If Obama Had Balls (Or: If Bush Had Brains)

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.