..."You really can't do health reform" without allowing the government to compete with private insurers, said Howard Dean, a former Democratic Party chairman. "Let's not say we're doing health reform without a public option," he added in a slap at the administration's latest move....--Liberals complain over Obama concession, By DAVID ESPO AP Special Correspondent, Aug. 17, 2009, 2:39PM
Netroots Anxious On Health Care, But Action Gets Results
The Mistake of Dropping Single-Payer
Netroots Nation was swarming with supporters of “single-payer” health care, pushing for HR 676 by Congressmember John Conyers. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has promised that Congress will get a chance to vote on this bill after the August recess, but it is not expected to pass – and is instead designed to push the debate on universal health care. Even if we end up with just a “public option,” asking for more is the smart approach.
At a Friday morning forum on health care, Howard Dean agreed when asked if it was a mistake for Congress not to start with single-payer. “This was a hangover from the old Democratic Party,” he said. “They thought that by taking single-payer off the table, we would have a serious debate. But we don’t have a serious debate – we have a shouting match, because the other side was never interested … [By dropping single payer], we have already made our compromises and there will be no compromises in this bill.”
Some conservative Democrats – such as North Dakota Senator Kent Conrad – have been pushing health care “co-ops” rather than a public option, but Dean effectively explained why this was unacceptable. “This is a political compromise, not a policy compromise,” he said. “They’re too small, and can’t do any good. We tried it before with Blue Cross / Blue Shield – and they end up behaving exactly like the insurance industries.” Dean said he was optimistic that eventually we would pass a public option bill – if we held firm.
Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett speaks with bloggers
Work With – Not Against – Obama White House
But there was no shortage of skepticism about whether the White House will stick with a public option, and bloggers hit Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett with hard questions. Jarrett would not say if the President would veto any bill that lacks a strong public option, or if he would threaten federal funding for Blue Dog Democrats that were making it difficult. “I know there is a lot of frustration,” she said, “but the President is counting on the American people to put pressure on their elected officials.” And by “pressure,” she made it clear that it also includes putting pressure from the left on the White House.
Yesterday’s news that Health & Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told CNN that a public option was not an “essential element” got the blogosphere furious – but it’s now become clear that she misspoke. The traditional media is hostile to a public option approach (even though over 70% of Americans support it), so it’s up to liberal activists to cut through the garbage on the Sunday talk shows and build a new political reality.
But for activists who feel that the President should do more, Jarrett offered a subtle hint to the crowd that bloggers should seize upon to advance the debate. Because the G.O.P. has shown no interest in a bipartisan solution for universal health care, they asked, why is Obama even trying to placate them? Jarrett replied that “bipartisan” is not about reaching out to Republican politicians, but reaching out to the American people. “That’s why the President was in Montana,” she explained, and is holding a town hall in Colorado. In other words, health care activists must reach out to Republican voters who support us.
Online Organizing Tools to Push Debate
One downside of the blogosphere is that you get a lot of liberals who have never been involved in political organizing suddenly become prominent voices – and these are the ones who cry “betrayal” whenever the Obama White House suggests it is going to cave. But the netroots is not about just building a progressive echo chamber in the media – it is about building a grassroots presence online to push Democrats to hold firm. Bloggers with organizing experience understand this, and are taking a constructive approach.
At a Saturday panel shortly after Jarrett’s speech, online organizers from Obama’s Organizing for America, Howard Dean’s Democracy for America, Families USA and Health Care for America Now explained what they’re doing for the August recess – and how liberal bloggers can get involved.
“An important element for us is peer-to-peer contact,” said OFA’s Ben Brandzel – to dispel some of the lies disseminated about the health care proposal. Charles Chamberlain of DFA said their role is to play “bad cop” in the process. “Republicans don’t matter in this debate,” he said. “We need to get to Democrats who have had screamers at their Town Halls – and let them know there are repercussions on both sides.” DFA has been targeting conservative Democrats who have been wavering, by running ads in their states.
