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Obama Is Losing the Health Debate – But He Can Still Mobilize and Win
Obama must inspire a grassroots campaign to head off the right's coordinated intervention in the health battle
1,000 demonstrators gathered at North Carolina's capitol on Saturday to support Barack Obama's proposals for universal healthcare. In one of four rallies across the state, some carried placards stating: "If it's broke, fix it", and "Insurance profits bad for my health", while ironic "Billionaires against healthcare" strode the grounds in top hats, carrying fat cigars and glasses of champagne as they mocked their enemy. Across the street stood 50 counter-protesters with signs saying "Socialism is an Obamanation", and "Revolution is brewing: 2010", and "Not ready for Obama's communist America".
In between stood a statue of Confederate general Zebulon B Vance with the inscription: "If there be a people on Earth given to sober second thought [and] amenable to reason ... it is the people of North Carolina." Given the fistfight that broke out at a local town hall meeting on healthcare recently that is, at best, debatable.
With Congress about to return to work, the struggle for healthcare reform reaching its most crucial and intense phase. Opportunities for a Democratic president to overhaul the system while his party has commanding controls both houses of Congress come around once in a generation - if that. Yet over the last few months the momentum has been slipping away. According to an ABC/Washington Post poll shortly before summer 53% of Americans approved of how Barack Obama was handling healthcare reform, against 39% who did not. Today 50% disapprove and only 46% back him. To get through Congress any bill will inevitably contain compromises. The issue is who will need to be placated and what will have to be surrendered.
Faulkner Fox, an organiser for Durham4Obama, knew there would be times like this. From the moment she started campaigning for Obama during the primaries she has provided unstinting but never uncritical support. After Obama took North Carolina by a hair's breadth in November - the first Democrat to do so since Jimmy Carter - she demanded that the campaign leave its data so the local group could continue organising.
In January, before the inauguration, she called a meeting to talk about what they should do next. She expected around 40; more than three times that number showed up. "We had brought together this very diverse brilliant group of people and it was clear to me that this should not stop on 4 November. We could not let those people go back into the woodwork. We had to keep going. We never thought Obama would do all the things we wanted to do and we always knew that we would have to pressure him to get some things done. That's how politics works."
When trade unionist and civil rights leader A Philip Randolph demanded that Franklin Roosevelt integrate the military, Roosevelt responded: "I agree with you. I want to do it. Now make me do it." Here they are, making him do it.
They formed working groups and started organising. Michael Pearlmutter, who co-chairs the healthcare committee, provides a daily digest of the day's healthcare stories. One of their principal targets is their senator, Kay Hagan, who swept in on Obama's coat-tails but has since dragged her feet on all the major votes. A moderate Democrat in a conservative state, she is anxious to find ways to cover her right flank. Ask the pro-healthcare demonstrators at the capitol how they think she will vote and they shrug. But Faulkner, Pearlmutter and their fellow activists have given her little wriggle room.
"We flood her voicemail," says Fox "We visit her, email and get people to write her letters. She always knows we're here. She does the right thing in the end. But we have to make her." Currently in the middle of a 30 events in 30 days spurt of activity, last week 75 people showed up to learn about campaigning, including how to peacefully deal with rightwing hecklers.
That is no minor feat. Central to derailing Obama's reforms has been the high-profile disruption of town hall meetings by conservatives alleging, among other things, that universal healthcare would create death panels that could kill your grandmother. Small in number but well organised, they captured the attention of the media. It is the silly season, and a lot of these people are quite silly. Like the "birthers", who insist that Obama was not born in America, most of their claims are not only demonstrably false but downright daft. They have argued that if Steven Hawking were British he would be dead, even though Hawking is British and alive. They insist that under the NHS the state decides whether to "pull the plug on grandma".
But life expectancy in the UK is higher than the US, meaning that even with our supposed state-sponsored euthanasia our grannies still live longer than theirs. In a blend of the comic and the tragic one protester, who was hospitalised after he got into a fight at a town hall meeting in St Louis, had to have a whip-round to pay for his medical bill - it turns out he had no health insurance.
There are legitimate arguments, both philosophical and economic, against the proposed reforms. Antipathy towards government runs deep here, and the national debt was last week forecast to reach $9tn. But that would be a case for different kinds of overhaul - not none.
