Are Liberal Netroots Groups Helping Obama Fail?

I've started deleting them as spam.

I'm not talking about the enlarge-your-penis emails or
"You've Won the Lottery" notices.

I'm talking about the increasingly-urgent emails coming
for weeks from liberal Netroots groups calling for a "public option" for
healthcare - a government insurance plan citizens could choose to PAY FOR
instead of private insurance.

Never has so much passion been so misdirected. If what these liberal groups ultimately
wanted out of President Obama and corporate-funded Democrats in Congress was a
topnotch public plan to compete with the first-rate private plans, the wrong way
to get it was to make that THE demand.

Especially of a President whose instinct is toward
conciliation and splitting the difference with big business and the rightwing.

Sure, Obama was a community organizer once. That was decades ago when Russia was
still our mortal enemy, Nelson Mandela was still an official State Department
terrorist threat and the White House was still funding Islamist fanatics in
Afghanistan.

For the last dozen years Obama has been a politician -
and a consummate compromiser at that. Have we failed to notice?

Activists must recognize the surest way to get a strong
public option that could compete with the Cadillac of health plans. We needed to
mobilize millions of Netroots people, almost every union and 150 members of
Congress to endorse a maximum demand:
National health insurance . . . enhanced Medicare for All. In other words, a cost-effective
single-payer system of publicly-financed, privately-delivered healthcare that
ends private health insurance (and its waste, bureaucracy, ads, sales
commissions, lavish executive salaries, profiteering).

Had liberal groups sent out millions of emails building a
movement that posed an existential threat to the health insurance industry, Sen.
Baucus and Blue Dog Democrats and their corporate healthcare patrons might well
be on their knees begging for a comprehensive public option - to avert the
threat of full-blown Medicare for All.

As things stand now, as writers like Bob Kuttner and Norman
Solomon have warned, a weak public option would
institutionalize a two-tiered system with healthier, wealthier citizens getting
the best (private) plans, and sicker, harder-to-treat people getting an inferior
(public) plan. Newt Gingrich
couldn't dream up a better scenario to discredit an enhanced government role in
healthcare.

To win serous reforms, we need activist leaders who are
tough-minded progressives making maximum demands for reforms that truly address
our nation's problems. Leave the
inside-the-Beltway deal-making to the politicians, properly frightened and moved
by the roar of mass movements.

We need activist leaders who have a clearer idea of who
Obama is. He's not one of us. He's one of them - a politician bent on
placating corporate interests. We
knew all we needed to know about his current worldview from all the corporatists
he put in top jobs.

And from the fact that he felt the need - six weeks into
his administration, after the middle-class bailed out Wall Street - to call up
the New York Times and assure the world that his policies were NOT
socialist but were "entirely consistent with free market principles." At a time the corporate greedsters and
free-market ideologues had been exposed as having threatened the economic
well-being of the world, they weren't the ones on the defensive. They weren't doing the apologizing.
Obama was on the defensive; he was
apologizing to them!

When Democratic leaders start borrowing rightwing
rhetoric, we know our activism has not been strong or progressive enough. At the AARP townhall Tuesday, Obama
described a public option as "controversial, I understand people are worried
about that." He went on to assure
his audience that "nobody is talking about . . . government-run healthcare" or
"a Canadian-style plan." At one
point, he further assured seniors that no "bureaucratic law in
Washington" would interfere in
their healthcare decisions - seeming to adopt the faux-populism of
anti-government rightists. Yet he
seems incapable of anti-corporate populism, even with despised industries like
Wall Street and health insurance.

I have huge respect for the smart young activists who
built up the Netroots, unleashing all sorts of progressive possibilities for our
country. But I'm bothered by their
often ineffectual, Beltway-originated, halfway demands.

I became active during the Vietnam War. We might still have troops in
Vietnam if -
instead of militantly demanding "All Troops Home Now" - we'd organized behind
polite Beltway initiatives like: "Let's begin negotiations" or "Let's set a
timeline for phased withdrawal."

I fear that Netroots leaders are doing the same dance
with Obama today that they did with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in 2007-08. Instead of demanding that Democrats in
Congress bring our troops home from
Iraq by using
the power of the purse to defund the war, Netroots leaders rallied behind weak,
non-binding timelines and other halfway measures cooked up with Congressional
leaders.

Without a loud, clear demand for "troops home" from the
large online antiwar forces, Democratic leaders started retreating and succumbing to Republican rhetoric. Reid proclaimed: "We will never abandon
our troops in a time of war." Pelosi declared: "We will have
legislation to fund the troops!"

And the corpses kept piling up.

Great social reforms have occurred in our country not
when social movements took their lead from what the White House deemed possible,
but when the White House was pushed by powerful movements demanding reforms
bolder than what the president was comfortable with. Leading abolitionists pushed
Lincoln toward ending slavery by
demanding immediate abolition.
Socialist and workers movements in the '30s sufficiently scared elites so
that FDR could pass New Deal reforms far short of socialism. Martin Luther King and civil rights
activists continuously pushed and prodded JFK and later LBJ.

And these movements didn't have the Internet.

In 1993, a National Health Insurance bill gained 100
co-sponsors in the Democrat-led House, plus endorsements from many unions, even
Consumers Union. There was
unfortunately no Internet then when the Clinton White House undermined this
growing movement by pushing an incredibly complex plan that left big insurers
dominating the system. Clinton's
plan inspired few and confused many.
After it went down in flames, talk radio host Jim
Hightower asked President Clinton why he didn't back an
easily-explained Medicare for All approach that had so much support in Congress.
Clinton
said he'd thought it was politically too difficult but now wondered about that
judgment.

Here we are 16 years later. Neglected by Netroots groups, John
Conyers today has 85 House co-sponsors for HR 676, the Expanded Medicare for
All Act, as well as the endorsement of many unions and Obama's
longtime personal physician.
If all those emails I've received lately had been about building the HR
676 movement and a public system instead of a "public option," the bill would
have many more co-sponsors and could be pressuring Democrats to stand tough
today.

For Obama to feel secure about reform and standing up to
the right, he needs to feel that he's in the center pushed by noisy forces to
his left. He's admitted as much.
The way to help him succeed is to mobilize seriously to his left.

The way to help Obama fail is for Netroots and liberal
groups to collapse toward him from the get-go.

And if Obama does fail, we can quit laughing at a
Republican Party in disarray due to Bush, religious extremism, hypocrisy and
anti-intellectualism.

Because in this period of crisis and fear, unless a
progressively-prodded White House delivers reforms that actually improve lives
soon, rightwing reaction could rebound more dangerous than ever in 2010 and/or
2012.