Today’s White House Watch column offers a good example of why the column will be missed after it ends tomorrow. Dan Froomkin, the columnist/blogger who has been writing it for several years, takes on President Barack Obama, the press and the seemingly forgotten war in Afghanistan.
One of my many regrets is that I didn’t get around to writing more about Obama’s Afghanistan policy, its extraordinarily bloody ramifications, how it threatens to sink the nation in a Vietnam-like quagmire — and, most significantly, how the president has never really made the case for his decision to increase rather than decrease our troop presence there.
There are plenty of authoritative arguments being publicly made by knowledgeable people that Obama is going about things the wrong way. This is way more the case, say, than before former president George W. Bush took the nation to war in Iraq. And yet Obama has never acknowledged or addressed those arguments — and the press has not forced him to.
Before a president sends troops (or more troops) into harm’s way, it seems to me he should be forced not only to explain why he thinks he’s right, but why he thinks his critics are wrong. As I thought we’d learned in Iraq, giving the president a pass on this sort of thing is a very bad idea.
David Sirota, writing on the In These Times Web site on the Obama administration’s reform plans, compares the actual details of his vision to some of the major American visionaries of the past (the Founding Fathers, Edison, FDR):
All of these inventors envisaged machines, theories and societies that never before existed. And that’s why for all the positive, even admirable steps Obama’s America seems poised to take, the aspirations still seem too small, too unimaginative, too confined by old parameters and old conceptions of how things have always worked.
Truth Dig, in its Ear to the Ground feature, remarks on some recent polls that show Americans concerned about the deficit and questioning whether Barack Obama has it in him to control spending. The danger is that polls like this could create a sort of backward momentum at a time when government intervention in the economy — specifically, government money priming hte pump — is needed and reform of health care and programs to address climate change need to move forward.
With mounting pressure at home and abroad to cut the budget, Obama’s ambitious health care plans could be headed for the rocks. Too bad we already blew a few trillion on wars and banks. We could have used that money for something useful, as it turns out.
Which brings me to an important point: Deficits are not necessarily bad, so long as the deficits and debt are used for productive purposes (schools, health care, mass transit improvements) and not for wars and tax cuts to people who do not need tax cuts. What I’m getting at is that the obsession with deficits that has cropped up now is misplaced and raises a question: Where was this obsession during the Bush years, when the Republican warmonger racked up record deficits?
This paragraph from this morning’s New York Times story on proposed financial-sector regulations is becoming all too common in the early days of the Obama administration:
Although it would strikingly reorganize the regulatory architecture, the president’s plan results from many compromises with industry executives and lawmakers, and is not as bold as some had hoped.
It is as if the folks surrounding the president — and the president himself — forgot Rahm Emanuel’s pre-inauguration comment, essentially the raison d’etre for the Obama administration:
“Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste,” Mr. Emanuel said in an interview on Sunday. “They are opportunities to do big things.”
I said early on — more than a year ago, back in the early days of the primary campaign — that Barack Obama was a politician at war with himself: It was obvious that his instincts were liberal/progressive, coming from his background as a community organizer; that he was cautious to a fault and too wed to the notion of bipartisanship (the basic thesis of his book, The Audacity of Hope).
For voters, however, he represented their hopes and aspirations — often competing hopes — his persona being a political Rohrschach test. Many on the left viewed him as a potential progressive ally, someone likely to revive the tradition of an aggressively activist government in the mode of FDR and LBJ (on domestic issues), ignoring his ties to the coal and financial industries, his vote on bankruptcy reform and forgiving his backpedaling during the campaign on telecom immunity and other progressive issues.
The reality is that Obama is, in many ways, a better version of Bill Clinton, less divisive and nominally more progressive, but just as pragmatic and just as committed to that vague third way that too often seeks to split the difference to keep dissent at a minimum. So far, the president has spent far more time trying to appease the more conservative elements of his own party and attract the few remaining moderates left in the GOP than using his strength among his party’s progressive base to push his agenda through.