Sooner or later something will have to be done about American healthcare. As a percentage of GDP the US spends twice as much on it as the UK, and yet one in six aren't even covered. According to government figures, life expectancy for women is lower than in Albania and infant mortality is higher than Cuba. This national disgrace conceals a regional outrage. Black infant mortality in Louisiana is on a par with Sri Lanka; in the very city where the reforms will be decided, Washington DC, life expectancy is lower than the Gaza Strip.
The rightwing protesters are ridiculous, but that does not prevent them from being effective. "It's much easier to turn up at a meeting and yell," says Pearlmutter, "than to propose something that works. Healthcare is complicated. Even within our own working group there are many different positions."
The fact that the right has diminished Obama's chances does not mean they have boosted their own. An NBC poll shows that while only 41% support Obama's proposals, 62% disapprove of the way the Republicans are handling it.
But those who complain that the right's intervention has been the work of co-ordinated activists rather than spontaneous individuals miss the point. The problem is not that the right were organised but that - with a few exceptions like Durham - the left has not been. At the very moment when he needed the "movement" that got him elected most, it appears to have largely stopped moving.
The bad news is there are all too few places like Durham. The good news is there is still time. A significant part of the country is desperate to be convinced and the battle for public opinion - which will ultimately determine how wavering congressmen vote - is finely balanced. "We're not going to out-yell them," says Fox. "So we have to out-organise them."
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34 Comments so far
Show AllGary Younge, how do you reconcile Obama secretly meeting with a drug industry lobbyist, selling us out to them, and handing off the insurance industry to their man, Max Baucus, who is giving them what they want, with "now make me do it" reform that would actually benefit the public?? And at the same time, telling progressives to just shut up about single payer? I don't see it. I see a president who has sold himself to corporate interests. And that's what we're stuck with.
On the bright side, Afghanistan is looking more and more like Obama's Waterloo. And now we have McChrystal telling Obama we need more troops and more money and more years in Afghanistan. Ouch. If he's so smart, he'll get out of that morass.
When the people fear their government there is tyranny,
when the government fears the people there is liberty.
~ Thomas Jefferson
You tell em young lady!
This writer just says "Support Obama's reforms" Can anyone find a defense of the changes that constitute "reform"? Just offer blind obedience.
I don't consider forcing people to buy health insurance to be a reform. More like a theft for the purpose of assuring profits to insurers.
Three months ago I was saying Obama is looking more like LBJ than JFK, RFK or MLK. If criminalizing the uninsured and criminalizing businesses that refuse to bow to insurance company extortion is what Obama calls reform, Obama will come out looking more like Dubya than LBJ.
The writer is from the UK. He's writing for a UK newspaper published in London and Manchester. His readers, for the most part, are not in any position to "support" or not support Obama's "reforms" and I doubt he's even aware that Common Dreams picked his column up.
Rainborowe
You've been reading a different article from the one I read. I didn't see "support Obama's reforms" anywhere. And why would he say that? He's writing for British readers!
Rainborowe
"Not ready for Obama's communist America".
But you are most certainly ready and eager for Glenn Beck's Fascist America with the stars on the flag being replaced by a skull and the death camps in Texas bringing in millions of dollars to the Texas economy. Wal-Mart will sell lamp shades made from the skin of subversives and enemies of the state. President Beck will go on nationwide tv every few days and cry on camera, telling the nation that no one understands how hard his job is. The rest of the world will cringe and wonder how it can deal with a homicidal maniac who controls the world's largest arsenal of thermonuclear weapons.
"The rest of the world will cringe and wonder how it can deal with a homicidal maniac who controls the world's largest arsenal of thermonuclear weapons."
It's amazing they got through the last 8 years of it, isn't it?
One of my conservative email friends forwarded this to me. It's Representative Mike Rogers, R-Michigan, 8th Congressional District.
I wish I knew more about what the content of the Health Care Reform that the prsident and his allies are trying to pass so I could do a rebuttal to this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=G44NCvNDLfc
What I would like to say is that I have no objection to private sector stepping up, but what is their solution to the problem of those who are uninsured? What is their proposal regarding pre-existing conditions and denial of services by insurance companies?
I can try to help.
His first claim, that we're "punishing the 85% of Americans that have earned insurance through employment for the other 15% that are uninsured."
