Its all about subtext. Didn’t know about subtext much until lately…
"Hi, I’m Obama. I’m smart as a whip, steady, cool, and reasonable. People like me. You sure you want to bet your career that you can get people to hate me? You sure?
All the people who don’t have health insurance, but really want it, you’re going to tell them that you saved them from socialized medicine? Let’s say you have a raging infection, I offer you a bottle of penicillin with Trotsky’s picture on it. You gonna say ‘No, thanks, I’d rather rot?’ Really? Think they will?
Say you got insurance. Do you? Or have you really paid all that money for a chance to play ‘Wheel of Coverage’? Don’t land on ‘bankrupt’! Oh, and this is Scrooge McGrinch. He’s an ‘adjuster’ for Big Insurance. He gets a big bonus if he can figure out a way to screw you out of your coverage. You like that? Well, then, vote Republican.
Oh, just in passing, by the way…we’re going after Big Money in the coming weeks. Gonna play a little Huey Long on the folks, kinda exploit how much people hate Big Money these days. How much campaign help you got from Big Money? Don’t know? That’s OK, we do. And we’ll make damned sure they know it too.
Planning on help from the Tea Party base? Have you noticed the Tea Party is coming apart like jello in a centrifuge?
Planning on running on ‘The Dems didn’t accomplish anything!’. Might work. But I’m going to keep on extending the hand of bi-partisan comity. And now, having painted yourself into the corner, you can’t accept it. I can make you publicly refuse it as many times as I want, looking just like I look now: calm, reaonable, adult… Trying to reach out, and being refused.
You’re betting that you can scream about nothing getting done, and get the people to blame me for it. You really, really sure you want to bet your ass on that? 'Cause if you do, there’s about a good chance that your ass is grass, and I’m the Obamower! Like that? Gotta hippy out in Minnesota, writes that shit for me…"
No, it’s more like the Republicans have totally rejected bipartisanship in favor of a scorched-earth policy. The hand is still reaching out…and it’s still being spit into.
Both sides have rejected bipartisanship because both sides believe that the other side’s views are wrong. If one side says, “Health care needs to be reformed” and the other says, “Health care doesn’t need to be reformed”, then there’s no such thing as a bipartisan solution, because the two sides are diametrically opposed. There’s no common ground on which to meet.
Bipartisanship isn’t in itself a virtue. There are times when compromise is a bad thing; when it means you accede to something that’s wrong or fail to do a thing that’s right.
But I believe that Republicans did/do think healthcare needed to be reformed and still may. The problem is that they don’t want Democrats to have a success, even if it hurts the country.
That’s because you also believe it likely all conservatives (all of them, folks) have no morals. Your hypotheses are built on shaky foundations like these, so it’s not surprising you come to such nonsensical conclusions.
Why do you think that? Obama and the dems have tried to include the repubs. he has had conferences and they have included the repub input in legislation. The repubs have still held together with Nancy Reagans "just say no ’ program.
Obama went to the repubs yesterday and talked to them face to face. How does that tell you he is not reaching out? You can not dump this mess in the dems lap.
That’s just not true. They passed a completely unfunded entitlement expansion of Medicare that will cost America $15 trillion with a “t” in increased long-term debt, an amount greater than our current national debt. And all the people calling the Obama healthcare bill (which would cut the long term deficit) socialism and currently screaming about the deficit voted for it.
Seeing as tax cuts under Bush 43 were a complete revenue/economic growth disaster and we ended up with a decade without a single job being created compared to Clinton raising taxes and creating 22 million jobs, and seeing how Reagan’s tax cut didn’t do anything to stop unemployment soaring and unemployment didn’t start falling under Reagan until he’d enacted the biggest-ever peacetime tax increase, why should Obama consider cutting taxes? All the evidence shows they’re ineffective and damaging to the wider economy/fiscal picture. Especially when cutting taxes is only going to add to the deficit, something Republicans are (post-January 21st 2009) now dead against doing.
Let me just step in for a second to point out that Obama will not do this; it hasn’t been, and won’t be, the subtext he pushes, because he loves to kick things off with magic words to the opposite effect. He doesn’t want to get into a long and drawn-out argument about how much your coverage sucks with folks who think they’ve paid all that money for solid insurance; he wants to sidestep that argument right at the start, as swiftly and reassuringly as possible.
“First of all, if you’ve got health insurance, you like your doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan. Nobody is talking about taking that away from you.” That’s how he’d defensively prefaced remarks long before this latest State of the Union address: if you remove the anticipated objection at the get-go, you don’t need to debate it.
He phrases it a lot of different ways in a lot of different speeches, but they all come to the same thing: “You’ll be able to keep your existing coverage”, he says. “What I’m saying is the government is not going to make you change plans under health reform”, he says. “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan”, he says.
And, as of the SOTU:
So he’s of course going to hit that one point hard right when the issue comes up, and after noting that people want to know What’s In It For Me he’ll – er, talk repeatedly about people who don’t have coverage, and then, uh, move on to other ways to build fiscal strength, because he certainly won’t claim that the proposed changes would be enough.
