waiting…
listens to the crickets…
Der, you’re welcome to save your buddy Elvis, should you have the proof that Americans wanted a public option. Again, if you show me an avg of polls that show this, I’ll concede that point.
IOZ sez:
It can’t be said often enough: those who are disappointed in Obama should only be disappointed in themselves.
After you’ve disentangled yourself from whichever of the two ruling class marketing vehicles your cultural background predisposes you to self-identify with, the continuity between governments, and thus the absurdity of partisan politics in this country, appears clearly.
This “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” slogan is woefully inadequate to describe what is happening. Especially as our glorious bipartisan Mesopotamian adventure soon enters its eighth year; our Near East ho-down, its ninth.
Here’s an average of polls on the public option:
Favor, 51.9%
Oppose, 41.4%
People were talking about this interesting split even at the time of the health care debate. While it’s true that the majority opposed the bill that was passed, many people who were opposed to the bill were actually in favor of even stronger reform measures, such as single-payer or the public option. A majority of people favored a public option, but that wasn’t on the table.
And who elected Ben Nelson President, VP, majority leader, or anything else with something like a veto?
No, wait, that’s beside the point. Y’all are making the same error that people like Barry Obama & yes, Hillary Clinton make. You think that you negotiate from the middle, that you start out with the deal you want, & when that gets changed, that what it gets changed to is the best you could get. Y’all are suckers. That is the technical term.
Obama should have been pushing a public option from go–no, in fact he should have started with Medicare for All–& he should have been campaigning in Nelson’s home state to get voters to hold Nelson’s feet to the fire. Results can be changed by framing the argument, & that actually works better than a “Jedi mind trick” would.
We on the economic left are pissed at Obama, as we would be at Hillary Clinton if she were Prez, because of what moderates like them are doing to the left’s rep. The common Republican voter now thinks that economic leftism is the government making you pay a single-payer tax for Medicare coverage you benefit not at all from & then mandating that you buy private health insurance for yourself with whatever’s left. And most don’t even associate Medicare with the left anymore, nor the payroll tax with medicine! The right (which includes many of the senior Democrats in Congress) is able to pretend that “those nasty leftists” are trying to force you to buy private insurance, because the center-right convinced the center-left that we needed a “baby steps” approach to universal health care or a German-style dirigism. The baby steps are pissing people off–they don’t see any real subsidy for them, just more obligation–and dirigism doesn’t work in a libertarian country.
So another generation is lost for the left, & will keep voting against their own interests, because they can’t see anyone on their side but at least the GOP claim to be on God’s side.
The ACA passed with 60 votes, and it needed 60 votes to pass. Every senator had a veto.
But Obama did press for the public option from the get-go. It was on his original list of “points” that he wanted the Healthcare reform bill to have (and was the only one that didn’t make it to the final bill). And he did have the public on his side (as Hellestal’s link shows). Nelson still wouldn’t vote for it.
And let’s be honest here. Clinton was a white Ozarkian good ol’ boy. Obama is, by comparison, practically a Martian to the central US. I like Martians, but not everyone does. As much as I hate to admit it, John Edwards was probably right when he said he could get stuff done 'cos he talked with a twang.
I’m amazed at the popularity of the “Obama never even tried/tries to get liberal policy X enacted” meme and its close cousin “Obama never uses his bully pulpit to promote progressive policy Y or to question right wing propaganda Z.”
Maybe I’ve been living on the other side of the looking glass, but I see a POTUS who has consistently been rather emphatic and eloquent in public comments, both to promote the policies he campaigned on and to push back against Republican talking points. I also find it rather implausible to believe that Obama’s political awareness isn’t at least on a par with my own, to put it mildly. But that’s just me, I guess.
Well I, for one, never bought into the whole ‘Obama is the love child of Lincoln and MLK who will lead us to a utopia of rainbows and chocolate rivers,’ bit. I’d hoped for more, but I’m not really dissatisfied. The tea partiers disgust me a lot more than Obama’s shortcomings.
The fact that numerous conservatives here seem to agree with the OP really tells you something about the thread. If many liberals all said what a great job republican president XYZ was doing, it would make you reconsider too. I want a democratic president who conservatives revile and fear (for good reason mind you. Not based on bullshit conspiracy theories). Not someone they like.