#1: Only 59% of Americans are insured through their employer:
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/05/insurance_loss.html
#2: The remaining citizens that do purchase their insurance on their own do not have the tax breaks provided to both employers and employees who get insurance that way, and so are already "punished" for it:
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/22/is-employer-based-health-insurance-worth-saving/
His second claim that the government will strip insurance from employees of businesses making with above $250,000 in payroll is totally false. The bill will fine such a company if it does not offer insurance itself.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/aug/26/ginny-brown-waite/health-care-bill
-does-not-force-employers-drop-c/
His third claim about cancer rates is also misleading. Several conservative media people have used a study from the Hoover Institute at Stanford, and it's been challenged for using a biased and incomplete methodology to study the cancer survival rates:
http://pnhp.org/blog/2009/08/06/facts-about-american-health-care-revisited/
The rest of it is rhetorical bullshit, which can't either be proved or disproved.
I watched the youtube of Roger's from Michigan speaking on the floor. His whole speech came off like some Health Insurer paid a PR firm to write a speech and they rehearsed it with him.
Michigan is one of the most crippled and hurting states in the USA. Where the heck is he getting his figures? He made the claim that 85% of American’s were happy with what they have? You mean to say that all those people who have 3 and 5 thousand deductibles are happy? Is he saying all those who have health care and find out their claims are denied are still happy?
His perspective is that America not being able to be competitive with other countries in the world because we don’t have health care, that this means 85% of American's are happy? Mr. Roger's is saying that 15% of the American population is no big deal, they don’t count? Does Mr. Roger's understand how many American's voted for Obama? Does that count?
Excuse me Mr. Roger’s, but who are you to quote and speak for 15% of the American population? Roger's is from a district that has nothing, is nothing. If we took the entire 8th Congressional District that Mr. Roger's is over, what percentage are they out of the entire American population. 0.24%? Big words from such a little man. I don't think they even have a single town in their district that anyone, including half of Michigan has even heard of. I gurantee you Roger's district is in dire conditions. The people are suffering. This guy is a flaming idiot! He's a no body and he's going to remain a nobody.
I guess this is fine with Mr. Roger’s because he’s got his. I like how he used the example of going home and telling your wife and daughter’s they’re going to lose their great health care. How about the single mother's with son's and daughters who don't have any health care Mr. Rogers? No biggie? Guess they don't have a wonderful man like you taking care of them.
Please don't tell me you fell for this horrid, ridiculous speech? I can't believe he gave the speech and kept a straight face. Take pity on Michigan for being stuck with this psychopath.
Very annoying. Why is a UK reporter supporting the Obama plan? Such a plan would be roundly rejected in his home country. Why does he think we should accept it here?
No reform can be better than the wrong reform, because it leaves the door open for the right reform. Onward to free, single payer healthcare for all.
"Very annoying. Why is a UK reporter supporting the Obama plan? Such a plan would be roundly rejected in his home country. Why does he think we should accept it here?"
Thank you ! Some people don't know what it's like to live in an utterly embarrassing nation that lacks universal health care of any form despite being a supposedly industrial nation.
Thank you.
Thank you all!
pdj412:
Younge is hardly "supporting the Obama plan" when nobody, least of all Obama I suspect, actually knows what "the Obama plan" is. All the various "plans" emanated in congress and are currently going through congressional committees. Whatever plan Obama had in mind (if he had a plan in mind) has been eroded by his deals with Big Pharma and his dumping of the single-payer/public plan.
As for Younge "supporting" anything, I don't think that's what he's saying. He's laying out the insanity going on here for his readers in the UK, precisely because those readers couldn't conceive of anything so silly as this going on in 2009, they having had socialized medicine since the end of the 2nd WW-- i.e. for all their lives in all but a handful of cases.
Rainborowe
In November 2006, Ken Silverstein wrote this about Obama/ Barack Obama Inc.: The birth of a Washington machine in Harper’s Magazine:
Obama has taken an approach to his policymaking that is notably cautious and nonconfrontational. “Since the founding, the American political tradition has been reformist, not revolutionary,” he told me during an interview at his office on Capitol Hill this summer. “What that means is that for a political leader to get things done, he or she ideally should be ahead of the curve, but not too far ahead. I want to push the envelope but make sure I have enough folks with me that I’m not rendered politically impotent.”
The question, though, is just how effective—let alone reformist—Obama’s approach can be in a Washington grown hostile to reform and those who advocate it. After a quarter century when the Democratic Party to which he belongs has moved steadily to the right, and the political system in general has become thoroughly dominated by the corporate perspective, the first requirement of electoral success is now the ability to raise staggering sums of money. For Barack Obama, this means that mounting a successful career, especially one that may include a run for the presidency, cannot even be attempted without the kind of compromising and horse trading that may, in fact, render him impotent.
