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Journalism committed in Britain.
Poor George W. He lost his mojo when he invaded Iraq. Everybody knew the war was personal, based on lies and avarice.
W wanted the war so he could prove to Daddy (maybe to Mommy, too) that he was a man.
Cheney wanted the war so he could feed the Beast.
Still, it was an Emperor-has-no-clothes moment because everybody knew the above facts and nobody was willing to say so.
President Obama is in the midst of the clothes-or-no-clothes moment with health care.
Everybody knows the Senate Finance Committee is full of prostitutes.
Everybody knows that single-payer, Medicare for all, is the only just, efficient, beneficial way to provide health care to all citizens.
"Everybody" includes President Obama.
If a strong health care bill does not pass — one that provides a way to break the hold insurance companies have on health care — then Obama will have failed the clothes test.
He can say he’s fixed health care all he wants. Everybody will know it isn’t true. Everybody will know he isn’t wearing clothes.
And they’ll know it every day. The emperor has no clothes. Obama is all talk. His father’s name wasn’t Jor-El. And no, we can’t.
(Breaking: Obama fails to bring the Olympics to Chicago. I think this makes it even more crucial to his presidency that he sign a public option bill.)
11 Comments
So you would use a single test to judge an entire presidency? Really? Presidents are not autocrats no matter how hard the criminal Bush administration tried to make it so. He can do one of two things, he can sign a bill or veto it. Okay three things he can lobby the Congress as to what he wants to see in a bill. But the President does not get to write legislation and it will hardly be all his fault if we get a crappy bill.
This is different from the Presidents Commander and Chief powers, where he does have a huge say in going to war. Once a Congress gives a green light it is all the President in that field. This is not and never will be the case in legislation.
Please, don’t engage in false equivalences.
Bill, I admire a lot of your stuff greatly, but I think I agree with LindaR. We know that Presidents who are very popular can be much more effective in shaping what Congress will do than Obama has been in the area of health insurance reform. The truth is he’s set the table very badly for it.
He needed to start by taking the big banks into receivership and ensuring that loan funds would flow through Main Street. He should have followed a different approach on the stimulus package than he did. He should have asked for enough stimulus to lower unemployment, about $1.6 trillion with much fewer tax cuts and substantial jobs programs than we have in the compromise bill he passed. He should have backed and gotten a much stronger credit card reform bill.
With those three things under his belt and a reputation as a friend of Main Street, he then should have insisted that HR 676, enhanced Medicare for All be on the table. In the context of these pro-main street policies, that would have frightened the insurance companies out of their wits, and even with their strongest opposition, it would have been easy to get a strong Jacob Hacker-type PO through Congress, because they would have preferred to live on and make substantial profits for at least a few more years, than to die immediately.
I do disagree with LindaR on one thing. It’s not “no we can’t.” It’s “no, he can’t.” And he can’t because he tried to make an omelet without breaking eggs.
You can’t change the system materially without breaking the power of the interests that now control it. He had the opportunity. He could have broken Wall Street by forcing the big banks to acknowledge their toxic assets, and then taking them into receivership. Then the stimulus package might have been used to further accelerate the development of a green economy and to weaken the economic power of the old energy companies. Then a much more radical health care reform bill could have greatly reduced the economic and political power of the health insurance companies. We would have a new political system, a rapidly changing economic system, and a revived Democratic Party.
I’m afraid Obama is just not the person many of us hoped he was. He’s better than John McCain would have been, but probably not much different from what we would have gotten if we had elected Hillary Clinton. What we have now is the third term of Bill Clinton. Wrong for the times. Wrong for America.
That’s a beautiful metaphor. And I actually “hope” that this explains it. Because my fear is that he doesn’t even really want to make the omelet, that he is in his heart a DLC’er.
Becca is right — a lot of this “hope” wave Obama rode in on is the hope we can throw off our corporate overlords and become a country of, by, and for people again.
Well, I am working on a post about this, but I will preview it now. When the primaries where going on I did not initially support President Obama. My argument was that while he is a hell of a campaigner, he is not that experienced a politician. There is a difference between the two. I put that aside because of what he said about torture (my only true hot button issue) but more and more I begin to think I had it right, he could get elected, but that is only the first part of the equation, once in office you have to be able to deliver, this seems to be his challenge.
Bill, Here’s some grist for your posts. There are different types of politicians. Obama seems to be good at some of the inside game. But he seems reluctant to use his very superior ability to mobilize people to create a determinative context for the inside game. Not to put too fine a point on it, he seems afraid to unleash popular democracy in his service. All of our great Presidents have done that. You can’t do change without doing that. Obama ran that way; but he turned off the movement once ge got it. I don’t know if he can turn it on again, cause we don’t trust him anymore.
