Fwiw, I’m not sure all this is separate. The deal looks to be healthcare and everything else is to placate, pacify, enlist, cajole, bribe, whatever the hell else it has to be in pursuit of that goal. For now.
Hell, that’s what this thread is about as well - perspectives like the OP take the pressure off Obama looking like a radical socialist.
Sam, have you got anything useful to add? Or are you happy playing premature-I-told-you-so?
I’m not a Democrat.
No, we wouldn’t. People typically run for office because they are scum. It is the nature of power ( political or otherwise ) that it attracts the worst among us. With very rare exceptions, all the choice we really have is what variety of scum to vote for.
I voted for Obama because I thought he’d do less damage than McCain; and even that was mostly because McCain is a Republican and the Republicans are so outright crazy and nasty that I’d never vote for one. Not because I thought Obama was a decent, honorable man; not because I thought he’d even try to keep his promises, work for the good of the country or regard the people who voted for him as anything more than tools to get elected.
The useful thing I added was that if you guys keep pushing Obama into taking up extremist positions, you’ll get nothing.
After I posted my previous message I read that Reid has in fact presented an ‘opt out’ public option, and as a result he has lost not only Olympia Snowe, but Joe Lieberman now says he’ll filibuster the health care bill. So you may wind up with nothing at all.
Know when to pick your battles. Prioritize what you want to achieve, and be willing to sacrifice the least-important things. For example, it looks to me like the next thing that will rile up the right and help move moderates towards the right will be a ‘card-check’ bill. Opposition to labor unions is the highest it’s ever been right now. They’re seen as being as much a part of the problem as big business was. Trot out a hard-core pro-union bill, and watch more of your support evaporate.
The same is true of cap and trade. That policy is dead in the water. Keep pushing for it, and you’ll simply lose more support. You’d be better to find some sort of compromise position or to do a 90 degree turn and look for another solution, such as supporting nuclear power or perhaps more investment in clean coal, solar, and wind. But if you push cap and trade, you’re going to lose Democrats from coal states, economic-issue moderates and Democrats, and rile up the right even more.
Govern like moderates, and push leftward slowly, on the margins, and only after gaining the support and trust of the people. This shotgun approach of passing everything at once while you have the power has been a disaster for your side.
Also, Obama could use a ‘Sister Souljah’ moment to regain some trust on the right. He needs to find an issue on which he can stand against his party and support the Republican side, to at least give him a fig leaf of bipartisanship. Perhaps school choice would be a good one, since he believes in it. At some point, it will be good politics for him to do it, and when he does, you should back him up and not blow a gasket and scream that he’s stabbed you all in the back.
Thank you, whack-a-mole, for helping to point out the incredible irony that is the Obama administration. The defense of the worst Bush policies, the fervent desire to sweep them under the rug and not examine them, and, in many cases, outright continuation of them is absurd.
All you apologists are either not reading what he’s writing, or are crazy.
The Public Option is not the least important thing to be traded away. It is the thing. In fact with the opt-out as is it is so freaking weak I’m amazed Lieberman would vote against his caucus on a procedural vote (will probably get him booted from his committees…someone somewhere on the right must’ve promised him something really good…I seriously doubt Lieberman will be reelected next time around).
A health care reform bill with no public option to actually, you know, compete and control costs is not a reform bill at all. Why bother?
Yeah this exactly. It’s funny how people view it as a compromise to remove the public option, that’s not compromise that’s capitulation.
Washington can easily regulate the financial system. No problem at all. Obama could break all the big institutions up into bits that wouldn’t cause systemic risk if they went bust, whatever he wants. He just chooses not to. He’s basically a third Bush term.
Exactly what is extremist about any of Obama’s positions? What’s extremist about wanting a public option which polls show the majority of people in the country want? Giving people the ability to organise into unions is something Democrats’ core support supports, who the hell do you think the core support is? There is no chance of any compromise with the GOP unless Obama pushes GOP policies. Everything he’s done so far with the exception of healthcare has only been fractionally to the left of GOP policy anyway and yet the GOP has painted it as Communism.
I don’t think you’re giving Obama’s Machiavellian side enough credit. His idea was to have a ‘trigger’ public option, which only comes into play if the insurance companies hike rates or otherwise don’t provide the kind of social support that reform demands, such as refusal of insurance for pre-existing conditions.
