So, I’ve got this article to write by mid-September for Lignes. They’re doing a second special issue on “crisis” or “The Crisis” – how ever the contributing authors wish to approach that. Lignes attracts a left/extreme left, sometimes anarchist audience. Some of its regular authors are Jean-Luc Nancy, Alain Badiou, Martin Crowley, Daniel Bensaïd, etc. It’s the brainchild of Michel Surya, founding editor. Their publishing house too Hélène and my book on USA PATRIOT Act, when no one in the U.S. would touch it.
Anyway, in asking me for a contribution, Surya suggested that I might write about the current crisis of capitalism – a.k.a. “the recession” – from the U.S. perspective. My challenge is that far too few potential readers outside the U.S. realize the profound truth in Obama’s “misstep” statement picked up during the campaign and used against him – as the far right will do at any moment, in any circumstance – when he described the boneheaded conservatives in this country as people who in crisis “cling to their guns and religion.”
When I began thinking about this Wednesday’s entry, I never would have guessed the extent to which the Obama Administration, in just one weekend, could bungle their chances of instituting the now infamous “public option.” But then, I should have remembered Barack Obama’s idealism, his pipe-dream of bipartisanship.
And Barack should have remembered that truth about undereducated bumpkins, their guns and their religion that he uttered in San Francisco. If he had, he would have realized that to waver one iota at the present conjuncture could create the Waterloo of his presidency. What’s needed right now is absolute focus, a take-no-prisoners determination, and the demand of unequivocal party loyalty from Democrats in Congress. Without these three things, the will of the U.S. people will not be heeded.
Everybody talks about how complicated the O’Administration’s health care reform is. What’s the “public option”? –Simple. 85% of us are insured for health care either through our employer (principally, that is; with us paying a percentage, whether we know it or not, in a payroll deduction) or we buy it ourselves. The “public option” would be a cut-rate, federally-run insurance program – very much like Medicare and Medicaid – for the uninsured, for that remaining 15%. And, as a bonus, its lower rates might actually cause the rates for the other 85% of us to level off or even diminish! Oh, did I mention that we 85% are insured by rapacious private insurance companies who richly pay off Republican and Democratic Congresspeople to keep the status quo?…
Some 65% of the U.S. population wants what I just described (I just saw a survey that says 83% are for it; but let's be "conservative"). That’s actually pretty amazing, considering the profoundly conservative bent of this nation. Yet this proposal appears menaced and, with it, any meaningful health care reform for the foreseeable future. Why? Because the will of 65% of the at-large population isn’t getting translated into 65% of the action of the voting legislators in Washington. And Obama and Sebelius wavering over the weekend, saying that the public option really ain’t that important doesn’t help at all. (Notice the understatement.)
The Democrats call themselves a “party,” but they seem to me to be utterly incapable of the discipline that normally characterizes a party. Nothing initiated from a Democratic majority can be achieved with any support from the Republican Party as it exists today – in all its desperation. Democrats should have learned a long time ago that the only response to desperate hysteria fed by corporate payoffs is to run rough-shod over them. Bernie Sanders, for one, knows this. Few others do.
The only way to mirror the will of the population that favors the “public option” is for Obama, first and foremost, and the rest of the party leadership to demand party unanimity or expulsion. Obama owns this party now. He’s got to direct it. A little Robespierre and less Jimmy Carter! Wouldn’t be bad to throw in a bit of Machiavelli too.
I agree that the White House needs to play hard ball at this point if it we're to pass meaningful health-care reform. My hunch is that they've known this all along, as no one in BHO's inner circle can be accused of political naivety. But you have to remember that appearances matter. The longer the public sees the president as working for a bipartisan solution, the better. I.e., it’s important for the GOP, as continues to harden and shrink, to be seen as the party petulantly abandoning the negotiations, rather than the party being steamrolled by a Democratic majority. As for the Blue Dogs, my sense is that they’ll fall in line once the August recess is in the rearview mirror.
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