Had liberal groups sent out millions of emails building a movement that posed an existential threat to the health insurance industry, Sen. Baucus and Blue Dog Democrats and their corporate healthcare patrons might well be on their knees begging for a comprehensive public option -- to avert the threat of full-blown Medicare for All.
As things stand now, as writers like Bob Kuttner and Norman Solomon have warned, a weak public option would institutionalize a two-tiered system with healthier, wealthier citizens getting the best (private) plans, and sicker, harder-to-treat people getting an inferior (public) plan. Newt Gingrich couldn't dream up a better scenario to discredit an enhanced government role in healthcare.
To win serous reforms, we need activist leaders who are tough-minded progressives making maximum demands for reforms that truly address our nation's problems. Leave the inside-the-Beltway deal-making to the politicians, properly frightened and moved by the roar of mass movements.
We need activist leaders who have a clearer idea of who Obama is. He's not one of us. He's one of them -- a politician bent on placating corporate interests. We knew all we needed to know about his current worldview from all the corporatists he put in top jobs.
And from the fact that he felt the need -- six weeks into his administration, after the middle-class bailed out Wall Street -- to call up the New York Times and assure the world that his policies were NOT socialist but were "entirely consistent with free market principles." At a time the corporate greedsters and free-market ideologues had been exposed as having threatened the economic well-being of the world, they weren't the ones on the defensive. They weren't doing the apologizing. Obama was on the defensive; he was apologizing to them!
When Democratic leaders start borrowing rightwing rhetoric, we know our activism has not been strong or progressive enough. At the AARP townhall Tuesday, Obama described a public option as "controversial, I understand people are worried about that." He went on to assure his audience that "nobody is talking about . . . government-run healthcare" or "a Canadian-style plan." At one point, he further assured seniors that no "bureaucratic law in Washington" would interfere in their healthcare decisions -- seeming to adopt the faux-populism of anti-government rightists. Yet he seems incapable of anti-corporate populism, even with despised industries like Wall Street and health insurance.
I have huge respect for the smart young activists who built up the Netroots, unleashing all sorts of progressive possibilities for our country. But I'm bothered by their often ineffectual, Beltway-originated, halfway demands.
I became active during the Vietnam War. We might still have troops in Vietnam if -- instead of militantly demanding "All Troops Home Now" -- we'd organized behind polite Beltway initiatives like: "Let's begin negotiations" or "Let's set a timeline for phased withdrawal."
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