It shouldn't have come to this

I'm holding off on doing a post on the need for inner emigration for progressive Democrats. But depending on how the health care reform comes out, I could be there in a couple of weeks. Maybe less.

Joe Conason states the problem well in Healthcare didn't have to go this way Salon 09/04/09:

The essence of President Obama’s problem can be found in an anonymous quote, attributed to a White House official, that appeared on the front page of the New York Times last Wednesday. “It’s so important to get a deal,” confided the unnamed aide, that the president “will do almost anything it takes to get one.” Such desperate confessions of politics as usual, which have appeared in dozens of such remarks in the press over the past several months, not only serve the president poorly but damage the fresh brand that he brought to Washington after his triumphant election last year. They are the residue of an ill-conceived strategy that has left Obama politically vulnerable, attenuated his connection with loyal progressives, and blurred his most important message. [my emphasis]

We're on the verge of seeing an historic opportunity to initiate a new era of progressive ascendancy flushed down the drain. Not by Republicans or FOX News or Hate Radio, though they've all played a part, but by a Democratic Party that refuses to go to the mat for the most important needs of its supporters. It may be down to the Progressive Caucus and their willingness to vote down an inadequate health-care bill. Unless they force Obama to choose between a good health care reform package and no health care reform package, a critical moment may be permanently lost. This isn't about "the perfect being the enemy of the good". It's about a critical strategic decision about America's health care system that is likely to be with us for decades.

As Conason writes:

Nowhere has this fundamental mistake been more visible than in the effort to reform healthcare. From more than six decades of struggle over the question of universal coverage and cost control, the Obama team must have known that they would face enormous opposition. They should also have known, from the ugly mood of the Republican campaign during the final weeks of the election and the partisan history of the past 15 years, that chances for bipartisan agreement were minimal. And they ought to have realized that the energy of the progressive movement, expressed in their own campaign, could become their most formidable weapon in that battle. ...

But this president surrendered that powerful weapon when he chose aides who prefer lobbyists to activists and adopted a strategy that ranks bipartisan agreement above policy substance. The telltale remark came from still another anonymous aide who boasted recently that the White House would welcome a "confrontation" with Democratic liberals over healthcare because it would "show he is willing to stare down his own party to get things done."

Obama has a chance, based on what we can see of our current situation right now, to be a positive and transformative President. Or he has a chance to win limpid compliments from our media priests of High Broderism for fighting against the core of his own Party, and spend the rest of his three-to-seven years as President fighting an essentially conservative battle to stave off the worst damage from a Republican Party that is already intimidating cowardly and irresponsible local school officials into requiring students have a parental permission slip to hear a saccharine speech by Obama about the importance of education.

That would be a tragic waste for Obama. It would be a devastating defeat for the people of the country.

Gene Lyons, Conason's co-author on The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton (2000) addressed the same problem in his Salon column of 09/03/09, A cake knife is useless in a gunfight:

If President Obama expects Congress to pass a healthcare reform bill worth signing, he'd better grasp that "bipartisanship" is a means, not an end. After eight years of cheering themselves hoarse over one catastrophic Bush blunder after another, Republicans will start dealing with reality only when they're afraid not to. Right now, it's their talk-radio/Fox News-hypnotized base that's got GOP congressmen running scared.

On healthcare reform, Obama has mainly his own high-minded fecklessness to blame. To alter the cliché, he hasn't just brought a knife to a gunfight, he's brought a cake knife.

Tags: gene lyons, joe conason, health care reform