Tag Archives: Obama

opposition to extraordinary needs

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I’ve just read a powerful op-ed piece in the Arizona Daily Star in support of the President’s program of health care reform. It’s a good, strong piece full of passionate thinking and based in personal experience. The writer is Sarah Garrecht Gassen, the daughter of a friend and co-parishioner here in St. Louis. The heart of it is the author’s experience trying to find health insurance in light of the fact that she has used a prosthetic leg since she was three years old.

Gassen’s concern in this piece is primarily with reform of the insurance system, particularly with changing the familiar practice of denying coverage because of pre-existing conditions; though her anger with people who are willing to ignore “the failings of our existing health-care system because someone somewhere told them President Obama is a socialist or some such nonsense” extends beyond that one set of issues. I had thought this was relatively safe territory, believing that the clear middle-class interest in insurance reform would ensure the success of this part of the President’s program. But I fear I was wrong.

The comment thread following Gassen’s piece is filled with attacks on her and her ideas. Many of them are just flaming, but not all. One merely observes sarcastically,

Sorry about your leg Sarah. I had a similar problem when I tried to get auto insurance the day after I wrecked my car.

Damn insurance companies.

Here’s another, this one a serious ad hominem:

Sarah is a liberal journalist with no background or expertise in health care. Yet she has the pulpit and the ink to spew her opinions. She is so biased her pieces abound in poor judgement, but she can’t really help herself. This is what is frightening about these people. Be afraid, be very afraid.

But the most dismaying comment comes from a person who speaks without apparent malice—I give it entire.

I am very sorry for your prosthetic leg situation.

However, I am tired of people such as myself on the right being accused of fear mongering.

If you want truth, the truth is much of what you hear from the right is the end result of much thought about how a government health care system will affect the country. We are not stupid as some might think and we have the right to our opinions just as much as any person on the left. I may not agree with the left, but I don’t accuse them of being non-thinkers.

Another thing I am tired of is that people with extraordinary needs are being used to set the precedent for why we need nationalized health care.

Truth be told, those people are a small percentage and I don’t think it is right to turn the entire health care system over onto its’ belly because of the few.

I have concern about the ever-increasing “me me me” mentality in this country…”the government should pay for this, the government should pay for that.” To heck with the entitlement mentality.

Finally, there are a number of very charitable organizations from churches to doctors and hospitals whose sole purpose is to assist those who need it

It’s been my thought that the struggle for consensus on health care involved persuading independent voters, those who voted for Obama in the general election because of perceived economic interest, that health care reform would benefit them, particularly that requiring insurance companies to cover everyone for a reasonable cost would benefit them.

It’s this thought that I am re-examining. I have no idea how representative the comments to Sarah Gassen’s op-ed may be of the opposition to health care reform, but if they are broadly representative I’m more worried than I was. When people who seem rational can characterize their fellow citizens who would simply like to be able to buy health insurance for a reasonable cost and be covered for their pre-existing conditions, as deadbeats possessed of an entitlement mentality, we’ve hit a new low, indeed.

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.

forget the greedy guts

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I am perhaps more than ordinarily sensitive to bullying when it comes my way or affects a person or an institution I love or admire–and of course I would never engage in bullying, myself. So when I read a piece somewhere last week that likened he tactics of right wingnut wackos to bullying I thought, Aha! Today I can’t remember where I read that piece, but when I went looking for it on the net, thinking I’d find a spate of writing about my guy being bullied, what I found was the opposite.

The President is accused of bullying everybody from hedge fund managers to the military government of Honduras. And now, today, he is being accused of attempting to indoctrinate school children with un-American, socialist ideas. I’m thinking we’ve all heard this before, but with President Obama it’s worse than the lies and smears directed against Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt never had to see himself represented as a “witch doctor,” with associated wingnut comments and pseudo apologies. Roosevelt never had to see himself represented as a monkey.

So it’s with great pleasure that I read an email from an old friend and high-school classmate this morning, who likes Obama and thinks all the media hype is just sound and fury. My friend, David Steinman, is a retired physician who supports health care reform. He is also a Christian gentleman. Here is what he says:

Obama knows that graphically describing the greedy guts of the current mess inflames the non-thinking masses who already are full of fear and loathing; more precisely inflames self-appointed talking heads whose followers are full of bluster—” Who is this non-American talking rot about the best system in the world?” I think that Obama knows how to make “soft pedals” work. That’s part of his specialness.

He avoids “Wagnerian emotions” by choice. I think he understands the Jewish mistrust of robust style and bad policy, as, in my imagination, a man of color in the White House might best figure.

I like Obama’s Rope-a-Dope Style [ from Ali’s wearing down of his opponents ] while in Obama’s case the opposition getting in their licks and spending down their energy is also showing their lack of concern and wisdom regarding the issue.

I remain convinced that health care reform is not going away and that Obama, in waiting for others, in this case congressional leadership, to forge the bills, remains the force for change, paltry and retarded as those on the far left may feel it to be.

Lyndon Johnson viewed politics as the “Art of the possible.” I see Obama in that light.

I am reading the world with a bit more hope after getting Dr. Dave’s email this morning. May it be as he says it is.

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.