This is the danger. Obama is becoming identified in my mind with those “real pony” versus “toy pony” ads on teevee.
Yes, It’s easy for Presidents to lose credibility, especially when they don’t deliver on their opening moves as President. The problem is the gap between rhetoric and reality. When you try to motivate people with lofty rhetoric you have to see to it that there’s not a great gap between rhetoric and reality. Obama had a small victory on S-CHIP. But since then he’s fallen short of his rhetoric in nearly every area of activity, and the gap is destroying his credibility, especially with his base, the people who believed in the audacity of hope. Those people may still believe in that; but they believe less and less in Obama as the agent of hope and change. Now it’s more like, “yes we can,” but “no he can’t.”
He can’t because he won’t
He won’t because he doesn’t want to
He doesn’t want to because he’s paid not to
Well, thanks for being so cynical. Sheesh! With that attitude how do you ever get out of bed in the morning?
I think you are correct. One of the most powerful platforms as then Presidential candidate-Obama was his proposal for a Health Care Reform. Many who would not have even considered him began paying attention, became excited to think that finally we might have a President who would side with the people rather than the corporations. I know many Republicans who voted for him primarily because of his Health Care Reform proposal, which included a comprehensive Public Option plan available for all Americans, and no mandatory requirement (which was and still is important for many Americans).
Health care is among the top priorities for most Americans. Health care not only has to do with one’s physical health and wellness, but with one’s fianncial wellbeing. People have lost their homes because of our broken health care system, 44,000 Americans dies every year because of our broken health care system, families are destroyed because of our broken health care system, people loose jobs because of our broken health care system. So, yes, I would say that this is a MAJOR issue for judging President Obama’s presidency. If he does not deliver in his promises to the American people, even after the American people delivered for him 365 electoral college votes, 60 Senate Seats, and 256 House Seats, he will not only be the Emperor without clothes, we will have a Congress without clothes. And I guarantee that if Health Care Reform is not delivered as promised, the millions of us who campaigned hard for him in the Presidential election, will campaign hard to rid him and the Dem members of Congress who did not deliver.
There is no excuse for not delivering, especially when he has a Super Majority in Congress, meaning a fillibuster proof Democratic Congress and a strong mandate from the American people–there is absolutly no excuse not to deliver for the American people, none!
How can someone who moved 80 million with his message not honor the message, not even acknowledge he is NOT honoring the message. Someone who asked Americans to embrace change, uses the natural fear of change and the unknown — people like their health plans (what illusion they have of it) and don’t want to change … yada yada yada.
And Bush left him the chaotic MESS of the century. And the players in Washington don’t let you in the game unless you are a gamesman. BUT STILL ….
I know Axelrod worked for so many … Edwards and Hillary and Dodd and Vilsack were previous clients. Did he just patch together Obama from all he learned from the others? Did we get the best of Axelrod’s strategizing, the peak of his learning curve? Winning is all????
Joan Baez once said that she became a “personality” before she became a person. Did Obama become a “brand” before he embraced a soulful personhood? I wished he had been old enough to have witnessed the Vietnam years first hand. Oprah gave him a mighty hand up, too. What was her story? She’s loyal to a fault at times, even hawks bad movies on her show out of loyalty to her actor friends.
Is he an Apollo?
From 45 MASTER CHARACTERS BY VICTORIA LYNN SCHMIDT
The archetype of Apollo (a/k/a businessman and traitor). Logical mind, dispenser of justice, team player, works too much, hard to play, calm and centered and into career, likes competition, fears losing job, chaos is his enemy, rejection is hard, especially from woman, motivators are self-respect, self esteem, success, competition; inscrutable, good dresser but not excessive, he needs to learn compassion and humility. Some say he is a phony. Must learn to let go of inhibitions and goals.
Dark side: traitor, will cover up his own stuff to protect himself if business in trouble, uses rules to avoid feelings, flies off handle when stressed, believes he is the good guy even when bad, not enough loyalty. Views people as pawns.
I don’t know if this fits Obama, I know it is presumptuous of me to speculate so deeply, but flipping through some writing notes it caught my attention and I linked it up with him.
I believe Obama is playing “look how hard I am trying” with health care reform. Meaning, he is not trying but wants it to seem so. The fix was in when he dumped single payer. Not on the table. Betrayal of the needs of the people for the convenience and good will of his new and old cronies. The two-tiered America, and he climbed up with the elites, the corporatists, the militarists. I know many, including Michael Moore, hold out hope. I hope they, not I, are right.