Tag Archives: health care

one-way hash

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In today’s New York Times. Charles Blow makes a point about discourse that I’ve seen made around the media for some time now. We’ve been told that the President is too cerebral. In fact that critique was close to the heart of the Clinton campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2008. Here’s Blow’s version:

Conservatives speak in bumper stickers. Obama speaks in thesis statements. In fact, he sometimes seems constitutionally incapable of concision.

He also seems to display a disdain for irrational excitability and confronts it with either princely dispassion, mocking disbelief or stirring oratory that speaks more to posterity than to the people in front of him.

I think Blow is right to the extent that the sloganeering arguments contained in sound bites like “Death panels. Death books. Taxpayer dollars for abortion. Kill Grandma. Take away choice,” have had an impact, or at least seem to have had an impact. Blow follows the common procedure of linking these slogans with polls showing voter confusion and antipathy to the health care proposals that are presently before the congress. Bit I’m not sure I like Blow’s prescription for dealing with that success.

In American debates, and particularly in this debate, facts are not sufficient, no matter how eloquently spoken. We want to be moved by passion and conviction and determination and faith. We coalesce around simple ideas like right and wrong, and for many, yes, good and evil.

Some may dislike this simplicity and wish it were different (I am among them), but in politics you have to play on the field where the game is.

In the first place, the arguments contained in the conservative sound bites are “one-way hash” arguments. There’s a good discussion of this type of argumentation at FactCheck.org. By my reading the cleverness of the conservative sound bites (all of which are what Huck Finn calls “stretchers” and many of which are outright lies) isn’t that they are beautifully simple as Blow claims. The problem is that they are difficult to answer seriously because the answers are complicated. And the slogans succeed, I believe, because brute populist appeals tend to favor conservative causes in today’s political climate, appealing as they do to naive individualism and to the residues of nativism and racism that still plague our social life.

Blow’s analysis invites a war of sound bites. I think that’s a losing proposition for progressives like me and for the President as well. I also think that if we do pass a health care bill and the President gets to sign it into law, there will remain a great deal of irrational opposition to it, just as there is still irrational opposition to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, even from many Americans who benefit from these programs.

One might wish that the Republican Party would abandon its determination to appeal to the worst in people. That seems unlikely, especially in the present political climate. So, yes, it’s fairly urgent for progressives and other democrats to learn to counter that appeal effectively. I don’t know how to do that, and I don’t think Mr. Blow does either. But the President and his team have a pretty good record countering it so far, and they learn fast. I’m anxiously awaiting the President’s health care speech.

making sure it goes on

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The title is stolen from the late Richard Hugo’s collected poems. I’ve loved it for many years. Maybe I should write something about Hugo, here—but whatever, it’s time for something new.

So I’ll remember that The Hon. Russ Carnahan was in town last week and walked into a restaurant where a number of us were having dinner to celebrate birthdays. We noticed him across the room, and he must have sensed our recognition because he came over to our table to talk. We told him that all of us were hoping that he would continue to support the public option part of proposed health care legislation. He allowed that he would and added that the public option will be in whatever bill the house advances.

Carnahan also volunteered that he thought the health care debate was a good thing, even though much of it had been rough, taking a view that I think can be defended: that our new president has re-energized public discourse. It was good to talk to the congressman.

As for the health care debate, so called: The Daily Beast offers this video with the headline: “NJ Town Hall Reaches New Low.” True enough, but the woman on camera is spunky, and she gets her message past the hecklers.

Just another example of what is fast becoming the norm in my country where swaggering thugs carrying assault rifles parade outside venues where the president is speaking. It’s good to think that moral suasion can sometimes cut through the lies and bravado.

button back

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Well, I got over my irrational pique and put back the Obama health care button. After a couple of days I still think the administration is honestly seeking comprehensive health care reform, even though its representatives are starting to speak of health insurance reform instead.

I’m also thinking the explanation for my various disappointments with the Obama administration is its constant effort to recruit Republican support in the name of bipartisanship. Harold Meyerson has a good piece in today’s Washington Post about why such bipartisanship is impossible and mentions some signs that the administration may be changing course. I hope so.

But it isn’t just Republicans who are poisoning the well with respect to health care. The so-called gang of six, including allegedly moderate Republicans, Charles Grassley, Olympia Snowe, and Mike Enzi also includes three Democrats, Max Baucus, Jeff Bingham, and Kent Conrad. Under the guise of seeking a bipartisan compromise, these senators, all of whom have received substantial contributions from the medical-industrial complex, seem actually seeking to prevent whatever legislation passes the Senate from containing provision for any public program or any employer mandate.

I do not believe that Baucus and Grassley are negotiating in good faith. Grassley is presently waging a reelection campaign that is filled with demagoguery aimed at the right of the right in Iowa, as witness his recent support of the Palin death-panel canard and his performance in recent town hall meetings. Baucus has received substantial contributions from the medical-industrial complex since 2005. Indeed, all gang-of-six members seem inclined at present to delay or scale back health care reform, and some are maintaining that public support for reform has eroded.

In Iowa, where only recently a majority supported reform, Senator Grassley, who claims to be listening to his constituents, is now claiming that “Iowans are more interested in making sure that Congress does not mess up what they already have.” I don’t believe him. Nor do I think public support for reform has eroded. I think rather that the weaker part of that support has now to contend with people’s fears about the economy in the wake of plummeting home values and shrinking or disappearing retirement savings. I also think sabotage of town hall meetings by activists and fringe groups has worked to the extent that it has created confusion that plays into the hands of Republican recalcitrance.

There are three alternatives, it seems to me, that the administration will ponder as it seeks a way out the morass: 1) scaling back reform in hopes of winning some Republican support, though I frankly don’t think this is meaningfully possible beyond two or three votes–Grassley will find a way to vote with the majority of Republicans who are demagoguing health care reform in hopes of bringing the President down; 2) forcing comprehensive reform through the Senate with the 51 votes necessary for reconciliation; or 3) allowing the Republicans to kill reform with a filibuster in the Senate and running against that in the elections of 2010. James Carville has proposed the third alternative–it might not be a bad idea.

What my guy stands to lose if he continues to court specious bipartisanship is any resemblance to the heroic young man who waged a remarkable campaign for office only a few short months ago. He will be perceived as just another politician.

—It’s a big thing to lose.

I stand with Obama

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Like many liberals who think a single payer health care system is the only thing that is fair to the public and will work over time, I support Preident Obama’s health care plan as the most practical reform that seems politically possible.

If you’d like to declare your support as well, you can do so by clicking on the little button just below my picture. It will take you to a website that offers a good many ways to help with the health-care initiative.