President Obama's shepherding of the health care debate has been a dispiriting experience, albeit an educational one. Obama's combination of sober intelligence and timidity is the mirror image of President Bush's combination of utter incuriosity and single-minded focus. If only we could merge the strengths of these two men....
But instead, we are left to debate which combination is worse.
We all know that President Obama would prefer for America to have a single-payer health insurance system along the lines of European nations. Whether that is a good idea is irrelevant to these observations. Let us just keep in mind that we know what Obama wants.
But consider his approach: before this debate even started, he excluded his own preference as a possibility, convinced that it would never pass. He may have been right, but now we'll never know, will we? And what sort of poker player flips over his trump card in the first hand?
Obama's fall-back position, his last defensible battle line, his final stand, was the so-called public option. But by surrendering single payer without a fight, the public option was thrust to the front line for the inevitable battering from the Congress.
So, instead of a watered-down single payer system, the best Obama can hope for is a watered-down public option, and even that now seems out of reach.
Again, this is not about whether Obama's proposals make sense; personally I have concluded that this issue is too complex for me to even have an educated position on. This is about Obama's leadership , or lack thereof.
The conventional wisdom had been that Obama had to avoid the mistakes of Clinton's health care proposals at all costs. But that misunderstands the mood of the country. This is not 1994.
Firstly, President Clinton was elected with 42% of the popular vote in a three way race. Indeed, President Clinton came in third in several states of the nation he now led. He had a very tenuous mandate. Obama won in a clear landslide, a good old-fashioned passionate ass-whippin', to quote Eminem.
Secondly, Americans weren't angry in 1994 about health care. Now, with costs having doubled for those with insurance in just the last 7 years, people are ready for radical solutions. But you wouldn't know that by watching Obama. It's as if he doesn't understand the power he has, as if he is shying from actually executing his own authority and powers of persuasion.
Let's compare this vacillation with President Bush's style. Again, this is not about whether Bush was right or wrong (he was right, very occasionally); it's about his ability to lead. For better or for worse, President Bush largely got what he wanted until Hurricane Katrina. And how did he pull that off? Well, he knew he was president, and he acted accordingly.
The war in Iraq is surely the best (or worst) example of Bush's leadership style, of his mixture of incuriosity and single-minded focus. All Bush knew was that he wanted to invade Iraq. Why or how was so secondary as to be immaterial. Bush's only focus was on making it happen, and he did.
He did not exclude any options under the logic that they "would never pass"; he simply took something that never
I'll put it this way; if, after 9/11, President Bush had decided that we needed single-payer health care or a coast-to-coast monorail, it would have happened. And this from a man who "won" on 49% of the vote in a two-way race in 2000.
Bush's audacity, of course, did not serve us very well, as he lacked Obama's depth and intellectual vigor. But Obama's depth and intellectual vigor are the Biblical lamps beneath the table without a little of Bush's audacity.
The recent grassroots anger at President Obama's health-care plan is quite illuminating. Firstly, it's interesting, and extrememly disappointing, that President Obama does not even have a health care plan. He has vague proposals that he submitted to the Senate.
If I submitted to the Senate a man in need of a foot massage, the Senate would return to me a man with his arms cut off. Obama has laid out a very vague set of "principles" to be considered by the Senate, but principles in the Senate are worth as much as an overcoat in a whorehouse.
But more than anything else, the anger at Obama's "plan"indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the federal government in America. To be concise, Americans rail against proactive government while simultaneously benefit ting greatly from reactive government.
So, it would be a socialist sin for the federal government to insure a young person, but it is taken as an article of faith that the very same government must insure every old person through Medicare.
So, it would be a socialist sin for the federal government to take over a car company, but it is taken as an article of faith that the very same government must build every road in the country. If private companies had to built roads, two things would happen: there would be fewer roads and cars would be way more expensive.
So, it would be a socialist sin for the federal government to tax soda, but it is taken as an article of faith that the very same government must assure the safety and supply and purity of water, which is the sine qua non of every beverage, including......soda.
So, it would be a socialist sin for the government to pay for the birth of a child, but it is taken as an article of faith that the very same government must pay to keep brain-dead people on life-support.
Socialism is here. It's been here. The Russian Revolution quickened it, as nearly-pure (and ultra-chaotic) capitalism gave ground to the grey area of a mixed economy in every civilized nation on Earth. Yet even before the Russian Revolution, we had a navy, a common currency, a post office, et cetera.
Every nation now is a mix of socialism and capitalism. The US has a higher relative degree of capitalism than any other nation. And in general, that's a good thing. But it's not the only thing.
Sex is the ultimate imperative of life. And profit is the ultimate imperative of economics. But there are certain types of relationships, in fact nearly all relationships, in which sex is entirely inappropriate.
It would serve us well to apply this lesson to profit vis a vis health care. Sex is not evil. And neither is profit. But to insist on making either of those things the ultimate goal of every Earthly endeavor? That is evil.
The so-called "birther" movement, which aims to prove that President Obama was not born in the United States and is therefore ineligible to be president, has absolutely no foundation in fact or common sense, but it says something rather interesting about its proponents' concept of Americanism.
