Squandered Opportunity

After his brilliant beginning, the president suddenly looks weak and
unreliable. That will be the common interpretation around Washington of
the president's abrupt retreat on
substantive heathcare reform. Give
Barack Obama a hard shove, they will say, rough him up a bit and he
folds. A few weeks back, the president was touting a "public option"
health plan as an essential element in reform. Now he says, take it or
leave it. Whatever Congress does, he's okay with that

The White House quickly added confusion to the outrage by insisting the
president didn't really say anything new. He's just being flexible. He
still wants what most Democrats want--a government plan that gives
people a real escape from the profit-driven clutches of the insurance
companies. But serious power players will not be fooled by the nimble
spinners. Obama choked. He raised the white flag, even before the fight
got underway in Congress.

He hands the insurance industry a huge victory. He rewards the
right-wing frothers who have been calling him Adolph Hitler or Dr.
Death. He caves to the conservative bias of the major media who insist
only bipartisan consensus is acceptable for big reform (a standard they
never invoked during the Bush years). Obama is deluded if he thinks this
will win him any peace or respect or Republican votes. Weakness does not
lead to consensus in Washington. It leads to more weakness. The Party of
No intends to bring him down and will pile on. Obama has inadvertently
demonstrated their strategy of vicious invective seems to be working.

Barack Obama mainly did this to himself. To avoid the accusation of
socialized medicine, he intentionally shrouded his objectives in
bureaucratic euphemisms like "public option." What the hell does that
mean? It doesn't mean anything. The vagueness allowed anyone to fill in
the blanks and anxious people did so in apocalyptic ways. The original
idea, after all, was making something similar to Medicare available to
anyone between childhood and old age who was either shut out by high
prices or abused by insurance companies policing the system. This
approach--call it Medicare Basic--would in theory give government the
greater leverage needed to control the price inflation and reshape the
system in positive ways. If you told people "public option" was a
Medicare equivalent, the polls would demonstrate the popularity.
Instead, that objective is now at risk. The right still calls Obama a
covert socialist.

There is a more cynical interpretation of Obama's flexibility. He is
coming out right about where he wanted to be. Forget the good talk, it
is said, this president never really intended to do deep reform that
truly alters the industrial power structure dominating our dysfunctional
healthcare system. He just wanted minimalist reforms he could sell as
"victory." Not until years later would people figure out that nothing
fundamental had been changed.

In this scenario, Obama has always been more comfortable with the
center-right forces within the Democratic party--Senator Max Baucus and
the Blue
Dogs--and the Clintonistas of DLC lineage who now fill his
administration. His real political challenge was to string along the
liberals with reassuring talk until they were stuck with lousy choices--
either go along with this popular president's pale version of reform or
take him on and risk ruining his presidency. This sounds a lot like the
choices Democrats faced during the Clinton years. Candidate Obama said
it was "time to turn the page." We are still waiting to see what he
meant.

I do not subscribe to the manipulative, deceptive portrait (not yet),
but you can find lots of supporting evidence in Obama's behavior. His
response to the financial crisis demonstrates a clear desire to restore
Wall Street power, not to change it. His war strategy in Afghanistan
looks like the familiar trap of open-ended counterinsurgency. The trap
may soon close on him when the generals announce their need for more
troops. Will this president dare to say no? Obama negotiated a truly
ugly deal with the pharmaceutical industry--a promise not to use
government bargaining power to bring down drug prices. His lieutenants
still yearn to demonstrate "fiscal responsibility' by taxing the
health-care benefits of union members or whacking Social Security.

In other words, this is really a decisive test for the Democratic party
and its main constituencies. Will they go along with the president or
push back and reject his misdirections? The burden will fall mainly on
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and
the House majority. They will be under intense
pressure from the White House to stay "on message" with the president.
Organized labor seems to be breaking out of the go-along passivity. Richard L.
Trumka, soon to be president of the AFL-CIO, promises to blackball Blue
Dogs or anyone else who double-crosses the working people who faithfully
financed their election campaigns.

Taking the high road will be hard and divisive. But maybe this is at
last the season when Democrats reveal which side they are on.