The stimulus, Guantanamo, gay rights, climate change, health care, financial regulation — on nearly every policy goal — he has been willing to jettisone the more progressive elements of his policies to keep moderates on the reservation.
Obama doesn’t deny this kind of calculus. A quotation of his from the Times story:
“Did, you know, any considerations of sort of politics play into it? We want to get this thing passed, and, you know, we think that speed is important. We want to do it right. We want to do it carefully. But we don’t want to tilt at windmills.”
Progressives are not asking him to “tilt at windmills”; they’re asking him to craft tough policy. If they — we — want him to be more aggressive, then progressives need to become more aggressive and make sure that the president knows that he can’t keep selling the left out.
Has President Barack Obama finally drawn the line in the sand on health care?
In a speech today to the American Medical Association, the president — in the words of The Washington Post “offered a forceful defense of creating a controversial new government-sponsored health insurance program as part of a broad overhaul of the nation’s system.”
“Insurance companies have expressed support for the idea of covering the uninsured — and I welcome their willingness to engage constructively in the reform debate, I’m glad they’re at the table,” he told nearly 2,000 AMA members. “But what I refuse to do is simply create a system where insurance companies suddenly have a whole bunch more customers on Uncle Sam’s dime, but still fail to meet their responsibilities.”
He described the outlines of the public plan this way (from text of speech as prepared, on Daily Kos):
If you don’t like your health coverage or don’t have any insurance, you will have a chance to take part in what we’re calling a Health Insurance Exchange. This Exchange will allow you to one-stop shop for a health care plan, compare benefits and prices, and choose a plan that’s best for you and your family – just as federal employees can do, from a postal worker to a Member of Congress. You will have your choice of a number of plans that offer a few different packages, but every plan would offer an affordable, basic package. And one of these options needs to be a public option that will give people a broader range of choices and inject competition into the health care market so that force waste out of the system and keep the insurance companies honest.
This is the strongest language he has used since the election in support of the public option. The question is whether it addresses the question raised by Robert Reich on Friday on Bill Moyers’ Journal.
BILL MOYERS: (Y)ou said on your blog this week that the real question for you is the extent to which Barack Obama will push back against these lobbies. What’s your answer to your own question?
ROBERT REICH: I don’t know, Bill. This is the first test where there is huge organized opposition. And it’s coming from very, very powerful lobbies who have prevailed– not just for ten or 15 years. You’ve prevailed for decades on this issue. So this is the truth time in terms of how able and willing the President and the White House is to really set boundaries and push members of Congress.
So it’s at this point– and I’m talking about the next two or three or four weeks. I mean, we’re talking about crunch time right now– that the President has got to step in and be forceful and be specific. And I don’t know whether he will be. I hope he is.
BILL MOYERS: What will you be looking for?
ROBERT REICH: I’ll be looking for whether he can say to Max Baucus, for example, of Senate finance, “Look, this is what I want. And if you’re not going to go along with this, I want to know why. And if you’re not going to go along with this, then would something else you want down the line you’re not going to get.” In other words, he’s got to really create very, very specific conditions, threats, promises. This is the stuff of politics.
Reich is correct. While he spoke several days before today’s speech, the basic point remains valid: He needs to spend his political capital to create a public option (especially with the public being in his corner on the issue), backing Ted Kennedy and the public-option advocates publicly and loudly and making it clear through the standard political channels that there would be consequences to those Democratic senators who jump ship.
Before anyone accuses me of calling for Obama to do something I critized Bush for doing, stop. I am not advocating the president usurp the power of the legislative branch via some kooky theory of the unitary executive. Rather, I am calling for Obama to play hardball politics, to put his popularity on the line for one of his signature policy goals.
Today’s speech is a good sign, but we won’t know for several weeks if it predicts a new tack for Obama, whose instincts are more toward compromise than confrontation.
So we’ll see. Let’s hope he’s begun drawing his line in the sand on health care.
Hank Kalet 