…that I don’t read for hours because I’m flipping between the Giants and Yankees on my teevee. From White House Deputy Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer:
A rumor is making the rounds that the White House and Senator Reid are pursuing different strategies on the public option. Those rumors are absolutely false.
In his September 9th address to Congress, President Obama made clear that he supports the public option because it has the potential to play an essential role in holding insurance companies accountable through choice and competition. That continues to be the President’s position.
Senator Reid and his leadership team are now working to get the most effective bill possible approved by the Senate. President Obama completely supports their efforts and has full confidence they will succeed and continue the unprecedented progress that is being made in both the House and Senate.
It probably was like pulling teeth to get the White House to release that memo. They’ve been avoiding getting boxed in with religious devotion. But their media outreach guys knew they were taking a beating. Some liberal senators were getting grumpy. And Pelosi needs a little push as she finalizes her whip count for the strongest possible public option. This last bit is probably what tipped the White House in favor of publicly backing Reid. As long as the Senate looks wobbly, it’s hard for Pelosi to push her caucus over the top for a robust public option.
The Senate puts a little air in their ballon and Pelosi lets a little out of the House balloon. See how that works?
I was having fun watching all of the ZOMGTHESKYISFALLINGOBAMAHASBETRAYEDUS people run around squawking.
Sigh.
Oh well, not to worry – there’s sure to be another unconfirmed rumor tomorrow. o/
I just don’t understand the attraction of a trigger. Is the President so hopelessly enamored of the concept of bipartisanship that he’d toss out his entire campaign and all this effort to appease one Republican?
I’m just still flummoxed why Obama hasn’t been personally calling these fence-sitters in the House and Senate and getting them on board. Has he talked with Bayh? Or these guys in the House like Cardoza? We keep hearing from Congressional aides that the WH isn’t doing enough.
If Obama really wants a public option (which I think he does) he shouldn’t have such a hands-off approach in this critical period. We could wind up with a less robust public option out of the House and who knows what in the Senate because Obama isn’t whipping up votes.
September fucking 9th?
Obama’s been hiding under the covers since then.
Well yes, it isn’t like he has been campaigning or fund raising or talking about health care anywhere that the public could see him.
Seems to me that Obama really, really wants to pass a bill. If that comes with a strong public option, great! If it has triggers instead, great! Pass a bill.
It is up to progressives to force the inevitable compromise more toward the strong public option than toward triggers or whatever else.
There is simply no evidence that Obama actually favors the more progressive alternatives for reforming health care. He would ditch the strong public option in a heartbeat to increase the odds of getting a bill to sign.
I am sensing frustration.
If Bush was the “decider”, Obama is going to end up being nick-named the ‘un-decider’. The last thing he wants to do is to publicly state in an emphatic way that this, that or the other thing is indispensable. For Obama, the over-riding priority is an ability to define “success” in a way that can mean anything. That way, whatever happens, unless it’s just absolutely impossible to put lip-stick on it, he can call it success and claim it for his own.
Those here who are regular apologists for a now-Byzantine system of legislative politics, and who defend what we have because, above all, they don’t believe anything else is possible, will readily accept and defend this attitude of the president—after all, they aren’t in Congress and don’t have to live in constant doubt about what the meaning of ‘is’ is.
The “public option” and the “Opt-Out” plan
In the ranks of the Republicans, there’s no such uncertainty. They know and say what they want or don’t want in this case. They don’t want a public health insurance plan at all. That is, they’re against the “public option” and are going to vote against a bill that includes one.
About the “Opt-out” plan, it reminds me of the sliced and re-packaged “mortgage-backed securities” which were made up of sub-prime home loans but enjoyed favorable ratings from the investment ratings agencies. In fact, the financial investments industries and the catastrophe they were allowed to cook up and produce are, for me, a perfect analogy for the insanity now prevailing in national politics. Any people who can have found nothing to worry about regarding the high-jacking of corporate finance by people who make casino-owners look as staid and conservative as insurance company executives, are thoroughly ripe for what prevails and has so long prevailed in Washington.
How many states in the nation now have a respectable alternative to the hideous industry-standard health-care system? The leading example is Massachusetts, with Hawaii coming in with a very weak version which might one day develop into something a little more like what people all over the U.S. have so long and so desperately wanted—universal, single-payer health care which is transferable and cannot be rejected at the whims of for-profit management.
Now, what has been stopping just any state from devising and instituting its own public non-profit single-payer health care program? In practical terms, besides the state’s population size posing a problem in mustering a sufficiently-large risk pool, there is no obstacle other than the main one which has accounted for the decades-long defeat of a national single-payer non-profit plan: the private for-profit health industries themselves who can do (and have done) at state legislatures and governors’ offices the same work they routinely do in Washington.
Thus, it’s not very hard to figure out that, if things are left in the hands of the various states, those with either populations too small for a private non-profit program’s risk-pool, or those which are by tradition thoroughly conservative politically, (and these are in many cases both true in a given state, often rural and sparsely populated), won’t be likely to remain in any national public option program. Everywhere else, we’re going to see more rounds of David versus Goliath (wherein, unlike the Biblical tale, “Goliath” slaughters “David”).
And, this, in our Brave New World of “Change You Can Believe In,” is called “progress”. Anything, anything rather than attack the problems which have destroyed the risk of a meaningful democratic system’s coming into existence.—even as a dual-track effort in which, in addition to working through the hopelessly broken system as it exists, there is also a developed and coherent program to produce, step by step, over the years which shall be required for them, to repair and replace that broken system with something significantly better.