Obamarama: Health Care: Gird your loins like a wrestler
This profile of the former Cigna exec who fell off his ass on the road to Damascus and has since become an advocate of relatively radical health care reform — answers all the questions again ludicrously in the air now that inbred ill educated assholes are showing up at Town Hall with machine guns.
Hillary — during the election campaign last summer — knew and warned that the health care battle would be a war. And she insisted that if you gave the insurance companies an inch they’d take a mile. She was ready for the war.
Obama, accustomed to charming people, seems to have thought Washington would like him so much that the institutional enemies of reform would cave in. This particular kind of naivete aside, he’s typical of his cohort — people who were impressionable still, ie teenagers, during the Reagantime and view the world thru the frame of corporate television that was born in the 80s.
The health care question is an aspect of the class war that the corporate class reignited during the 80s to found Globalization. It is called war for a reason. If Obama fails — with this astounding majority in the Congress — to get a public health care system up and running, then he will confirm fears of a year ago that he was not ready to be president.
He has the values, but may not have the vision. Hillary and Edwards both saw farther and deeper, into the deep ugly heart of what the USA became in the final quarter of the 20th century.
Peter Gilbert says:
Bill,
You’re probably right about Obama’s need to exert more authority. I still think, though, that Hillary would not have won the election; and as for Edwards, he’s tabloid fodder these days. All in all, I’m glad Obama won the Democratic primary and got into the White House. But, you’re right, reasonableness and charm are not going to work for him on this particular issue; he’s got to do something different.
Peter
September 2nd, 2009 at 5:38 pm
ed says:
Hello Peter,
I’ve been away and often out of touch with the internet.
I think Hillary would have garnered more of the middle than Obama did. I wonder if Obama would have won without the Sept 2008 financial meltdown.
As for the future … After Obama’s speech (which I admired) it seemed clear he had, indeed, abandoned the Public Option — he said so by nodding to the then-not-yet-public Baucus plan.
Now we have Baucus, and it seems a non-starter. All the concessions taken from the Left seem to have failed to win the requisite Repubs.
Perhaps this failure (assuming I’m right to think it’s a non-starter) might encourage Obama and the Donkeys to go ahead with what they think is right. So might the Public Option rebound?
I doubt it. But perhaps the chance is better now than it was the evening of the speech.
Meanwhile international affairs are blowing up in the president’s face. He is going to have to stop being the Pentagon’s boy, or will go down the tubes with them. Which will hand the next election to Romney-Palin.
September 19th, 2009 at 10:44 am