Killing Yourself with Kindness

Will somebody please explain to me why Barack Obama is still on his bipartisan kick?

Ever since Obama's first efforts to reach out to Republicans, with
his cabinet appointment of two Republicans, Gates at Defense and LaHood
at Transportation, and his appeasement of Republican tax-cutting
demands in the stimulus package, the Republican opposition has made it
clear that no goodwill gesture, no effort to meet them halfway signals
anything other than weakness. They are out to destroy his presidency,
pure and simple. Nothing makes this clearer than the battle over health
insurance reform.

Even Chuck Grassley, the rank (I mean ranking) Republican on the
Senate Finance Committee and the great white hope of bipartisanship for
his Democratic buddy Max Baucus, was giving aid and comfort to the
Palin "death panel" nonsense. "In House bill there is counseling for
end of life," said Grassley, "And from that standpoint you have every
right to fear ... we should not have a government program that
determines you're going to pull the plug on grandma." Maybe it's time
to pull the plug on Grassley.

The White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, is said to be a tough
guy. And Obama's top political adviser, David Axelrod, is supposed to
be some kind of tactical genius. What do these guys thing they are
getting by continuing to kiss up to the Republicans?

I don't buy the claim that making nice got them any more Republican
votes for Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation. The handful of Republicans
who supported her were motivated either by demographics of their state
or by the fact that a few GOP senators are still willing to approve a
highly qualified centrist nominee and didn't want to alienate women
voters. Had Obama been playing hardball on other issues, it would not
have fatally damaged Sotomayor.

This weekend's op-ed piece "by" Barack Obama in the New York Times was the same old high-minded pabulum. It read as if it had been pureed several times by the speechwriting staff:

The long and vigorous debate about health care that's been
taking place over the past few months is a good thing. It's what
America's all about.

But let's make sure that we talk with one another, and not over
one another. We are bound to disagree, but let's disagree over issues
that are real, and not wild misrepresentations that bear no resemblance
to anything that anyone has actually proposed. This is a complicated
and critical issue, and it deserves a serious debate.

That's great above-politics stuff if you are modeling high school
civics, not so great if the other side is going for the jugular -- and
winning.

Clearly, the administration playbook is to stick to the high road
and not take the argument to the other side. But the strategy isn't
working. The approval ratings for both the president and for his health
plan are falling. He isn't even inspiring his own strongest grass roots
backers to turn out in numbers at support rallies.

Obama's own gut instincts seem to be a little better than those of his astonishingly risk-averse advisers. At his own town hall meeting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire August 11, Obama was quite eloquent and detailed on the foolishness of the "death panel" lies, and he also said this:

Every time we come close to passing health insurance reform, the
special interests fight back with everything they've got. They use
their influence. They use their political allies to scare and mislead
the American people. They start running ads. This is what they always
do.

We can't let them do it again. Not this time. Not now.
(Applause.) Because for all the scare tactics out there, what is truly
scary -- what is truly risky -- is if we do nothing. If we let this
moment pass -- if we keep the system the way it is right now -- we will
continue to see 14,000 Americans lose their health insurance every day.
Your premiums will continue to skyrocket. They have gone up three times
faster than your wages and they will keep on going up.

But, oddly, he didn't name the "special interests" (like the
insurance and drug industry) because they are nominally part of his
reform coalition. If anyone is killing somebody with kindness, it's the
insurance industry backing Obama and slyly killing real reform.

Despite the lies, the real insecurity that people feel, and the
shameless Republican opportunism, health reform will be a loser for
Obama and the Democrats unless this president can shake off his
delusion that bipartisanship works. So far, it works mainly to
strengthen the far-right and weaken this president and what should be a
reform moment.