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Robert Reich at HuffPo concludes:
So, I repeat: Why has it come down to these six? Who anointed them? Apparently, the White House. At least that’s what I’m repeatedly being told by sources both on the Hill and in the administration. "The Finance Committee is where the action is. They’ll tee-up the final bill," says someone who should know.
Visibly there is Kabuki in progress. Predicably, health-care reform is being disemboweled before us in the name of bipartisanship. But Reich fails to ask the obvious question: "Why?" Here are some conjectures that are floating around, and obviously there’s room for more.
1) Obama doesn’t believe in health-care reform and has cynically used the promise of health-care reform to get votes.
2) Obama and Emanuel are running an industry-shakedown racket, where they say to each industry one at a time: "Give us campaign funds and political support and your status will remain quo; otherwise, we’ll drop change you can believe in all over your ass."
3) Some powerful group has the goods on Obama and own him. Emanuel and Brennan are his "minders."
4) Obama has an unexplainable fascination with elderly conservative senators, e.g., Lieberman, Grassley, and Baucus.
UPDATE: under the first three conjectures, the function of the gang-of-six would be to serve as scapegoats so that Obama’s base doesn’t blame him and his administration for the weakness of the final bill.
18 Comments
It’s all about the money–both for big business and that which they funnel to the pols…
wigwam, thanks for an interesting post.
I don’t believe in any of 1) to 4). What I do believe is the problem is Obama’s orientation to politics as community organizing, and his flawed view that his community is composed of the policy makers and lobbyists in Washington rather than the country as a whole.
Obama is not an FDR-style progressive. Instead, he’s a an elitist who likes to go forward by bringing the community of elites along with him. He seems to distrust populism and popular democracy, even though he has benfited from it.
I also think he’s pretty arrogant about what he thinks he knows; though he’s far from alone in having that fault. -:)
Obama is a member of the Establishment. This is what reform looks like to that Establishment. Scary, I know.
Hugh, not scary, so much as infuriating.
“…so that Obama’s base doesn’t blame him and his administration for the weakness of the final bill.”
Oh, but we will. We most certainly will. Along with all the corrupt faux Democrats.
the heavy heavy reality of that is beggining to sink in. whatever their motivation, they oviously think its still 1993.
He isn’t. He’s just using it as cover for neoliberal policy prerogatives.
Two possibilities:
1) Obama has a deep-seated need to avoid conflict…to seek agreement.
2) He is a tool of corporate interests.
Rahm’s presence as COS tells us which it is.
It’s #2.
Anyone who believes otherwise should stop kidding himself or herself.
Your timely post, wigwam, and comments here and at HuffingtonPost raise a question for me:
What, exactly, do people think Robert Reich meant by:
Because, to me, one of the absolutely clear take-aways from Reich’s buried-lede closing paragraph is that there’s really no point in blaming Baucus & Company for what Obama & Company have deliberately wrought. Perhaps Reich’s closing paragraph still leaves it somewhat debatable whether Obama wrought The Baucus Caucus in order to try to force nominally-”bipartisan” health-insurance reform legislation on the Senate, rather than to cover up an unbelievably bad-faith deliberate corporate sell-out, but Reich is at least unambiguously telling us that Baucus is a willing vehicle for the schemes of others, and is not the hurdle to Obama’s “agenda” that he’s been (too-conveniently) made out to be.
And yet, one major ‘revelation’ absorbed instead by those commenting at HuffingtonPost (based in large part, perhaps, on Reich’s post title) seems to be simply that small-state Senators are illegitimately empowered by the structure of our federal legislature. Consider how warped and misdirected a takeaway that is in this instance, particularly if it’s true that the “illegitimately empowered” party here – as it seems to be – is actually the President, assisted by Party Servants in the Congress in the form of Harry Reid and Dick Durbin and the rest of their silently-complicit caucus.
Why do Americans have so little conception of the structure and form of their system of government, by which all the political personalities they notice have been raised to prominence, and from which those personalities derive their sole source of legitimate power?