I was surprised that Julia Eisman of Families USA touted how many letters to the editor had been sent in favor of health care reform – given that it struck me as a less effective “old school” approach. But Eisman explained that the target of this campaign is not the public as a whole, but legislators who need to stay firm. “Letters to the Editor can target the issue very locally. It’s important to still use the mainstream media, because that’s how members of Congress will be taking the pulse of their community.”
Each website from these four groups has an “August tool kit” in how online activists can get involved – in order to keep the public option a critical element of the health care bill.
Bloggers Push Specter to Lobby Republicans
The Conference also featured a live conversation with Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter – who recently became a Democrat – and his primary challenger, Joe Sestak. Netroots Nation was not a friendly audience for Specter, but some of the questions were targeted at taking advantage of his need to get liberal support for re-election. Specter said he had been to more health care town hall meetings than any other Democratic Senator, and that he could help get Republican Senate colleagues Chuck Grassley, Susan Collins, George Voinovich and Olympia Snowe to support the President’s health care proposal.
But Grassley had just repeated the lie in that morning’s New York Times about “death panels” – and when Specter was asked about it, he said he would “call up Chuck Grassley today” to resolve the situation. This prompted myself and other bloggers to shout “call him now!” – as we took out our cell phones and held them up. Specter then invited us backstage to watch him call Senator Grassley, which we all followed up on.
With a challenge from Congressman Sestak, Specter must desperately prove progressive credentials – and this small episode shows how liberal bloggers can use pressure points to advance the health care debate. After confronting Senator Grassley, two days later he was criticizing Utah Senator Orrin Hatch for also lying about health care reform. But Specter will have a tough time winning re-election as a Democrat, because his years as a Republican Senator leave him with a lot of explaining to do.
I asked Senator Specter if he still supports a regressive “flat tax” – where all Americans pay 20% of their income each year. This was part of his campaign platform in 1996 when he ran for President, and in 2008, he held town halls with Grover Norquist to support it. As recently as one month before switching parties, he re-introduced the flat tax as legislation in the Senate. “I will have to look at it based upon how much money we are spending on the federal stimulus,” he said, “and how much we are spending on climate change.”
That answer will only make things worse for him. Specter repeatedly took credit during the forum about being the “decisive” vote for the federal stimulus – although he played a role in cutting it substantially. Specter’s own state of Pennsylvania lost about $1.7 billion after he insisted on cuts to the federal stimulus, at a time when the state faced about the same – $1.7 billion – in cuts to social programs. If Pennsylvania bloggers keep pushing this angle, national bloggers can keep getting Specter to assist in the fight for a public option for health care.
Posted Monday, August 17, 2009 3:17 PM
House Dems Say Bill Won't Pass Without a Public Option
Major newspapers today are reporting that the Obama administration is backing away from including a public option in health-care-reform legislation. I'm in the camp that tends to believe that the cautious language employed by officials like HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in recent days isn't actually new, nor does it necessarily signal the death of the public option. One reason is the difference between House and Senate politics. All of today's talk about shifting from a public option to a co-op arrangement emerges from the need to compromise with centrists in the Senate. In the House however, the political center is very different. There you have folks like Congressman Anthony Weiner from New York, who, like a significant number of his peers, still advocates for a single-payer system, even though that's not really on the table this time. For them, even the public option represents a compromise of sorts, so shifting even further to the right, and sanctioning co-ops is simply a bridge too far. Weiner said as much on CNBC this morning:
The president does seem like he's moving away from the public plan, andif he does, he's not going to pass a bill. Because there are just toomany people in Washington who believe that the public plan was the onlyway that you effectively bring some downward pressure on prices, and ifhe says well we're not going to have that, then I'm not really quitesure what we're dong here.
Later, Weiner said that Obama could lose the support of 100 Democrats in the House if he doesn't hold the line on the public option. What all this means is that the most interesting, and powerful, part of the health-care-reform process won't be the outcome of Max Baucus's Gang of Six negotiations. It will be what happens in conference when members try to reconcile what looks like being two very different reform bills.