The tricksy part of this is that you can get that passed by saying, “Hey, so long as insurance companies do what they say they’ll do, you’ll never have a public option. So if you trust the market, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
Then of course, the government can set up the conditions such that it’s impossible for the insurance companies to meet their obligations, which kicks in the trigger. Then you get your public option, and with no namby-pamby ‘opt out’ provision.
What’s even better is that the way you get to kick the insurance companies in the nuts and take their ball away from them is through boring procedural amendments and piecemeal bills, none of which attracts much attention or opposition. You do this a bit at a time, over a year or two, once the attention has gone away. A new requirement here, a new requirement there, and suddenly insurance costs are going up, and government rides in on a white horse with the public option, right at the time when everyone is mad at the insurance companies for raising their rates. Government’s the big hero, capitalism had its shot and failed, and sadly the public option must be invoked. Remember to look solemn when you sign it into law ‘with regret’.
That’s how you play the game. It’s dishonest, and it’s sneaky, and it damned sure isn’t transparent. But it gets the job done. And it’s the Chicago Way.
Polls only show a majority wanting a public option when they are asked the question in the vaguest of ways. If they are told the public plan could give government an advantage over private insurers, support falls to 32% (cite).
But you don’t live in an absolute Democracy. The political problem is that there are a number of Democratic Senators from states where the majority do NOT support the public option, and they risk their senate seats if they vote for it. That’s why the blue dogs are holding out.
Like it or not, America is not a dictatorship - not even a tyranny of the majority. The political system is what it is, and within that system, the ‘public option’ in its full blown form simply does not have the votes to pass.
It’s one thing to give them ‘the ability to organize’, but it’s quite another to give them the ability to organize without secret ballot, exposing workers to union intimidation. You and the 20% of people in the U.S. who call themselves liberals may not have a problem with this, but a healthy majority of the country does. If you’re going to stand by your belief that the majority should rule, then you can have the public option, or you can have card check, but you can’t have both.
Like it or not, the GOP are the representatives for just about half the country. Like it or not, you have to compromise. George W. Bush compromised plenty with Democrats. The education bill that expanded the DOE was co-written by Ted Kennedy. The prescription drug benefit was supported in a bipartisan way. Hell, the Iraq war resolution was heavily supported by Democrats. I don’t remember a lot of ‘my way or the highway’ rhetoric from Bush. He never had a majority big enough to vote for cloture on a filibuster, but he sure as hell had the ‘nuclear option’ of passing legislation through the reconciliation process (which you guys are advocating for Democrats to use), and he never used it.
Obama had plenty of opportunity to make the stimulus bill bipartisan. Republicans presented an alternative stimulus. He declined, and Democrats froze out the Republicans. Now they own it. They also burned a lot of political capital. Now they’re threatening to do it again. Had Democrats gone for the ‘trigger’ public option, they would have gotten Snowe and Lieberman, and Snowe might have brought along a couple other moderate Republicans with her, and you could claim some level of bipartisanship. Instead, you want all or nothing, so now you don’t have enough votes for cloture. That means the bill will die, or you’ll have to push it through under reconciliation. A move like that will cause you to lose even more support, and will be a rallying cry for Republicans in the midterm elections. It could cost you control of the Senate.
Is that worth it? Also, once you set that precedent, will it have been worth it when the Republicans invevitably get back in power at some point and start using the same against you to push their own divisive policies?
Slash-and-burn governing works - for a short time. Reasonable, bipartisan governing keeps you in the game long enough that you can use the bully pulpit and your shining example of moderate, reasonable government to pull more of the population to your side, then you can make your changes when the population supports you.
This is arrant nonsense. It’s the only way you can square Obama’s surrender to the healthcare industry (in keeping with his general GOP-style corporate-friendly governance) with your ridiculous claims that he’s some kind of subversive lefty. The trigger option is a total joke, it’s a guarantee that any effective public option will never happen. You realise the 2003 Medicare bill had a trigger too right? Drug costs have gone through the roof since then but no trigger has been pulled. There are endless ways to rig things so that corporations can still go on charging what they want and don’t activate any trigger mechanism. It’s a bunch of bs, a total surrender to the lobbyists.