In other words: There is no such committee or subcommittee in the U.S. Senate as “The Baucus Six-Member Small-State Caucus” – and therefore that caucus has no, I repeat, no formal legitimacy in our form of government, no matter how much it is portrayed as some subset of the Senate Finance Committee, which it is not. The media and Americans might as well call The Baucus Caucus a “subset of the Senate Appropriations Committee” – because that would make about as much sense, and share about the same membership or formal connection with that committee as it does with the Senate Finance Committee.
What we are actually dealing with here – which Reich’s words (especially added to Jane’s reporting) clearly convey to me – is an abuse of raw, unchallenged power by one Senator (Max Baucus) who happens to chair the Senate Finance Committee; an abuse of power which could not have been, nor be, sustained (as I believe even Chuck Grassley essentially admitted on TV today) without the support of others more politically powerful in the Party, namely Harry Reid and Barack Obama (primarily through Emanuel). Reid and Obama are the actual enabling actors here, but yet have managed to carefully avoid blame in the matter, or, more absurdly still, have been cast as victims of the machinations of Baucus, due in large part to the media and public’s refusal to recognize or understand, or to insist upon, the legitimate, formal, open and democratic Senate process for lawmaking on this (or any) vital issue.
Baucus would likewise be unable to abuse his power to this degree without the willing acceptance of his abuse of their legislative prerogatives by the legitimately-constituted Senate Finance Committee as a whole (it only takes three of them to force Baucus to hold a public meeting of the full committee). Every member of the Senate Finance Committee has disgracefully stood by – Republicans too – while their committee, charged with helping reform health insurance, has avoided holding even one public drafting or mark-up meeting on any version of health insurance reform legislation.
What kind of democratic legislature does its (real) business wholly in the dark, except for the occasional planned press leak? More to the point, why on earth do we uncomplainingly accept such secrecy-cloaked behavior from our Congress – or, worse yet, from our President, who is now apparently secretly dictating outcomes to our Congress while pretending not to be??
Thank you. You are absolutely correct that it is Harry Reid (under direction/encouragement of the White House) who has empowered the gang-of-six and who is subverting the will of the majority of the Democratic senators.
IMHO, all of this is to cover for the deals that the White House has already cut with various industries. Per Glenzilla: http://www.salon.com/opinion/g…..index.html
Fantastic analyses wigwam and powwow. thanks so much for your takes on the issues.
Blessings
powwow, This is a great analysis of what’s happening. In fact, it’s much better than Reich’s analysis. Thank you for it.
I eagerly await any evidence that Obama is a progressive–aside from presumptions stemming from his complexion.
So far he seems to be a down the line/bought by Wall Street guy–just like Bush–whose bank bailout Barack has expanded–without Bush’s excuse of being a moron.
It seems this Harvard lawyer, Obama, embodies Wall Street and Harvard’s–ahem–values.
His health-care plan is a throwback to the social Darwinism of Germany, 1939.
Allow me to be more provocative. I favor Medicare-For-All–not HMObama-care.
I think that internet-popularized Adolph-like mustache on Obama fits.
Obama bails out Wall St. @ $14 trillion and counting–and wants to cut health-care.
If you truly care about poor peoples’ well-being kick Barack’s ass–do not kiss it.
So who will be the “fixers” for the Climate Change legislation that’s to be taken up when the Congress and President return? The audience for those machinations will be considerably larger and more savvy than the American people (who are, however, catching up with the foreigners in cynicism). If this brand of garbage politics is attempted on a world stage, you can bet the US dollar will take a huge dive at year’s. when the US shows up empty-handed for December’s UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.
Moreover, no American abroad will be safe from verbal assaults on his or her nation’s integrity and by extension, his or her personal integrity. Let’s hope the assaults stay only verbal: overseas crazies believe just like our own in the rightness of deploying violence against those with whom they disagree, who are perceived as the enemy, and who want to control (or ignore) the world. Overseas crazies won’t target only Democrats.
May the Goddess forgive us for what our small, self-serving politicians. They know not what they do, not on a global scale.
Thom Hartmann agrees:
h/t perris
what obama is doing now on health care is pretty much what he did for both health care and nuclear power [non]regulation back when he was in the illinois legislature. he’s a pro-big business, socially-moderate republican who went to chicago [because it’s a big center of black politics] and in chicago, if you’re going to be a politician, you join the democratic party machine.
Great post, even better comments. My minor contribution here is to point out Arturius is spelled Arcturius.