What Now?
It's pretty evident that Obama is caught between rock and a hard place, but the trap is one he made for himself, and those of us on the left who hoped that he would not make this trap now have to ask ourselves some very difficult questions. The first of these is this -- if we step up to the plate and support him now with both our money and our feet, what will we get in return? If the last six months are any indication, the answer is, "Nothing." I have to admit that I've watched the administration with increasing dismay. Although I sent Obama as much in the way of campaign contributions as I was allowed to by law, and then was dunned again after the inauguration for more (in this I am like most of my liberal friends), Obama seemed neither to share our analysis of what was wrong with the Bush administration nor to share our views on who, exactly, was the right sort of official to correct Bush's crimes and misdemeanors. While his choices on the environment have been pretty good, he has catered to Wall Street at every turn, and Wall Street has responded by going back to business as usual as quickly as possible, clearly unintimidated by their friends Summers and Geithner. Our tax dollars have disappeared into the maw of fat bankers' salaries and rising equity while we, the taxpayers are still stuck with high principal, tight loans, high fees, and skittish lenders. Yup, Naomi Klein was right -- a crisis is just another way for the financial class to soak the poor.
Health care has been the real test, and if his administration caves to Republican intimidation and lies and foregoes the public option in the health care bill, Obama is failing that test. If there is no public option and no way of lowering the price of drugs -- if Obama is determined to make back room deals with the same old corporate shills--then what have I gotten for my campaign contribution? It's not nothing, it's worse than nothing, because if the man who promised hope does the same old thing, then that is the end of hope.
It was always pretty clear to me that the right wing was not ever in a million years going to play the bipartisan game, and I couldn't figure out why Obama thought they might. At first I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt -- that he knew he had to appear to extend the hand across the aisle so that he could then do the right thing with a clear conscience (and good PR). But then it became evident that he really does care more about the Republicans across the aisle than the left side of his own party, and this is really peculiar, because the more that he has attempted to woo those Republicans, the more hysterical they've become. They think he's weak, and they think they're winning. If he foregoes the public option, they have won. Simple as that, and we on the left can and must come to the conclusion that he used us and our money, but never intended to listen to us or give us a G-D thing. Believe me, even if and when he gives up the public option, no Republican is going to extend the hand of fellowship to Obama, no matter what. As far as I can tell, Obama does not understand how Republicans work. Here is how they work -- if you are stronger than they are, they arm themselves and scream that they are being victimized, and if they are stronger than you, they arm themselves and scream about what a pussy you are. In other words, they work like spouse abusers work. To try and work with them is crazy, and Obama's only hope for making something of his promises and his presidency would have been to work around them. But he didn't.
There is a real danger now that some right wing nut is going to commit an enormous and terrifying crime. Obama has never understood that what he represents is, in and of itself, repellent to some Americans. There are people out there who believe he's the Anti-Christ and if there's one thing Saddam Hussein learned, it's that you can't prove a negative. But Obama courted the Republicans from the beginning and gave us the cold shoulder. Now Move On is asking me for money again, and I expect Joe Biden will appear in my mailbox any day now.
If I pony up, what will I get? More Geithner. More Summers. No public option. Obama needs to wake up before he has no friends at all. Max Baucus is not his friend. Chuck Grassley is not his friend. If Obama wants me for a friend, he's going to have to give me something for my little contribution and my vote, and my support. He's going to have to come clean about the abuses of power committed by the Bush administration and repudiate them. He's going to have to repudiate the drug companies and give them back their money. He's going to have to pressure the banks to revamp their lending policies and their fees, and he's going to have to regulate them. And he's going to have to stand up to the Senate Finance Committee and give us the sort of health insurance that the Senate Finance Committee enjoys. The left could do again for Obama what they did last year -- back him up. But he's jilted us since then, so what hope is there?
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