necessarily all bad news, either. No point in fussing with those messy elections anymore!
Meanwhile, one needn't dig deep into the bowels of the thousands of pages of legalese contained within the five separate health-care proposals now making their way through Congress in order to figure out whether they contain good news or not. You can tell a lot about somebody or something just by the company they keep. Suffice it to say that both the insurance and pharmaceutical industries are now spending hundreds of millions of dollars running ads on television in favor of healthcare "reform". I can hardly think of a handier or more pure litmus test for determining whether this is good legislation or not. If those guys are for it, and especially if they're spending millions to make it happen, it's a very safe bet that I'm against it. And if those industries are for it, it's a very safe bet that the deal is they get rich and we get nothing. Except maybe poor. And sick.
The pharmaceutical ads are especially galling, proving that there really is nothing immoral enough to be excluded from the discourse of American politics. These spots feature the two actors who portrayed Harry and Louise -- the very same marionettes who whored themselves back in 1993 and got a paycheck in exchange for making sure that tens of millions of Americans would be denied health care in every year since then. Now they're back, this time advocating for legislation rather than against it, and sanctimoniously telling us that "it's about time" that "we may finally get healthcare reform". When "Sally" -- slayer of American healthcare for a few shekels of blood money -- righteously intones that, "with a little more cooperation, a little less politics, and we can get the job done this time", I want to reach into the television and detach her head from the rest of her. She certainly isn't making any use of it. I'd go for the heart, but that seems to have been removed long ago. Is there some reason that these people haven't been taken out back and shot? And, failing that, do they have some sort of new, special, high-tech pillows that allow folks like this to sleep at night despite a 40,000 ton conscience crushing down on their skulls?
Now why in the world would the insurance and pharmaceutical industries be running ads in favor of healthcare reform? I'm just thinking out loud here, but I wonder if it has anything to do with the deals that a certain Barack Obama has cut with them behind the scenes, promising to limit to pathetically minimal amounts any future inhibitions on the trough-gorging to which they've grown well accustomed. In agreements which the New York Times has delicately characterized as "potentially at odds with the president's rhetoric", Obama has bought the support of these industries for a pittance. At least, that is, a pittance of his capital. The true costs will continue to fall on tens of millions of Americans with no or lousy healthcare, including the tens of thousands who die each year because of that simple fact. In exchange for their political support, our "socialist' president secretly promised the pharmaceutical and insurance industries that their costs under any new legislation would be capped at $80 and $155 billion, respectively, over ten years time. In short -- nickels and dimes.
One might be excused for beginning to get the feeling that what Obama really wants from healthcare reform is simply to be able to say that he did it. No matter that there is almost no reform in his healthcare reform legislation. No matter that he doesn't even have his own proposal, but is deferring to the worst elements of a legislative body that is a wholly owned subsidiary of American corporate interests. No matter that whatever little effect the legislation will have won't even begin to be seen for another four years, and then will be phased in after that, over yet another period of several years. And no matter that, even after the law goes into effect, this country will continue to suffer from all the major maladies of a system designed principally to provide profits for a few, rather than healthcare for all.
What continues to astonish me, however, is what passes for political calculus in the White House these days. I never assumed that Obama would necessarily be any different from Bill Clinton, in the sense that he might actually have a set of good progressive politics or that he might actually give a damn about the American public. No disappointment there (although did he have to be even worse than that, more like Bush than Clinton?). However, I always assume that almost all politicians are completely consumed by the one thing that Clinton was ever truly passionate about: self-interest.
But, even purely from that narrowest of perspectives, does the Obama team actually believe that their strategy is helping their guy politically? Do they really like the way that their failure to articulate a plan, or even a set of fundamental principles, has worked out in terms of shaping the debate over healthcare? Is it really their belief that they can go to the voters in 2012 and win their hearts with a nothingburger healthcare plan, passed three years prior, and due to fully kick in three years hence? I hate more than a root canal sans novocaine to sound like one of the regressives whom I so very much loathe, but if this is the level of political sophistication to be found in the Obama White House, then, no, as a matter of fact, I really don't want this clown negotiating with Vladimir Putin.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