The problem with Obama in the eyes of lefties like me is that he really doesn’t negotiate well. His policies are good democratic policies (not as far to the left as I would like, but much better than anything the GOP could come up with). But as an example he said in an interview that he made health reform like Romneycare so republicans would vote for it. None did. He gave up the public option to win approval of health insurance companies. They ended up dumping millions into anti-health reform movements anyway (the tea party was originally a movement largely funded by the health insurance industry). He put tax cuts in the stimulus to win GOP votes. No republicans voted for it, then they bragged that none voted for it.
He said he wanted to fight to end supply side tax policy. Then he comes up with the current deal and says he looks forward to future fights. But future fights will have him even weaker than he is now.
He doesn’t seem to know how to negotiate. You don’t give something up and get nothing in return. And if you do, you only do it once.
He has accomplished alot. But he has accomplished a lot with 59-60 senators, 260 house members and a congress which is far more progressive than congresses before the 1990s since the 60s-90s period saw a massive realignment in politics (nearly all conservative voters left the dem party to become republicans, making the GOP so radical that they became extinct in liberal parts of the country. Cenk Uygar, just as an example, was a republican until the party became too nuts. It happened all over the nation). The end result is that the south is deep red while the west coast and northeast became deep blue. The point is, it really isn’t hard to accomplish progressive goals with 60 senators, 260~ house members and a democratic congress which has been purged of conservatives for the last few decades.
You probably couldn’t get a coalition of democratic congressmen in the 80s to do what Obama did today because there would be tons of conservative southern dems back then. But now they are all republicans, and all the liberal republicans from the northeast are now liberal democrats.
As a leftie, I feel he could have accomplished more had he worked at it. I don’t know who would’ve been a better president though. In all honesty, Pelosi would’ve made a great president. She is truly reviled by the GOP, and she is reviled because she is good at what she does (not because of her skin color or beliefs she is somehow ‘different’). That is who I’d want as president, someone the GOP reviles because she ass rapes their ideology rather than someone they revile because of how he looks.
If I understand **WC **correctly, I think I can understand the lefty frustration.
When will there ever again be a Democratic president with such a huge majority in Congress? And this is the best Obama could come up with?
I think there is a sense that everything is going to be downhill from here, and that Obama blew his chance to get real progressive policies enacted.
But the fact is, the Democrats just don’t exercise political unity like the Republicans do, and the only way the Dems got their huge majority was to to run some pretty conservative Dems in vulnerable Pubbie districts/states. There may have been a Democratic majority, but there was never anything close to a progressive majority.
It became painless for the filibusterer. All it takes now is for the oppositionist party to say “You’re gonna need 60 for this one, Hoss” and that’s it. It used to require some work.
Given a tame, salaried mass media that reports simply that a vote failed to get the needed 60 votes, instead of pointing out why, or even mentioning “No matter what the Constitution says, a Senate vote requires 60 votes to pass now”, the painless option is now actually attractive to anyone whose primary goal is tactical victory that can continue to be portrayed as fecklessness of the majority.
Now, to anyone, *anyone *who still insists on calling this tax deal a “compromise”, how about telling us just what it is that the Republicans were forced to reluctantly accept, in spite of their principles, in order to get this compromise? What? What have they expressed regret about failing to get this time? What emotion have they even expressed other than outright glee?
Chew on this, Smashy. And then you can drop the nonsense.
Can you quote the part of the rule change in 2005 that you’re talking about? My cite clearly states that the procedural filibuster has been around since 1975. I know that educating us on “political basics is getting a bit tiresome”, but maybe you can help us ignorant folks understand this mysterious rule you keep alluding to.
Three Republican Senators voted for the American Recovery Act. It wouldn’t have passed otherwise.
Which is the problem I think people don’t understand. Its all well and good to say Obama shouldn’t try and negotiate with the GOP as its extremely difficult to get even one or two to break ranks with their party. But even with the current majorities, the choice for Obama hasn’t been to either try and deal with the GOP and pass compromise legislation or ignore them and pass more liberal legislation, its been compromise or pass nothing.
But the thing is, Pelosi looks good to you because she’s had a much easier job then Reid or Obama. She can let 30 members in her chamber vote however they feel and doesn’t have to worry about it. Obama and Reid need every Dem senator (two of which have spent part of the last Congress being terminally ill), two independent senators and for most of the last congress, at least one or two GOP senators to pass anything.
Club for Growth seems pretty pissed about it. One of the really conservative senators (I can’t remember which one) is trying to organize a filibuster. It included only a limited extension of the tax cuts, a return of the estate tax (admittedly to a lower level then I’d like to see) an extension of the unemployment benefits and a host of tax cuts targeted at lower incomes. None of which the GOP likes.
