Time for boldness on healthcare and everything else

President Barack Obama finally may be getting it. Seeking bipartisan support for healthcare reform will be impossible.

The president told fellow Democrats during a lunch “they might have to pass a bill with only Democratic votes if Republicans stood in the way.”

Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said Mr. Obama was ready do battle. Mr. Wyden quoted the president as saying, “The White House is not a bad bully pulpit.”

Isn’t this what progressives have been saying since January?

And yet, maybe he’s not. The president remains unwilling to go to the mat for any specific healthcare goal, which could leave reform gutted and ineffective. The key to the plan outlined by the president is the public option, the government-run plan designed to compete with and drive down costs at private insurers.

The public option, to my way of thinking, falls far short of real reform — only a single-payer system can fix the mess that our healthcare system is in — but it is still better than the various
neutered plans being offered in its stead by so-called moderates.

The consumer-owned nonprofit cooperatives being floated, for instance, would lack the scale of the public option, making it far less effective as a counterweight to the insurance companies.

John Nichols of The Nation says progressives need to change the tenor of the discussion, extricating ourselves from “the narrow ‘debate’ between ‘party of no’ Republicans who favor no reform at all, and Blue Dog Democrats, whose ‘reform’ is to make a bad system worse.” Progressives, he says, “should just say ‘yes’ to real reform.”

Campaigning for single-payer in August – by demanding that members of the House agree to support such a plan when it comes up for a vote, and by urging senators to schedule and support a similar vote in their chamber – is the best was to assure that whatever reform ultimately comes will err on the side of Americans who need healthcare rather than insurance companies that would deny them that care.

Keeping single-payer off the table — done at the behest of the insurance industry by Congressional leaders whose campaign chests have been packed with insurance-industry cash — has meant that the debate has veered wildly to the right, despite the obvious support for reform among the public.

The polls, while not as favorable to the president as they were when the healthcare debate started, show that the public remains strongly in favor of reform.

A Time poll conducted late last month shows that 69 percent of Americans believe it is somewhat or very important that Congress pass reform within the next few months. The same poll found that 55 percent of voters believe the healthcare status quo was only fair or poor and that 60 percent believe the private health insurers are doing only a fair or poor job.

Voters also back expanded coverage by a two-to-one margin, even if that requires subsidies, and by an almost six-to-one margin they support a ban on denying coverage based on a pre-existing coverage.

And, perhaps most importantly, the polls shows support — 56 percent to 36 percent — for a public option and a bare plurality (49-46) favoring, yes, a single-payer system.

Basically, the public is on the right side of this debate and well out in front of the politicians.

But that should not be a surprise. The public is not getting campaign contributions from the health insurance and medical industries.

Which brings me back to the Nichols piece. He writes that the current outlines of the debate are more likely to lead to disaster than real reform.

The worst mistake that progressives could make in August would be to put their time and energy into getting members of Congress to agree to back a barely-acceptable compromise that could end up being unacceptable by the time the lobbyists and their political handmaidens finish with it.

Better to get representatives and senators to commit to back single-payer bills.

That does not prevent them from ultimately agreeing to compromise measures.

But it gets them to begin on the side of real reform, and lessens the likelihood that the eventual deals will be as bad as the schemes that the Blue Dogs tried to impose before the break.

And it could break the hold that the conventional wisdom has on Washington — including that notable change agent, Barack Obama.

The problem is, however, too many progressives are too wed to the president, too invested in his success to see that he has yet to make a real break with what Kevin Baker “the dogmas of the past.”

Baker, writing in Harper’s, compares Obama to Herbert Hoover, saying he has been unwilling to accept “the inevitable conflict” that has been bubbling up and that “Like Hoover, he is bound to fail.”

He has allowed “a parade of aged satraps from vast, windy places stepping forward to tell us what is off the table.”

Every week, there is another Max Baucus of Montana, another Kent Conrad of North Dakota, another Ben Nelson of Nebraska, huffing and puffing and harrumphing that we had better forget about single-payer health care, a carbon tax, nationalizing the banks, funding for mass transit, closing tax loopholes for the rich. These are men with tiny constituencies who sat for decades in the Senate without doing or saying anything of note, who acquiesced shamelessly to the worst abuses of the Bush Administration and who come forward now to chide the president for not concentrating enough on reducing the budget deficit, or for “trying to do too much,” as if he were as old and as indolent as they are.

Obama, rather than using a bully pulpit to push through a bold agenda, he has allowed boldness to die in the Senate and in discussions among what Baker calls the “’key men’ of the 1990s,” the men who helped create our current financial mess.

None of this should be surprising. Obama always has been a conciliator, rather than a battler, and has always needed a powerful push from his left before he has acknowledged — let alone followed — his more progressive instincts.

A major theme of Obama’s 2006 book The Audacity of Hope is impatience with “the smallness of our politics” and its “partisanship and acrimony.” He expresses frustration at how “the tumult of the sixties and the subsequent backlash continues to drive our political discourse,” and voices a professional appreciation for Ronald Reagan’s ability to exploit such divisions. The politician he admires the most — ironically enough, considering the campaign that was to come — is Bill Clinton. For all his faults, Clinton, in Obama’s eyes, “instinctively understood the falseness of the choices being presented to the American people” and came up with his “Third Way,” which “tapped into the pragmatic, non-ideological attitude of the majority of Americans.”

He adds that “Obama will have to directly attack the fortified bastions of the newest ‘new class’ — the makers of the paper economy in which he came of age — if he is to accomplish anything.”

These interests did not spend fifty years shipping the greatest industrial economy in the history of the world overseas only to be challenged by a newly empowered, green-economy working class. They did not spend much of the past two decades gobbling up previously public sectors such as health care, education, and transportation only to have to compete with a reinvigorated public sector. They mean, even now, to use the bailout to make the government their helpless junior partner, and if they can they will devour every federal dollar available to recoup their own losses, and thereby preclude the use of any monies for the rest of Barack Obama’s splendid vision.

Franklin Roosevelt also took office imagining that he could bring all classes of Americans together in some big, mushy, cooperative scheme. Quickly disabused of this notion, he threw himself into the bumptious give-and-take of practical politics; lying, deceiving, manipulating, arraying one group after another on his side—a transit encapsulated by how, at the end of his first term, his outraged opponents were calling him a “traitor to his class” and he was gleefully inveighing against “economic royalists” and announcing, “They are unanimous in their hatred for me—and I welcome their hatred.”

Obama should not deceive himself into thinking that such interest-group politics can be banished any more than can the cycles of Wall Street. It is not too late for him to change direction and seize the radical moment at hand. But for the moment, just like another very good man, Barack Obama is moving prudently, carefully, reasonably toward disaster.