Ken Silverstein/Washington Babylon/Harper’s Magazine today writes, “When the piece came out, Obama’s office issued a press release criticizing it and said I displayed too much cynicism about the American political system and politicians. Clearly, I wasn’t cynical enough.”
Amen!
In his November Harper’s article, Silverstein recalls a remark made by Studs Terkel in 1980, about the liberal Republican John Anderson, who was running as an independent against Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter: “People are so tired of dealing with two-foot midgets, you give them someone two foot four and they start proclaiming him a giant.” In the unstinting and unanimous adulation of Barack Obama today, one wonders if a similar dynamic might be at work. If so, his is less a midgetry of character than one dictated by changing context. Gone are the days when, as in the 1970s, the U.S. Senate could comfortably house such men as Fred Harris (from Oklahoma, of all places), who called for the breakup of the oil, steel, and auto industries; as Wisconsin’s William Proxmire, who replaced Joe McCarthy in 1957 and survived into the 1980s, a crusader against big banks who neither spent nor raised campaign money; as South Dakota’s George McGovern, who favored huge cuts in defense spending and a guaranteed income for all Americans; as Frank Church of Idaho, who led important investigations into CIA and FBI abuses. Today, money has all but wrung such dissent from the Senate…All of this has forged a political culture that is intrinsically hostile to reform. On condition of anonymity, one Washington lobbyist I spoke with was willing to point out the obvious: that big donors would not be helping out Obama if they didn’t see him as a “player.” The lobbyist added: “What’s the dollar value of a starry-eyed idealist?”
That is what we are up against. And, as Paul Krugman said, “turning this country around is going to take years of siege warfare against deeply entrenched interests, defending a deeply dysfunctional political system.”
What a bare-faced lie! The "American political tradition" has been REACTIONARY, not reformist or anything similar. The only time reform is even considered is when the alternative seems to be going to be outright revolution.
Read the People's Party Platform of 1892 and William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech of 1896.
btw, "reactionary" and "reformist" are not mutually exclusive; in fact they are usually interchangeable. See above also.
Rainborowe
Ludicrous.
As BeForKids says, we on O'Bummer's left are told to either (1) support his plan on faith, or (2) shut up.
How dare he demand our support when he's gone out of his way to (1) keep crucial details either deliberately hidden or in constant flux, and (2) declared that the plan his campaign was partly based on is now "off the table?"
Corporations have set the agenda, and have selected their spokesman. It's a given that anything he does will be opposed by the Rs, but now that it's the Ds who are deserting him in droves, because they're seeing how they've been sold a classic bait-and-switch, he's crying foul.
This is the role you chose to play, Mr. Prez. I had thought you a realist, if nothing else. Well, here's an adult dose: HR676 is the non-negotiable demand, and our support for you is contingent on your support for it. Deal with it.
Saved me the trouble.....what you said. His plan is dead.
Judge Mr. Obama as one would any other person, by the company he keeps, like the drug dealer Billy Tauzin of PHARMA, and the commitments he then makes on behalf of all of us that there will be no negotiation of drug prices for Medicare bulk purchases and no importation from Canada. Notice also that he has had no meeting with any public advocate of single payer universal healthcare, nor has he uttered a word regarding the arrests of singlepayer advocates at the Baucus hearings. His words and generalities at public events and lapdog press conferences are just distractions while he cuts the deals with the real "players", namely the drug, insurance, and hospital chain thug corporations. UK writers like Gary Younge and Mary Dejevesky of the Independent last Tuesday and the gulled liberals thinking that they can email and phone call Mr. Obama and the corrupt Congress into serving anything but corporate interests have been hypnotized by Obama's slick act. This entire healthcare spectacle is classic corporate capitalism using its bought and paid for politicians to determine just how large the loot is to be and how it is to be divided. That's all that is happening, folks. Just follow the $$$$$ to see that there are trillions for endless wars and trillions more for the Wall Street criminals, the two major and all-consuming commitments of the Bush/Cheney gang and its continuation as the Obama crew.
Obama will not lead, nor will he follow the majority of people who support real health care reform. So just WTF is he doing as Prez?
I normally like Gary Younge's articles, but I think this one had a bit of a bias.