Also I have no idea what you think happened in 2005 regarding the filibuster. You say it “became painless”. But your still not saying specifically what you think changed that year. I can’t imagine you think it literally caused someone physical pain pre-2005.
The mathematical reality is that Obama couldn’t have gotten more without the votes of three or four centrist dems. So in order for you to believe in good faith that Obama could have done more if he tried, you need a theory about why he could have changed those votes. What is your theory? You seem to imply that he would have swayed their votes by initially proposing more liberal policies. What makes you think that, in light of the fact that the one’s he proposed were already too liberal for those Senators? In other words, what makes you think crafting legislation is like negotiating the price of a used car?
As John Mace points out, and as I said in the OP, the reason the Dems have 60 Senators and so many house members is because they ran moderate or conservative candidates in GOP districts. It would be easy to pass progressive policies if you had 60 progressive Senators. But not every Democrat is a progressive.
Part of it is that dems don’t play rough like the GOP does.
The house was extremely progressive. Since you only need 218 house votes to pass a bill, and there were about 260 dems you got tons of progressive legislation in the house. But it all died in the senate. And it felt like the dems never played rough in the senate.
They never (as far as I know) threatened the chairmanships of democratic senators who didn’t pass laws. The GOP does this. They did it to Specter around 2005, threatened his chairmanship. They could’ve done it to Baucus, Nelson, Conrad, etc and they never did. Chairmanship comes from seniority, it should come from party loyalty.
I believe the GOP also lines up good jobs for retired congressmen and uses those for leverage too (according to Krugman). No idea if the dems use that power in the senate.
The dems also could’ve altered the filibuster rules at the start of the 111th congress and never did, as a result the GOP obstructed heavily. If the GOP wins the white house and senate in 2012, I’m 99% sure they will change the rules when the 113th congress starts.
George Bush got supply side tax cuts with political capital from a presidential election he barely won, 51 senators and about 230 house members. Obama, with his quasi-landslide presidential election, 58 senators and 255 house members can’t remove them. It is pathetic.
Threatening chairmanships, using post-congressional careers as leverage, changing the senate filibuster rules, etc. The GOP does those things in the senate, the dems do not.
What is yours? :dubious:
You actually think Congressmembers vote on bills based essentially on their *merits *and their (claimed) principles? That’s so cute! 
But several Republicans are. But they vote as they’re told.
Had the dems altered the filibuster rules at the start of the 111th congress they wouldn’t need 60 senators. Tons of progressive legislation could’ve been done with 50 senators and Biden as the tie breaker.
The dems lost most of their conservative members in the house in the last election cycle. About 4 progressives lost their seats, about 44 centrist and conservadems lost seats.
As far as Obama doing more, what he could’ve done is not tried to appeal to republicans or powerful private interests (insurance companies) who were never going to negotiate with him or work with him in good faith. Like I said earlier Obama said he tried to make his health reform similar to Romneycare, and I believe he tried to use the public option as a bargaining tool to win over private health insurance companies. Neither worked. He gave up ground and leverage and got nothing back for it.
That isn’t negotiating with the most conservative democrats and actually getting something for it (like they did with conservadems in the senate to pass health reform). That is giving up ground and legislation because you are too naive to know the other side has no interest in seeing you rack up legislative victories.
Obama would not have to personally talk Repubs into changing their vote. What he needed to do us to loudly and clearly proclaim what the Repubs are trying to do, who they work for and how their programs will harm the people. It is the power of the people who will call, write and email their politicians that he should have appealed to.
Politics is the business of getting re-elected. Th Repubs want to keep their seats. They can not ignore the will of the people all the time.
The Dems are now seen as Republican light. Obama put bankers in charge of the economy. How is that different than Bush? We knew who Bush was. We thought Obama was different. But he put Goldman is charge of the economy. Geithner, Summers and the others were all the same as Bush’s men. The policies did not change. Many wanted Obama to prosecute the bankers for fraud. He did not. The bankers are back to rewarding themselves with huge bonuses and salaries. He does not even have the guts to push Elizabeth Warren. She is just quietly slipping into her position. I think he is afraid she wants to rock the boat. The boat needs some major rocking.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/bofa-pay-137-million-settle-claims-defrauded-schools-hospitals/ Heres who the bankers are. Enter bank fraud into google and you get pages of fines they are paying. They don’t go to jail though. Fines are just a cost of doing business for them.