The issue of where Obama was born is not what this is really about. And it's not even really about the blackness of Obama's skin. In fact, Obama is not "black" at all in many ways but is rather something far deeper and far more threatening to reactionaries.
"Black", as classically understood in our culture, means "African-American". Blacks, despite their persecution, are more "American" than nearly any other group that survives on this continent.
Blacks have been in America from the beginning, they speak English, they are largely Protestant; aside from the hue of their skin they have nearly everything in common with "Americans" as that term is understood by the reactionary right.
Blacks who descend from slaves have been in this country for centuries, far longer than my (Irish and German) people and nearly all other white ethnic groups. If a descendant of a slave had been elected president , I actually think that the reactionaries would be far less upset.
Consider that before Obama we had only one president out of 43 who was not a white male Protestant descending from Anglo-Saxons. Kennedy broke that formula with his lack of English blood and his Catholicism. And there were millions of Americans who did not like it one bit.
Staying in 1960 for a moment, let's think about Martin Luther King. He was black, as classically understood; a true African-American. When Kennedy was elected president that year, he was a third generation American. When King was arrested for a sit-in protest that same year, he was at least an eighth-generation American.
But unlike Martin Luther King, Barack Hussein Obama has very little "American" pedigree. Once whites could look past pigment, they realized that African-Americans were about as "American" as it gets. But even for the relatively enlightened, Obama does not fit that mold.
Obama, the Kansan Kenyan who came to Chicago by way of Hawaii via Indonesia, does not fit the previous definition of "black". Obama's father was NOT an African-American; he was an African. Obama is not black if "black" is understood to exclude other identities. Obama is a little bit of everything.
Obama's election was revolutionary not just because of his dark skin, but because he truly is post-racial. He is white. He is black. He has Christian roots. He has Muslim roots. One grandfather was an African tribesman. The other fought in Patton's army. Attempting to describe Obama's identity with a single word or phrase is a futile enterprise.
And that goes to the heart of the reactionaries' problem: they do not truly embrace the cosmopolitan ideal of the United States when they are confronted with that cosmopolitanism all crammed into the single canvas of a man who has become perhaps the most popular person on Earth.
So they argue that he is an other, because to be perfectly honest, he is if one has a 19th-century sense of what makes one an "American". So they say Obama is from the outer-sphere, that he is a pretender to the throne, an illegal immigrant who's taking a job away from a "real" American. It's actually not surprising that this "issue" has come to the fore.
In fact, I'm mostly surprised that these people didn't surface in greater numbers during the campaign. There is, of course, a disquieting aspect to this whole charade. These people can be dismissed as cranks, but it is from precisely this type of crowd and mentality that assassins are culled.
But perhaps the saddest thing is that some folks just can't take "Yes" for an answer. These are precisely the chest-thumping, crotch-grabbing, frothing jingoists who insist on constantly reminding all within earshot of America's superiority to all else. So now that Obama has proven that the dream is still real, why are they so upset about it?
Because some people don't want dreams to come true. There are two types of people to steer clear of in this world. One is the type that insists that he or she can impose his or her own dream onto other people for their own good. The second is the type that resents others when their dreams come true.
For anyone who thinks the moniker "Slick Willie" implies strictly douchebaggery, this week's performance by President Clinton should put that caricature to rest. Not only can this man sell a ketchup popsicle to a woman in white gloves and talk the pants off any white-trash chick in this country, he is also an absolutely incredible statesman in the truest sense of the word.
All he had to do was show up in North Korea and pose for a picture to get what he wanted. He didn't even need to smile in the picture. That's game. How can the charm, the classic "women want him, men want to be him" charm translate all the way from rural Arkansas to the most isolated and psychotic corner of the world?
All we have to do to answer that is to imagine George W. Bush embarking on a similar quest. Can any of us imagine a single country in the world, including ours, where George W. Bush would be received as a statesman?
Bill Clinton can go to North Korea, he can go to Belfast, he can go to Rome. It doesn't matter where he goes; he is loved. If George W. Bush went to Rome, he would be arrested on outstanding warrants for kidnapping and torture. An interesting contrast, and it tells us all we need to know about their respective foreign policies.
Bill Clinton talked to the world. George W. Bush's policy was to tell any group or nation not wholly in our sway to go sit in the corner. North Korea wants nukes? Al-Qaeda is determined to strike inside the US? Well, I'll just ignore them. That'll teach 'em.
As a brief aside and postlude, let's imagine that the two American journalists President Clinton had released were white women rather than Asian. "America Held Hostage" strikes me as a probable headline. Right?
And as for the right-wingers who disparage this hostage release, sure than some nefarious trade must have been made, remember Iran-Contra? The government sold weapons to the country holding American hostages (Iran) and gave the profits to death squads in Nicaragua, both acts being illegal. Somehow I doubt Slick Willie went that far in North Korea.
President Obama's shepherding of the health care debate has been a dispiriting experience, albeit an educational one. Obama's combination of sober intelligence and timidity is the mirror image of President Bush's combination of utter incuriosity and single-minded focus. If only we could merge the strengths of these two men....
