Everyone could see it coming last summer. Republicans openly declared a strategy of delay and obstruction. They delivered, feigning bipartisan interest just enough to hold up health care reform in a Senate committee and on the floor. Democrats struggled with a 60 seat majority that was a majority in name only. The country had drifted so far to the right that persons whose actual politics were closer to Reagan than to Truman were able to assume the mantle of Democrat.
The Bush/Cheney debacle began the undoing of Reaganism. That is why a populist sounding Democrat of utterly impossible ethnicity was propelled into the White House. The election of 2006 began the process of cleaning up the profligate disasters left by Reagan through Bush/Cheney. 2008 took it much further. It was, as of 2009, still not far enough. It was not far enough on the eve of 2010. The fate of Democrats, and their left wing too, was hostage to one lousy obstreperous vote in Massachusetts.
Through all of 2009, Obama remained aloof, insisting on action and contrarily insisting on bipartisanship. The Senate seemed bent on self immolation. It drove us all completely crazy while the Republicans sacrificed live goats to the gods of their luck. Was Obama really that inept?
It nagged at me though. Issuing mutually exclusive orders, like haste that must be bipartisan, are a classic upper management test and tool. It reveals, in the most excruciating way, the capabilities and priorities of your organization. The organization will be forced to choose which of the imperatives they more value.
Congress is the organization through which Obama must now work to implement his agenda. So now, if my intuitions were correct, conflicting goals offered to Congress should reveal Congress. In the health care debate and process, the whole Congress is revealed, Democrats and Republicans alike, for all to see. We see the process and the impasse and the corruption and the pouting old bulls stamping and snorting, defending their turf. We also see what it is that they value, or if they value anything more than themselves.
We may never know if this was deliberate on Obama's part. All the world sees conflicting, self cancelling goals as stupid or crazy. All, that is, except for those that know how to shake up the status quo by creating a tension that will break it. The executive can then lead a dazed, exhausted and grateful organization back to the stable of his leadership, through relieving the tension.
Deliberate or not, it is done, amazingly dangerous, and done. And the person that capitalized on it in the end was Obama, taking the reins at the moment of lost hope. Even if not quite as calculating as my intuitions suggest, Obama is at least opportunist enough to know when a time is ripe and is bold enough to seize on it. All the Republicans know they are revealed. All the Democrats know they are revealed. It all played out in a clueless media.
Single payer is the next step in health care. There are more politically pressing issues that will detract from it. Jobs, financial regulation and budget deficits loom larger in the short term. But the health care marathon sets the tone and timbre of what comes next. The Republicans will screw themselves into the bowels of the earth resisting, and not know or care that it shows the darkness in their souls. Socialism is not so evil as is the rank inhumanity that has manifest itself in the ambitions of the far right. Democrats will true up to their principles, as they did on these last few days of the health care ordeal.
We have been taught a lesson of which few will ever know. We have lived very dangerously. Medicare for all is next year, and now in the realm of the politically possible.
Three of the most accurate, hopeful sentences I've read recently.
Then, "Medicare for all is next year, and now in the realm of the politically possible." suggests the darkness may be receding after many long, depressing years.
Thanks.