Watching the gun-toting, Nazi-sign-holding town hall crazies, the talk radio charlatans, and the Palin-infected politicos, my first instinct has been to rally around President Obama and defend his handling of the health care debate against this Cuckoo's Nest menagerie.
But my better instinct has prevailed over my protective instinct. It's time to take a cold, hard look at how the president's leadership -- or, more accurately, his lack of leadership -- on health care has helped create the vacuum that allowed these fringe-dwellers and their preposterous claims to dominate the debate.
Recent polls show that while Obama's personal approval rating remains high (57 percent), only 49 percent of the public has confidence that he will make the right decisions -- down 11 percent from April. This means that Americans still like him, but have less faith in his leadership.
Given his incredible skills as a leader, this is deeply ironic. How could someone with a renowned ability to inspire, communicate complex ideas, and connect with voters find himself in this position?
Chalk it up to another of his strengths that seems to have failed him this time around. The president, though a dedicated student of history, has failed to learn the lesson of our nation's most significant political confrontations: they've required single-minded determination and the willingness to battle entrenched opponents until the fight was won.
The 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, the New Deal, Social Security, Medicare, the Voting Rights Act -- each of these required a bloody fight. Only after they were pushed into law, and people saw that they worked, did a consensus grow up around them.
Isaiah Berlin famously laid out two opposing styles of leadership in his essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox." The hedgehog doggedly and relentlessly pursues one big idea. The fox, on the other hand, flits and floats and tries to advance the way Obama has on health care -- by spinning, triangulating, and splitting the difference. And it's this foxy slicing and dicing of the message that the public is truly sick of, and which has created the vacuum that allowed the debate to devolve into nonsense about death panels and socialized medicine (In June, the public option was essential; in August it was "just one sliver" of reform. In September, not negotiating with PhRMA was called "a profound mistake"; in July, he agreed to do just that. Etc, etc, etc.).
There is no better example of what the hedgehog approach to leadership looks like than the way FDR handled the fight over Social Security. The story of how it passed, succinctly laid out by Prof. Jerome Karabel on HuffPost, shows that FDR faced many of the same obstacles Obama is facing, including stiff opposition from within his own party.
At one point, Sen. Bennett "Champ" Clark, a conservative Democrat from Missouri, introduced an amendment to weaken the bill by allowing employers to opt out of the program. It passed with the majority of Democrats voting for it. But FDR knew this would, as Karabel puts it, "fatally undermine" Social Security and vowed to veto any legislation containing the amendment. As Yale Professor Jacob Hacker sums it up, "Social Security passed not because Congress wanted it but because Roosevelt demanded it."
Soon after his election in 1932, FDR told a group of labor leaders who were pushing reformist legislation: "I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it." Contrast this with Obama, who has told his most avid supporters to settle down and avoid putting pressure on recalcitrant Democrats.
Of course, even if Obama were to summon his formidable grassroots army, as he attempted to do last week, exactly what is it they would be rallying around when knocking on doors or holding house parties? We've heard the mantra that the president wants "choice and competition." But how does he intend to do that? Specifically. He's been way too fuzzy -- and foxy -- on the fundamentals, with his administration delivering mixed messages from the very beginning.
Instead of laying out his vision for reform in unequivocal strokes -- drawing clear lines in the sand on what he will and won't accept in a bill -- Obama's plan is apparently whatever Charles Grassley and Max Baucus and Kent Conrad will accept. The president "guaranteed" he'll get reform done. But we're not worried that there will be no bill to which Obama affixes his signature. We're worried that the bill will be the equivalent of a Social Security bill containing Clark's poison pill amendment. And we are even more worried that the president will sign it, declare victory, and move on.
This is where Obama the pied piper, who builds consensus by charming and seducing, has to give way to Obama the leader who brings about change by laying down the law. This is not an issue where you are going to be able to get all the stakeholders together and have the health care equivalent of a beer summit, with everyone walking away singing Kumbaya. The president needs to drop the delusional notion that there is some perfect plan that will make everyone happy, from insurance companies to PhRMA to the people who want the government to keep its hands off of Medicare.
The consensus will come later, once reform has taken hold. You don't see many Republicans these days willing to come out in favor of repealing Social Security and Medicare. But if those programs weren't already in place, you can bet they'd be fighting against them just as hard are they are fighting against health care reform now. (Back in 1961, Ronald Reagan warned that if we passed Medicare we would "spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free.")
Speaking of the entrenched interests arrayed against him, FDR said: "Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me -- and I welcome their hatred." Obama, on the other hand, welcomes these entrenched interests into the Oval Office and invites them to amputate another limb off health care reform and dump it in the garbage on the way out.
Such is the desire for real reform that even the poorly explained -- and only fitfully supported by the White House -- public option (which, it's worth noting, is already a half-a-loaf compromise from a Medicare-for-all single-payer plan) still has 77 percent support among the public.
But Kent Conrad is telling us again and again that "there are not the votes" for a public option. And Marc Ambinder reported last week that "privately, White House aides have communicated to the House leadership that the onus on changing minds about the public plan is on Congress, not on the president."
That is not, to say the least, leadership.
