One of the great things about going home (Nebraska and northwest Missouri) for the Christmas vacation, especially in a year like this, is that you get to brag to everyone when you get back about the weather. Freezing rain the day we flew in, 15 inches of snow on Christmas Eve/Christmas Day (and we still did the full family Christmas dinner at my mom's), 40 mile an hour winds, minus 5 degrees Celsius one night. I feel so hearty and toughened up. My only regret is that it was 2 degrees when we left, but got down to minus 14 degrees yesterday, so now I'm feeling like I missed out on some even better weather to brag about.
Having survived all that, I am now back in DC eager to see the health care reform fight finally finished and the political focus move on to all those other easy issues: financial reform, jobs legislation, the energy bill, immigration reform. It should all be a walk in the park. Or maybe not.
President Obama has done plenty of things to infuriate me, but you have to give him credit: he has been willing to take on the biggest, most intractable, most complicated and messy issues around. I wish his proposals had gone further; I wish he hadn't made some of the compromises and tactical decisions he had; I wish he had fought harder and communicated better on important policy choices. But he deserves a lot of credit for taking on these huge issues and trying to get them done -- it shows a courage few politicians have.
The truly mystifying thing is how he has handled the politics of it. As I wrote in my last post of 2009, it takes special talent to take on all these big issues that progressives have been dreaming of working on for decades and yet have your activist base this disillusioned. So what is going on?
Some Democrats argue that the problem is with the progressive activist community itself, and that their unhappiness really isn't that big a problem anyway: most Democrats still like Obama, according to the polls, and where are those progressives going to go anyway? They argue that progressive leaders are just being whiny, and their whining doesn't matter. In fact, these Democrats argue, it is good that Obama has a lot of the lefties mad at him because it just demonstrates to the country what an independent centrist Obama really is.
I first heard these kinds of arguments as I was just entering politics in the 1970s, as the folks defending Jimmy Carter were telling people it was healthy for Carter to be distancing himself from the crazy liberals in the Democratic Party. I heard them in 1994 as moderate Democrats assured each other they would survive by distancing themselves from the "liberalism" of the national party. I heard them in 2002 when the top people in the party assured us that by putting the Iraq war vote behind us, we could refocus on other key issues and win the 2002 elections.
I have made this argument before, and will likely make it in my last blog post before I depart this mortal coil: Democrats win by uniting their base with swing voters, not by playing the two against each other. I am not one of those progressives who argue that you can win only by motivating progressives, but I do know it's essential that Democrats have them fighting hard on their behalf, as opposed to fighting with Democrats trying to win elections in a challenging year.
President Obama should be the president who gets this instinctively. He won by energizing volunteers and small donors hungry for change, people who gave and raised hundreds of millions of dollar and knocked on millions of doors. Those progressive activists successfully reached swing voters in neighborhood after neighborhood, and with a message of hope and change won the presidential election by the most decisive margin in 24 years. By taking on the big issues progressives have been passionately wanting to take on, he should have been able to keep that dream, and that fire, alive. But Democratic approval ratings for Obama have been dipping, online donations are down, it was very tough recruiting volunteers for campaigns last year, and Democratic base turnout was way down in the off-year elections. Most dangerous of all, the passion progressive activists have for helping and defending Obama in water cooler and neighborhood conversations with their friends is missing.
How did it come to this? Yes, expectations were too high to be immediately fulfilled. And some of the policy decisions have gone the conservatives' way, such as Afghanistan, banking policy and some of the compromises in the health care bill. But I think the paradox of a president working for universal health care and regulation of Wall Street and a huge new government role in climate change and comprehensive immigration reform finding himself with big problems with his base is too complicated to be easily explained away. I have a lot of theories about all this, and plan to be writing about the subject a lot in the coming year, but what I or others write about the subject is a lot less important than President Obama and his political team really examining this subject in some depth and coming up with a serious strategy to deal with it. Ignoring the problem, writing it off as unimportant, or even intentionally inflaming it (as unnamed White House officials seem to love to do) are all very bad ideas, because you cannot win elections or big legislative battles while fighting an even hotter civil war within your own team.
15 inches of snow, 40 mile an hour winds, minus 14 degree temperatures? Come the November election, it will look like a sunny day in May for Democrats in comparison if the president doesn't figure out how to rally his base. It is time for the White House to pay some attention to this problem. 
