During last year's presidential campaign,
Barack Obama said he was willing to sit down with Cuban leaders without
preconditions. Hopes were high for the change that Obama had promised
during his campaign for the White House. Obama, however, has been slow
to implement any significant policy shift towards Cuba since taking
office, raising concerns among those eager to see a new relationship
with the island nation. This week two groups of Americans, over 250
people in all, are traveling to Cuba to challenge the travel restrictions
and protest the slow pace of change.
For those still clinging to quaint
notions of the American ideal, these have been a faith-shaking 10
years. Just as evolutionary science once got in the way of
creationists’ catechism, so has politics now undermined patriots’ naive
belief that the United States is a functioning democracy.
A House leadership deal with Blue Dogs and an aggressive marketing push by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) shifted the healthcare debate sharply toward centrist positions Wednesday, sparking threats of rebellion from the left.
The day's events left the Senate Finance Committee's emergent bill as the most viable vehicle on Capitol Hill, but also made clear that House Democrats are still riven by bitter disagreements. Democrats postponed a floor vote until after the August recess, meeting a top demand of centrist Blue Dogs.
At a critical moment in the tense health care debate -- when the U.S.
House and Senate are scrambling to forge compromise reform plans that
might be passed before the Congress embarks upon its traditional August
recess -- President Obama is retooling his health-care reform message.
Instead of the bold rhetoric of last year's campaign, or even of
last month's press conferences, the president is now pitching reform as
more of a consumer-protection gambit.
In
recent posts and in
my last column,
I noted that there's an unspoken deal between D.C. reporters and "Blue
Dog" Democrats to explain Blue Dog opposition to health insurance
regulation, unionization, Wall Street reform and pollution controls as
a direct outgrowth of them representing culturally conservative
heartland districts.
As I write, the Senate Finance Committee has yet to release its version
of healthcare reform legislation, and Harry Reid has announced that the
Senate won't vote on any healthcare bill until after the August recess.
This is worrisome. The future of progressive politics and the nature of
the American social contract, not to mention the lives and health of
millions of our fellow citizens, is up for grabs.
After six months in office, Barack Obama’s presidency reveals striking
parallels not only to Bill Clinton’s troubled first term, but to Jimmy
Carter’s only term. And, how those dangers are reappearing show that
the Democrats and American progressives have learned little over the
past 30 years.
So, some of the top corporatist Democrats and Republicans in the
Senate sat around a table in the Finance Committee for awhile
pretending to sweat out a compromise and then came out with exactly
what we thought they would -- a health care proposal that benefits the
health care companies above all. Shocking. What did we expect?
Right now the fate of health care reform seems to rest in the hands
of relatively conservative Democrats — mainly members of the Blue Dog
Coalition, created in 1995. And you might be tempted to say that
President Obama needs to give those Democrats what they want.
But he can’t — because the Blue Dogs aren’t making sense.
To grasp the problem, you need to understand the outline of the
proposed reform (all of the Democratic plans on the table agree on the
essentials.)
I feel something coming on in this country. Our healthcare
reform effort is catching a bit of a cold. Actually it’s a virus. The
Blue Dog and the Blue Blood flu. And this flu bug will kill far more people
than the swine flu or the bird flu.
Here’s how we got sick…