I'm starting to plan a walk from California to D.C. with the arrival date of July 4 2010. If anyone is willing to walk along or meet along the way, please email me at rahten@netptc.net I'm calling it the paucity of hope walk,
He is not winning. He's not even trying. Deep down inside, way past his inner lawyer and craven inner politician, he knows this is a sham. We know it is a sham, and more are awakening to the fact it is a sham. He's trying to calculate that pesky Lincoln-ism about fooling all of the people...
charles: its even worse than that
first off: obama has no plan for health care reform. he did not bother to flesh out any guidelines or minimum standards for the public option.
he sent the concept up to the hill where it was eviscerated by committees, all of whom were showered in bribe money by the hmo's and big insurance.
obama's 2 biggest supporters wre/are: wall street and the healthcare industy and he has brought them the booty while he gave us the boot.
now we are looking at a system that is worse than the one we have and a cash cow for the pharma, insurance and hmo companies. i guess they are the next group of "capitolists" to go on welfare in this the late, not-so-great fascist states of amerika.
obama has not lost the healthcare debate - that would assume he tried to win it which he hasn't. instead he has sold us down the river for 30 shekels (i think that is the going rate) and we the sheeple get screwed once again...
"folks"
Yessiree.
As noted in preceding comments, the premises of this article are so flawed that it's meaningless.
It reads like a fantasy featuring "Campaign-Mode" Obama: a vaguely populist agent of change commanding an enthusiastic popular army with the mission of reforming a corrupt government.
I personally never bought into that fantasy, but I guess Younge did.
To put it in the context of a Sixties phrase that, like so many others, has new relevance: Younge writes as if Obama were part of the solution, when it's obvious that Obama is a part of the problem.
A BIG part of the problem.
· Yr Obd't Servant
Obama already lost the health debate the minute he shot down single payer a long time ago.
I'm already losing control of my mind watching this retard debate go the way of Hillary care that I'm turning out to be just like Archie Bunker. Whatever makes it to Obama's desk is most likely to be Taxachusetts care instead of single payer ! Attention Canada, Europe, and the rest of the world with some universal health care, we the United States shall forever remain the biggest LAUGHING STOCK NATION when it comes to health care so gather round your refreshments and keep having fun laughing at GOD PUNISHING AMERICA !
And more bad news. Democrat Creigh Deeds sent me a reply letter on Friday calling single payer "too much government involvement". Since there are no Independents running for governor, I think I'll shoot my head out and vote for Bob Mcdonnall as a punishment ! I hope Deeds fails !
"Central to derailing Obama's reforms has been the high-profile disruption of town hall meetings by conservatives alleging, among other things, that universal healthcare would create death panels that could kill your grandmother."
Get ready for it: when "Obama's plan" gets "derailed" (as how could it not as an unwieldy train on a rickety track?) his Gary Younge-type supporters will blame those crazies at the town hall meetings with their "death panel" blather. As most commenters here have said, Obama "derailed" his own train when he let it be captured by health industry-flacks and their flacks in Congress and the White House. The plan will die of a self-inflicted wound, not the homicide indicated by Younge. If the Obama supporters didn't believe their own foolishness, how could they continue to support the man who has given them NOTHING of what they expected? (Oh, I forgot, Hilda Solis as Secretary of Labor and who has heard from HER for 6 months while EFCA was dying on the vine?)
Younge sez: "The issue is who will need to be placated and what will have to be surrendered."
***
Exactly.
It has nothing to do with "health care".
The answers, by the way, are a) The top 1/10 of 1%; and b) the last scraps of cash Gold in Sacks, et al, missed on their recent pass through taxpayers' pockets.
What's 0 losing, exactly?
Isn't this about tossing the least expensive and most chewed possible bone to the small dogs of the Demoplican left?
No bill will get support from the Republicrats. If no bill passes, they will gain at least seats, likely a president by 2012.
0's losing an arm of his 2012 campaign. To avoid that, he will gladly pass a law that criminalizes Americans who cannot afford private insurance.
The question here is not whether 0 gets his plan, but whether we get ours.
In 50 years of watching elections, 50 years of regular political betrayals, I cannot remember when I ever saw a candidate so thoroughly abandon the people and policies generally considered to be his base.
It takes 1.5 million government workers in Canada to administer their healthcare for 30 million people. Given our 330,000,000 people, how many more US federal workers will it take to administer Obamistake?
Do the math.
Nothing but the truth.
In addition:
Women's Rights groups brought Roe v Wade to the Supreme Court as a privacy issue; the privacy between patient and doctor in order to make health care choices, including murder, er, abortion.
If Obamistake passes, and the government has ALL of our health care information, then conservatives should, and hopefully will, take steps to overturn Roe v. Wade as no longer being pertinent.
Works for me.
Nothing but the truth.