The list of betrayals by him and Congress Dems are too long to list. I've tried the Cadillac Tax out on some Union workers in NYC, they could not believe the Dems would do this much harm to them.
2010 there will be a revolt: at least a vote boycott or voting out incumbent Centrist Dems.
This is why we need a third party --
Perhaps you and many others have failed to reason that hope and reality are difficult concepts to coalesce. The great thinkers and moral navigators sure didn’t win in a single day or attempt; their challenges took a lifetime. Loose the “I want it and I want it now†attitude; ask what you can do, to better to serve your own heart and then determine who serve you best. Then maybe change will come.
I think the failure has been in practice. A health care reform bill that is negotiated down to mandates to purchase insurance from private monopolies that face regulation only from existing weak state insurance boards doesn't deserve the title "reform" no matter how nice the temporary subsidies are (until there's a Republican congress to cut them). By entrenching insurers with captive customers, future reforms will be more, not less difficult.
Perhaps something less grand in scope, and more within the abilities of today's Democrats would have made more sense. At least we wouldn't have reform that was worse than nothing and precluded further efforts.
If this healthcare "reform" that is a bailout for the insurance industry stands as is with no robust public option and contains a mandate, I will not be voting for any dems in my state supporting this.
Wall Street wins again. Main Street, not so much. I smell fraud!
During the campaign, Senator Obama’s healthcare proposal did not include “mandateâ€. Obama explained that the reason why people do not purchase healthcare insurance is due to cost. He argued that if the cost were substantially reduced many people would purchase healthcare insurance plan.
What changed?
Senator Obama had planned to finance his healthcare proposal by allowing the temporary Bush tax cut for the wealthiest Americans to expire. The estimate from the tax cut revenue will be $300-$400 billion per year. That was in May 2007.
As President, Obama inherited annual budget deficit of $1.3 trillions. There is no way healthcare legislation will pass through Congress with deficit spending. Hence, other sources of funding have to be found. Consequently, “Mandate†became one of the sources. There are limited resources available to the government to substantially subsidize healthcare in order to bring down the cost.
Imagine you are at a used car lot and both you and the dealer know you will go to jail if you walk off the lot without buying a car? How good a deal are you going to get?
There are countries that have mandates that serve the people. But in those countries the government standardizes the basic plan that is mandated, the prices are set, and insurers can't make a profit off of it. Their governments police the insurance companies to make sure they are not abusing their millions of mandated customers.
The Senate bill does not create social contract guaranteeing quality, affordable health care for everyone in exchange for mandating the buying of health insurance. It just forces people to buy a poor-quality product from an extremely wasteful, predatory, and poorly regulated industry.
The resources are in Afghan, Iraq and the "occupations (known to the brainwashed as "wars") of tomorrow.
Their putting INSURANCE reform on the back of the middle class.
The senate bill was negotiated down to mandates to purchase insurance from private monopolies with minimal regulations that are only enforced by our current weak state insurance boards. Yes there are subsidies to help those who would otherwise be bankrupted by being forced to pay 8% of their income to these insurers, but those will be gone from the budget as soon as the Republicans take congress. The mandates, on the other hand, are forever.
If the final bill is like the house bill, the Democrats might win back the progressives. If it's like the senate bill, they're gonna lose everyone for a long time.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/29/us/politics/28text-obama.html?_r=1
An excerpt from the Obama’s speech:
“If you are one of the 45 million Americans who don't have health insurance, you will have it after this plan becomes law. No one will be turned away because of a preexisting condition or illness. Everyone will be able buy into a new health insurance plan that's similar to the one that every federal employee - from a postal worker in Iowa to a Congressman in Washington - currently has for themselves. It will cover all essential medical services, including preventive, maternity, disease management, and mental health care. And it will also include high standards for quality and efficiency.â€
Senator Obama never campaigned on creating government run insurance company “known as public optionâ€. He campaigned on creating “Public Exchange†similar to the one that is available to every federal employee. Participants in “Public Exchange†are private healthcare insurance companies. The advent of Public Option took the center stage when Obama became president at the instance of healthcare legislation proposed to the Congress. Public Option was the brainchild of progressives in the Congress rather than Obama’s presidential campaign.
He is an embarrassment to every Democrat alive on the planet.
When Congress reinvents the wheel they only inject politics into the debate.
the Excuseacrats never give up