The issue that is, for now, the defining moment of Obama's presidency is itself at a defining moment.
The president has, rightly -- finally -- started speaking of health reform as a "moral imperative." If he really believes that it is a moral imperative, then the time for dealing with those who oppose it needs to come to an end. Martin Luther King, Jr. didn't march on Selma so Rosa Parks could sit two rows up from the back of the bus.
During the campaign, Obama frequently said that this wasn't about him, but about all of us. That's true, but we're now at a juncture where it actually is about him.
The president has the leadership skills to reclaim this debate and take it directly to the American people, sidestepping -- or running over, if need be -- those who have decided to stand in the way of real change.
Follow Arianna Huffington on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ariannahuff
Miles J. Zaremski: The Moral Imperative: Health Care as an American Right
However we look at health care, one thing is certain: health care is universal to each and every human being in this country, regardless of power, position, gender, race or ethnicity.
The assumption that the New Deal Era will continue forever.
This is sad.
Everything has a life cycle. And sadly for all the DC politicians, pundits, prognosticators, policy "experts", the New Deal Era is DEAD, Kaput, Finito, Expired.
Like the re-invented Teddy Kennedy of the 1980s, everything we have tried to accomplish recently in New Deal Era USA has been good intentioned but self-destructive.
While the FDR administration was visionary....everything our Congress has tried to do since the 1980s was reactionary(not "liberal" or "conservative".....these folks are just opposite cheeks on the same butt).
The Obama administration is just a desparate effort to revive a DEAD HORSE.
The Horse was probably shot in the head when Congress passed and Clinton enacted the Repeal of the Glass-Steagal Banking Act.
Sorry Folks......the New Deal is DEAD.
If the Obama Administration had any vision at all, they would be observing what success there is out there right now and build on it. What the Obama administration is doing right now is nothing. Pres Obama appears to do little except give speeches and stand there holding an empty New Deal Bag.
Stop promoting "National Health Care System".
Stop protecting Insurance monopolies.
Start providing FREE education to any US Citizen that qualifies to attend Medical School.
Start allowing American Taxpayers to write off ALL medical expenses (not just the unattainalbe 7% of Gross Adjusted Income).
HAVE THE PRESIDENT SUGGEST CONSIDERATION OF A WIND-FALL PROFITS TAX ON HEALTH INSURANCE COMPANIES TO FUND THE UNINSURED AND THE UNDER-INSURED!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jerome-karabel/obama-fdr-and-the-politic_b_234400.html
I think Obama is practicing the "leaf" leadership style. Like a leaf on the wind he is prepared to do whatever it takes to accommodate external forces, even if that means being blown into a fire and destroyed.
As David Axelrod told him in 2006 according to the book, "The Battle for America 2008," "You care far too much about what is written and said about you. You don't relish combat when it becomes personal and nasty. "
If bipartisanship was possible, the Obama approach would work. But he is confronted by far-right Republicans, the only ones left except for a few New England senators, who have no intention of doing anything other than making him a one-term president .
He can pass every other piece of legislation he proposes but if nothing is done on health care, that is how he will be judged by the majority of voters.
It is the antithesis of nationalism, national socialism, socialism and communism.
But regardless, all western political leaders of the last 30 years have subscribed to globalism.
But that doesn't not mean they want a global government. Nobody wants to be their country's last prime minister or president.
2+2?
Obama needs to see how much we care. Our ability to rise up is limited. He needs our help. It takes time to understand the depth of our desire and willlingness to help ourselves.
Obama and members of congress need snail-mail letters and emails telling them the public demands universal medicare.
Tell them that allowing people to opt-out makes as much sense as allowing people to opt-out of social security.
Opting-out just sets financially vulnerable people up to be prayed upon by charlatans.
I am looking for the hammers to come out in mid-September.
Now is the time to start rallying behind Obama and give him the anatomical parts we think he needs.
If he doesn't have the political cover to do this then it is partially our fault for letting the wackos walk all over us.
How do we support the president when he is asking too little?
Or
How do we support the president pushing for universal medicare for all?
Or
How do we support the president pushing for universal medicare for all who want it?
Fact: The majority of Americans ARE STILL fed up and frustrated with the direction our country IS moving in, as this is not the change most expected. Where is the fiscal responsibility we were promised?
Universal medicare would end or reduce payroll deductions and premiums corporations would have to pay for health insurance.
The savings in payroll deductions and premiums might be double the cost of increased taxes to pay for universal medicare.
The federal budget would go up, but consumers and investors would have more money to spend.
And more money for Americans to spend and invest is better than holding the line on the budget.
The highest paid job most are qualified for without using their medical degree is sales associate.
2. Canadian doctors at one time threatened this. None did. Now they most fight hard to keep Canada's universal medicare system.
3. Canadians in all professions move back and forth to the USA. The leading cause of Canadian doctors moving back to Canada from the USA is having to turn away patients or offer obsolete treatments after proper treatments are declined by insurance company death panels.
4. Doctors will make similar money with far far less bureaucratic effort under universal medicare for all.
For those MDs who went into medicine to cure people, medicare will let them focus on that.
Those MDs who went into medicine to make a lot of money, they can do that practicing outside of medicare, doing cosmetic surgery.