If people are told that a public option isn’t compulsory and will give consumers a cheaper alternative to existing policies, the majority are in favor.
As with all other Obama promises, the unions aren’t going to get anything they wanted. The union intimidation thing is just yet more crap from the right. The country actually needs more unionisation, more bargaining power for workers, to offset the damage done by so much wealth going to the top 1%. It won’t get it from Obama. The 2003 Medicare bill passed on a reconciliation vote, blocking any Democratic filibuster, with 53 votes. Bush railroaded the country into Iraq.
Obama changed the stimulus to allow 40% of it to be tax cuts, a total waste of time compared to the 60% fiscal spending, to get GOP support. The GOP got their tax cuts but then grandstanded against the stimulus anyway. The trigger option I already explained to you. If Obama passes a shitty healthcare bill after pushing for single-payer during the election then negotiating his position away to nothing don’t you think that’ll actually affect his support? You think that all the people who voted for him want a shitty corporate giveaway instead of something effective? How keen will a shitty bill make them to vote for him again? People voted for change, remember? What do you think they were voting for, more of the same?
Please. “Extremist positions”? He’s a moderate right winger at most. Nor is supporting what most people want and is the most reasonable position “extremism.” Not that he’ll support that; he’ll just continue to cave in to the Right and suck up to the corporations.
In other words, no change.
:rolleyes: Please. All we’ve seen are the Democrats and Obama caving in and groveling in submission to the Republicans. They aren’t trying to “push everything at once”; they aren’t even pushing leftward slowly. They are spineless cowards with no ideals and no loyalty to the people who voted for them; not the left wing crusaders you want to portray them as.
Nonsense. They demand absolute submission, not compromise. And they’ll still hate him because he’s black and a Democrat. “Bipartisanship” with the Republicans doesn’t work.
Great. Have a nice time, guys. Kick and scream and demand that Obama move farther to the left. Push him into invoking the nuclear option and passing sweeping regulation through reconciliation.
I’ll ask you again how you’re enjoying yourselves in 2011.
We won’t notice any difference? What makes you think any amount of “kicking and screaming” will push him to the left?
And what makes you think that doing what the American public in general and the people who voted for him in particular want would hurt his popularity? And what makes you think that caving in to everything the Right wants the way Obama and the Democratic leadership are is going to get the Left more of what it wants that actually trying will?
As for what will happen in future elections? I expect the Republicans to make a comeback, because Obama and the Democrats are doing everything they can to convince their supporters that there’s no point in supporting them. Why bother to show up at the polls for someone so spineless, so useless?
There’s a scene in a Louis Lamour western story about two tough* pistoleros* chafing each other about the prospects for a showdown. And the one guy says “I’ll be looking forward to that”
And the other guys says “Maybe, but I’m gonna be the one looking back on it.”
That is not the nuclear option.
The nuclear option involves breaking a filibuster with a simple 50 vote majority, whereas reconciliation is a process under which filibuster never comes up in the first place.
Maybe anything used to forward an agenda Republicans don’t like counts as a ‘nuclear option’ in their eyes, but half of them are also so nutty as to think Obama doesn’t love America.
There are many ‘nuclear options’. The term has been used to describe any attempt by a simple majority to circumvent normal rules, procedures, or precedent to pass legislation that otherwise would not pass. It’s been used to describe such manoevers in many countries with different forms of government.
The fact is, reconciliation was never intended to allow for sweeping regulatory change, and everyone knows it. You can certainly do it, but the political price will be heavy - both in terms of public opinion now, and what will happen when eventually the opposition controls the government again.
Jesus, Sam, get your facts straight before you spout off.
Bush used reconciliation for 3 huge tax cuts, one Medicare cut, and a college loan bill. Two of those bills only passed because of Cheney’s tie breaking vote. I know you are really riled up about Obama, but an alarming number of your facts are simply incorrect. I don’t know if you are simply unaware of the facts, or you don’t care enough about what you’re saying to verify any of it, but some of the points you’re making in debates are simply false – not in the eye of the beholder, but objectively, empirically wrong. I suggest you address these serious deficiencies.