So: he still doesn’t want to argue with the What’s In It For Me folks who are already satisfied – and with good reason, I’d figure; after all, that’s reliably upwards of 80% of the folks polled, and he doesn’t want step one of his PR blitz to stall out by requiring him to convince a massive number of people that they shouldn’t feel that way dangit. No, he still wants to reassure that 80+% just as quickly as possible so as to get all 80+% thinking about how great this might be for, y’know, (a) other people, and (b) the economy – with a hasty disclaimer that it of course won’t be enough to fix the economy.
You’re missing the point. Obama’s not figuring that the Republicans will scream about nothing getting done in hopes of assigning blame; he’s figuring that if he doesn’t placate the overwhelming majority of satisfied Americans at the outset, he’s going to look like the looming threat to What’s Already In It For Me, such that making sure nothing gets done would be praiseworthy rather than blamable.
He paints himself into that corner at the start of every speech because, otherwise, the Republicans would like nothing better than to publicly refuse him again and again and again; he instead does the two-step of quickly saying that (a) anyone who likes their coverage can keep it – at which point 80+% of the country listens with possibly lukewarm interest when he adds that (b) we should help those who lack or don’t like their coverage.
He may want to hint at your points, but he doesn’t want to emphasize them; talk too much about it and he’ll look like the guy who thinks he (a) knows best about your beloved current coverage and (b) is eying it with malicious intent – and at that point, the Republicans win by default. And he knows it.
I don’t see the emphasis here that you apparently do. He certainly mentioned that part about not requiring anyone to change the insurance that they have, but I don’t see that as any kind of major point, since none of the plans afoot come anywhere near that. Its not like he thumped the lectern and shouted, it was a gimmee. Why should he defend a position he doesn’t hold?
Yes, of course, the eighty percent you mentioned above. But its all in how you ask the question, and of whom, no? If you ask one of the ever-growing pool of medical bankruptcies amongst the insured, they have quite a different take on it. As well as anyone who has heard of these repulsive practices.
So, if you want to maintain that most Americans will report themselves “satisfied” with their insurance, a gentlemans “C”, if you will…then sure, you’re on pretty safe ground. But if you want to suggest that Obama needs to tippy-toe around America’s heartfelt trust and admiration for health insurance providers, that he needs to take care not to speak harshly of an institution so universally “beloved”…
Well, that might be a bit of a stretch. Kind of a lot, actually.
Sure there is. Unfortunately it’s the tiny, rapidly shrinking corner of a lifeboat. Half the passengers insist that it’s absolutely, positively *not *sinking, even as they fight for the remaining space.
No, that’s only half of it. The trap swings shut when Republicans can then keep shifting the debate back to whether this new stuff really will let things remain as they are for the 80+%. Wait, they say; won’t a public option outcompete those insurance companies everyone is so satisfied with, and force them out of business? Now, a Dem who’s so inclined could of course flash a quick grin and say that’s the whole point – but that’s not what Obama wants to do; he wants to start any debate by granting that nothing of the sort will change, and so will drop the public option.
Wait, they say; doesn’t that mean changes will result for the companies everyone is so satisfied with, since they’ll now have to insure the bad-risk folks that public option would’ve covered? Well, uh, gosh, no, we sure wouldn’t want to threaten what y’all are so satisfied with, so we’ll force able-bodied young workers to buy policies too. Heh, they say, chalking up a point before continuing on to ask what’s all this about death panels and have you actually read the bill yet and thus and such, slowing the process – so there’s enough time for one Dem after another to realize that hey, their united front means I can get sweetheart pork by just threatening to jump ship, which gives the Republicans new talking points about why Nebraska is getting a special deal on Medicare the rest of us will need to shoulder and how we’ll be paying all this money to Louisiana to buy another vote and whether the bill is so obviously bad that even Dems won’t support it on its own merits but instead need extras…
…which, coming back around, combines with how Obama won’t soapbox about how great the bill would be for the 80+% who are already satisfied, which means the health-care legislation doesn’t much get touted as a great alternative to the status quo; it’s not supposed to look like it’ll change the status quo, because it’s still only ever being pitched as leaving every “status quo” option intact for those who’d like to choose one. And the Republicans will keep putting up questions about whether that’s true – while throwing in stuff about coverage for illegal immigrants and whether taxpayer-funded abortions are on the table and so on, but whenever possible shifting the argument back to whether everything will really truly honest-to-gosh remain the same for anyone who wants it to stay unchanged.
McCain and his concubine ran on fixing health care too. There was practically nobody ,who wasn’t in Insurance, who thought health care did not need to be changed. Since the election the insurance companies have spent millions and pounded the airwaves fighting Obama ,not because heath care is fine ,but because it can score political points. The repubs knew better when they were running and they know better now. Heath care is way out of whack and needs to be fixed. It really requires UHC, But too much money stopped that so fast ,that they figured they can convince Americans of anything they want. I am beginning to believe they are correct. Fox and friends can get the Americans to buy whatever they are selling.